My Story: Why I Do This Work
I was born and raised in Hong Kong, a vibrant metropolitan city—but one marked by stark inequality between the rich and the poor. Before I ever stepped into a college, I was already learning about resilience (aka the Lion Rock Spirit or 獅子山精神)—working part-time jobs from the age of 15 to help make ends meet. Growing up in a neighborhood just outside the poorest district in Hong Kong, I witnessed the weight that inequality places on my friends, families, and communities. I also experienced the brokenness of my family up close, and I carried the quiet wish to one day study abroad, though I never believed it would actually come true. Looking back, I believe it was God who planted that vision in my heart and carried me through every up and down along the way.
Despite various familial hardships, I became the first in my family to attend college, starting at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where I was admitted to the top-ranked business school in Asia on a scholarship. It was a path many would have considered ideal—secure, prestigious, and promising. But in 2008, a series of heartbreaking suicides in Tin Shui Wai, a marginalized community in Hong Kong, unsettled me deeply. These tragedies weren’t isolated—they revealed the limits of market-driven approaches and deep cracks in our social systems; they forced me to reckon with the very frameworks I was being trained to succeed within. I realized I didn’t want to pursue personal success while turning a blind eye to the tragedies and structural injustices so many others face.
That year, I decided to quit HKUST in my second year and reapplied to the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where I pursued a degree in Government and Laws and LL.B. I wanted to understand how power works—how decisions are made, how policies are shaped, and why certain communities are continually left behind. I believed that studying how government works might help make society more just. But over time, I became even more captivated by how communities themselves come together to solve problems—often without formal authority, through trust, collaboration, and innovation.
This shift was shaped in large part by my experience as a research assistant with Dr. Danny Lam and Dr. Helen Liu. We studied self-governance, public participation, and how communities manage common pool resources from the ground up. Around the same time, I co-founded a nonprofit startup that used design thinking to co-envision community-based responses to social problems. These experiences deepened my belief that meaningful change often begins within communities themselves.
Although I completed my LLB, I ultimately chose not to pursue a legal career. Walking away from a stable, lucrative path—especially in the face of strong family objections—wasn’t easy. But the conviction and questions that moved me—about equity, voice, and community self-governance—felt too important to ignore.
That calling eventually led me to the United States, where I completed an MS in Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2016, I began my doctoral studies under the mentorship of Dr. Chao Guo, whose guidance helped me develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nonprofit sector and its management challenges. I joined the School of Public Policy at UMass Amherst as an Assistant Professor in 2020, where my work continues to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic organizations engage with place, leadership, and public participation—both in communities and digital spaces.
Through it all, my core belief remains the same: that communities are not passive recipients of policy or charity—they are builders, problem-solvers, and co-creators of change. My research, teaching, and mentorship are shaped by that belief and the long journey that brought me here, one rooted in struggle, guided by faith, and driven by my conviction in the collective good that communities can create.
Check out my research to learn more!
