EDiversity

I am the founder and CEO of education charity EDiversity in Hong Kong, a mother of two, ex-radio and TV news reporter, and author of 3 books about my family's voyage across the Pacific from 2005-2009 and our homeschooling experience. 

The voyage has enabled me to see different possibilities in life, but it was my children's entering local mainstream schools after returning to HK that has triggered my founding of EDiversity. I saw how the exam and academically driven education system is taking a toll on children, teachers and parents alike.  I was inspired by a number of education gurus and the book, Parenting for a Peaceful World, which says "change childhood and we change the world".  Through EDiversity, I hope to enable more choices in education and encourage adults to take action to change. 

Our vision: Happy and fulfilling education for ALL! 

Our mission: Respect diversity. Transform learning 

We want to tackle the unhappiness of HK mainstream education, which is exam-oriented,  highly competitive, and doesn't cater children's diversity and needs. Their learning quality and emotional health have been compromised.  Education has become a source of negative pressure for most education stakeholders. The big majority of people see no alternatives but to 'play the game'.

EDiversity tries to intervene by working with teachers and parents with an aim to shift mindsets and empower them with skills, so they can become facilitators rather than dictators of children's learning. 

From promoting learning by doing in primary schools and UNESCO's Happy School Framework through Happy Classroom Day, to community parenting programmes that encourage self-reflection and inner child awareness, and producing books and online contents that aligned with our vision and mission, we believe our work elevate humanity by helping people to be happier, with better relations, and more fulfilled through education.

Our education has produced many unhappy and demotivated people, and that's the problem. Despite having a world-acclaimed education system:

1. More than ⅔ of year-one university students shows mild to severe depression and anxiety. 

2. Over 50% of teachers have show signs of depression 

3. 15 year-old score high in PISA, but has low self esteem and contentment of life.  (according to PISA 2018)

4. Primary 4 students has good reading-comprehension skills but the least interest in reading (according to PIRLS 2016)

Globally, teens stress outdo that of adults, and education is a main contributing reason. 

In HK, there are 883,000 students, 73,600 teachers and 1,700,000 parents of school-age children. Besides the current political situation, Our culture which values speed, quantity and achievements over well-being, and an exam-driven system has worked together to encourage the gigantic billion-dollar after-school cram class market. Students work up to 11 hours a day. Some teachers up to 70 hours a week. Teachers inundated with work have little time to design meaningful classes and interact with students in a more nurturing way. Big classes of up to 30+ students, traditional scheduling and pedagogy, one-size-fit-all curriculum, and anxious parents with a herd mentality all contribute to the problem.

EDiversity is about showcasing and enabling possibilities in education. 

Despite being an international city, it is surprising how little people know about education outside of the mainstream school system.  So we started with family-friendly education conferences that showcase non-mainstream education in and out of HK, from Reggio Emilia, Waldorf to Montessori; from Finland education, to Sudbury to homeschooling. 

Then we showcased what teachers and parents have done differently within mainstream schools to convince those in the mainstream that they too can make a difference. 

In 2016, we started our first major 3-year project: introducing learning by doing in local primary schools. It is a teachers development programme to empower them to design and conduct classes that are more in tune with children’s needs and interests.  We also organise experiential days and workshops for parents. In 2018, we started a community-wide  parenting programme that promote empathy in children’s emotional needs through helping parents to reflect on their own childhoods and to be aware of their own ‘inner child’s needs’  . 

We do these through programmes in schools and in the community. We also engage the wider public through writing and translating books and engaging the media to spread our messages.

We directly serve to empower teachers and parents because in so doing, we will also indirectly improve children's well-being and family relationships and achieve a much bigger good. 

As core members of EDiversity are parents and professionals, some have been teachers, we have first hand understanding of the community's needs. Through our conferences and programmes, we get to know more of them directly, which further confirms the demand for happy learning. Problem is most either don't know how to do, or have an outdated belief:

"happy learning --> poorer academic results-->poor future--> unhappy life".

So we began by focusing first on a few schools with higher readiness for change, and offer intensive teachers development programme: ‘Learning by doing’ (LBD). We work along with school teachers to change their way of teaching, while encouraging school management to review workload, scheduling, and cut homework and exam.

For less readied school, we have “Happy Classroom Day” as a taster before they make commitment for more change. 

For parents, we give them experiential workshops so they can understand better and be strong supporters of child-oriented learning. 

We address the readied ones' urging needs, but the resulting system change benefits others too.

It is well-aligned because we work with teachers to change from exam and academically-oriented to child-oriented pedagogy, and with parents to change from authoritarian to democratic style parenting, both requires a change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.

