Social Innovators of Tomorrow: Creating Inclusive and Sustainable Communities

Payal brings over 13 years of expertise in advancing gender and racial equity, and empowering marginalized and underrepresented communities in both India and Hong Kong. She actively supports and empowers youth-led initiatives and promotes learner-led approaches. She is the Senior Opportunity Fund Manager at Resolve Foundation, s88 charity with a mission to inspire, empower, and connect emerging leaders to foster a more inclusive Hong Kong.. Payal oversees the Opportunity Fund program, a seed-grant initiative aimed at supporting community changemakers who often face challenges in accessing the necessary resources to get their projects off the ground. Previously, she worked at a grassroots NGO that promotes inclusion of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities, in different roles of community organizing, youth development, and policy advocacy. She advocates empowering people to realize their rights and giving them the opportunity to participate in society.

My Sustainability goals for 2024:

The changes I hope to see:
1) Increasing access to resources and opportunities for community changemakers through financial support and capacity building programs.
2) Building thriving communities through partnerships and collaboration between businesses, academic institutions, non-profits, and government.

Myles is the Founder & CEO of HelpBridge, an online business school and information sharing platform for Hong Kong’s 350,000 migrant domestic workers (MDWs).

A Filipino education entrepreneur, people professional, and community builder who was raised by a domestic worker in the Philippines since he was a child, Myles has empowered thousands of migrant workers to equip themselves with core skills to transform into small business entrepreneurs.

Initially started as a college project that connected domestic workers to charities online for free, HelpBridge has since grown into a community-based education platform that’s equipped over 2,500 migrant workers with core practical skills in entrepreneurship, IT literacy, and financial planning.

Myles has worked in strategy at Fortune 500 companies like BlackRock and JP Morgan, Kalibrr (the first Y Combinator startup in the Philippines), and Gobi Partners (one of Asia’s largest venture capital firms). Myles graduated First Class Honours (Summa Cum Laude) in Economics and Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Christine Vicera (she/hers) is a Hong Kong-raised Filipino researcher, educator and multidisciplinary artist. At the heart of her research and praxis lies a broader concern toward the relationship between Filipino migration and marginality within global racial capital.

Creative practice and community building are integral to her praxis. Sisig and Puchero (2021), her first documentary short was featured at the 2021 Southeast Asia x Seattle Film Festival. It follows the story of Julie Mangrobang, a former Filipino migrant domestic worker turned restaurant owner in HK, and explores how Filipino migrants contest and reshape their visibility in a multicultural, post-colonial HK, and enact their agency to create spaces for cultural and economic participation. In 2021, she co-founded be/longing an arts-for-education lab that harnesses the transformative power of storytelling and the creative arts to to co-create tools for anti-racist critical public pedagogy. Her research, poetry, and personal essays have been published in Kritika Kultura, Voice & Verse, Spill Stories, Asia Art Archive “Like A Fever,” and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.