Besides, our learning by doing programme helps children who are traditionally behind academically, to have opportunities to learn in ways that also cater to their needs. (elevation point 1) 

Relationships being one of our world's most difficult problems, our parenting projects would help parents see how their own childhoods affect them today and inspire them to change too.   (elevation point 2) 

In 2011, I was writing a book on my homeschooling experience. While I was researching on it, I did a number of reporting jobs about education, and took a range of MOOC courses. I started reading up on education, including the very influential Sir Ken Robinson’s "School Kills Creativity" and Dr. Sugata Mitra’s "School in the Cloud". 

All this helped me rethink, and a year later, our family made the decision to leave the system to homeschool again.  We started sharing about homeschooling and met more parents who were feeling despair, struggling with their children in the education system.  Later I had a chance to meet with Tim Chen, aka homeschool godfather of Taiwan. Attending his homeschool conference inspired me to host one in HK. 

But I wanted a conference that was more than homeschooling. I wanted one that would broaden parents' views, and show them education is much more than exam and grades, that there are different choices, but we have to understand our children's needs and change our thinking first. EDiversity wants to give parents information, camaraderie, and real options, so they have the courage to make sensible educational choices for their children. 

When I started, it was a combination of 1) showing my homeschooled children that we should go for our passion, 2) wanting other parents to experience the joy of being able to make choices when one is freed from the constraint of herd mentality.  

My family voyage on the Pacific showed me other possibilities in life. Because of this experience, I've been freed from the mainstream formula about what constitutes success. This makes our lives so much happier and fulfilled.  

Throughout these years, I've been helping homeschool parents who have problems with the Education Bureau. We have brought changes to mainstream schools so parents who can't afford to choose can have slightly more choices in the public system. 

I found not only are underprivileged families are trapped in the system, all of us are indeed trapped in different ways. This first-world education problem is like a pandemic that hurts our collective emotional health and relationships for years to come. When a number of highly educated and kind parents told me, after attending our conferences or workshops, that they finally found courage to talk to their schools or face up to their children's long term schooling problems, that keeps me going. 

My experience at sea and homeschooling was genuinely a unique one in Hong Kong. When I came back from the family voyage,  we chose to join a tiny local school against most people's expectation. With a lot of persuasion from the school,  I also became chairman of its parent-teacher association, which has broadened my understanding about the system enormously. 

After 2 years we saw that our children didn't enjoy school. The classes were dull, homework was much, but worst was they didn't have time to pursue own interests. So we returned to homeschooling. My husband and I negotiated with the local education authority, and researched about the legal and educational requirements. I shared the whole experience in my homeschooling book later for other parents' to take reference. 

As I was brought up in the local education system, these whole range of experiences inside and out of the mainstream, in terms of both education and family life, has shaped my views quite differently. I have become very comfortable in making connections with people from different parts of the world and all walks of life. My experience as a bilingual TV news reporter has also helped me deliver stories through videos and how to work with the media.   

My work at EDiversity is one that shows possibilities to people, and we talk about embracing diversity. I think my experience, plus that of others in the team helps establish EDiversity as a trusted organisation that contribute to bridging the gap in mainstream education. 

Our flagship proramme, Jockey Club “Learning by Doing” Academy, is one that presents us with endless adversity. 

We are probably the first parent organisation to station in a school, bringing in a number of community education partners, to work along with teachers to transform all afternoon lessons into experiential learning classes. 

We have to equip teachers who have little to no experience in conducting this type of classes. Worse, the number of students and teachers grew  2-3 times unexpectedly, yet, we had to deliver with the same amount of budget. 

We tweaked the programme so our community partners worked closely with a few core teachers to train them to be LBD leaders to help guide other teachers with less experience. We took 1/3 of the school teachers to visit  Finland and teach LBD there. We encouraged inter-school experience sharing, and the school to give teachers a half day break each week for training and give them more space to try. After the 3-year, we exceeded target by adding another 4 schools to the programme. On the funder's invitation, we are now on our second 3-year LBD programme, with a more refined programme that aims to spread to more school.  

Our first conference in 2014 "We need choices" was first such example. 

I had no education background when I started so I began by calling friends in the education sector.  Whilst they were supportive, none offered to help.

As a last straw, I approached a new friend in homeschooling, Karen Chow, an ex-teacher, who immediately agreed. She then introduced Michell Huang,  who helped invited Sudbury Valley School, USA, to the conference. The three of us founded EDiversity in 2014.  

I designed and organised the conference, with dedicated help of them and a new core member, Doreen Ho, and a few other parents. I invited Prof. Kai Ming Cheng, Emeritus professor of HKU, who wrote a preface for my homeschool book. With his support, we were able to co-organise the event with the prestigious HKU Faculty of Education. 

We had no money, but we managed to invite guests, nearly all through cold-calling, from Finland, USA, England, Taiwan and China, who all kindly supported and did not take speaker honorarium. The 2-day conference was run entirely by volunteers. We charged a low fee and managed to break even with full house of audience both days during Occupying Central, and good publicity afterwards. 

EDiversity is probably the first organisation to showcase alternate education options in HK, including that of homeschooling, which was seen as illegal here. We are also rare specifically aim to transform education through advocating respect of children and happy learning in this highly competitive HK culture. 

We challenge the education system positively and proactively by showcasing and enabling possibilities, offering training, publishing books for self-learning, and engaging the media for publicity. We network with like-minded people and organisations locally and overseas, and engage support from the academics and the government. 

In October 2019, we celebrated our 5th anniversary amidst serious protests in HK, with a free-of-charge one-day event  “We Have Choices”. 

We provided a rare platform for mainstream and alternate educators to exchange, and for parents to learn from them. Our conferences and events have always been family-friendly, experiential and reflective, which is also unusual.  

We write books, inviting nearly 30 HK parents and children to write about their homeschool experiences in 2 books. We also chronicled our first 3 years of LBD experience in local primary schools. We crowdsourced people and money, using 2 years to translate and publish the internationally acclaimed  “Parenting for a peaceful world”, when commercial publishers found it too hard to do, and we made it into a 3-year community parenting programme. 

Our work is innovative not in technology, but in facing up to the real problem, which people often sidestep, for its success is difficult to measure and quantify. 

Our theory of change is to first focus on parents and schools who desire a child-oriented education. We first used conferences and seminars to attract their attention, and converted a few more along the way.  With funders proactively giving us support after those conferences, we introduced the 'deep cultural shift' teachers development project Learning by Doing (LBD), and later on the taster: Happy Classroom Day (HCD). We also give workshops to parents and invite them to join LBD and HCD, and empower them with skills like story-telling, so they can be positive supporters of schools. 

Concurrently in the wider community level, we started the Parenting for a peaceful world project, with a range of activities including public talks and workshops, developing a parenting app, translating a book with the same name, a book reading club, and small pockets of community parent mutual-support groups. The aim is to help more to be aware that understanding our own childhoods yields an important insight about our relationships today, and offer directions and motivation to change.  

With this model, we wouldn't waste effort in converting people who aren't ready. They will be gently introduced to the idea, when the whole school and the community are adopting this approach. With time, hopefully they will become a supportive force too. 

Our Theory-of-change:

Activities : school-based teachers training and parent workshops plus community-wide parenting programme

Outputs:  a few key schools adopt learning by doing in General Studies subject and cutting down school work and exams. Small pockets of progressive parent groups set up

Short-term : Happier and more engaged students, teachers more tired but happier, parents find children have more to talk about school. Parents understand themselves and children better. 

Medium-term : More authentic learning by students. Teachers more experienced and energetic. Experience sharing with other schools, higher public awareness with publicity.

Long-term : Students and teachers become motivated to learn and share. Both enjoy school more, and parents are happier with children. More schools started to follow suit. Early LBD schools introduce more change in all subjects and care more for both students and teachers' well-being.  

The aim this year would be to serve about 500 teachers, 1,400 students and around 800 parents in total. Our projects have been seriously disrupted by the protest and school closure due to Covid19.  We did introduce 2 series of online sharing sessions about homeschooling and parenting during the lockdown to give support to parents, which served an additional estimated 4,000 people. 

The number of people we will serve in one year will slightly increase to about 700 teachers, 1800 students and 1000 parents. 

It’s difficult to predict how many we will be serving in 5 years’ time, as most of our work to date is relied on a few big funders’ support and are offered for free. That’s why we are currently building EDiversity Social Enterprises, which will offer a range of fee-charging school programmes for students, teachers and parents. We also would like to publish more books that will promote respect of diversity among children and also to strengthen the development of  My Happy School Map - a wesbsite for parents information sharing and learning.  

If we can get funding to hire enough people to kick start these projects, we hope in 5 years we will be directly serving 30-50 schools, about 2,000 teachers, and directly and indirectly 28,000 students. Again, with funding to our online platform will be able to serve all parents with school-age children in HK which is about 2 million, as long as they have access to the internet.  

Within the next year, our goals is to start building up EDiversity Social Enterprise (SE). Having the same vision and mission as EDiversity, the charity, SE aims to spread our messages through fee-charging programmes,  to school students, teachers and parents currently not served under funded programmes by EDiversity.  This will also help us financially diversified.  

Programmes in plan include furthering our Happy Classroom Day project, which encourage schools to dedicate one day for teachers and students to build relationships through designing their happy classroom together. It is a taster of LBD and also a promotion of UNESCO Happy School framework.

We also plan to produce 12 pictures books that promote understanding and empathy among children, featuring 12 different animal characters representing major types of student characteristics in HK. This project also come with a training programme for parents to become story ambassadors at school. 

Besides, we are planning our next phase of Parenting for a peaceful world programme, which aims to train more professionals to help parents to conduct self reflection of their childhood based on Robin Grille’s inner child journeying. 

In the next 5 years, we would like to revamp My Happy School Map platform to make it a go-to website for parents who seek and share happy school information and learn to become a better parent. Large scale surveys referencing upon UNESCO Happy School framework will be conducted on this platform, to collect stakeholders' views for schools to plan policy change towards happy schools.  

Our major barrier is lacking funding to hire people to support our background work and new initiatives. Another one could be political, with the government exercising more control over education, and powerful politicians favouring traditional education. 

We started off running everything voluntarily. While we much appreciate the support of funders, the funding normally does not allow enough manpower to even cover the programme properly, not only all our staff are underpaid for their workload, for our biggest funding project, we have to use our own money to cover the claim remuneration gap. 

Besides 3 funded programmes, all other EDiversity work is done voluntarily, including all book publishing, website and facebook updates, promotion, online homeschool sharing sessions during Covid19, a lot of video production now, all planning work and my own job as the CEO, are done without pay. 

All our backend work, admin and planning, is done voluntarily, mostly by myself, which makes it very difficult. Obviously I can't and should not do everything.

If we have funding to cover our basic staffing needs for 2-3 years, including a full time accountant, a full time fundraising and marketing manager, and a full time programme assistant, plus money to cover our office rental, that would help us enormously to become self-sustainable with our SE development.  

Writing funding proposals, developing fee-charging programmes for our Social Enterprise, are what we are doing. Fund raising through crowdfunding and other means is our next step. 

When I saw The Elevate Prize I thought to give it a try, as it claims to support the organisation or the person who runs it. This is very important to us, as in HK, funders in general fund programmes, and tend not to fund advocacy, staffing and office rental. Organisations are expected to take care of these themselves. We have been lucky in a way to have received funding quite early on (after 1.5 years of operation) but then it also means all our effort and funds are drawn towards the programme, without extra resources to develop our backend capacity. 

Besides, funding programmes here tend to stress a lot on KPI in numbers, and short term results. For a big cultural shifting programme like LBD for example, we have not been able to secure funding for doing proper research to track the development of teachers and children who have gone through these years of a changed pedagogy. 

With Covid 19 and the protests that hit HK, we find private funders and donation in general is tightening. Therefore I think Elevate Prize may be a chance to help us go through this challenging time. With the political climate is tightened in HK, whilst there is no evidence yet, but it's possible that local funders may favour less liberal programmes. An external funding would help. 

We work a lot with universities and community organisations. For example our LBD programmes work with private companies likeMakerBay(Maker education), CreativeKids (art eduation), Playright (freeplay advocator), and many other small scale local companies, NGOs and instructors who provide different expertise who can help our teachers development. 

We have been working with universities, in particular The Faculty of Education of The University of HK and The Education University of HK, who provide university interns to support our school programme, and they in turn can practise LBD in their internship, which is something very special, as none of their practicum is focused on experiential learning.

We also work with other education NGOs with similar vision to co-organise conferences. After our first two conferences, we worked with a friendly organisation Ednovators, to co-organise Ednovation Fest, which they have now taken over the running of it. The Fest is still an important platform for us to showcase our work and we leverage on each others' expertise in terms of teachers development as well. 

We also actively engage with the Education Bureau, meeting top officials from time to time. Their acknowledgment of our work is important for us to get major fundings for our programmes. 

We are more like a integrated model. 

We are a registered charity in HK established in 2014. In the first two years, we volunteered to deliver two educational conferences, opened to parents, teachers and all to rethink education. We charged a low fee and asked for private donations to cover the costs. 

As we want to shift parents' thinking, we continued to do seminars that would inspire them. In 2016, we did two more voluntary seminars, one on brain science about how we learn, and another one to rethink about the use and misuse of exam and assessments. We also started a "My Happy School Map" platform for parents to contribute their first-hand information on happy school. 

Concurrently, we started to translate Australian psychologist Robin Grille's "Parenting for a peaceful world", as we strongly believe this is an important mind shifting book for parents and all for our purpose. We crowdfunded and gave a copy of book to supporters afterwards. It's also available on Amazon now. We are also selling everything we published on our website, and some books through bookstores.  

In 2019 EDiversity Social Enterprise (SE)was set up. As explained it will provide fee-charging activities to schools and parents. We will group our publication business under this. We are only starting but we can use our network and capabilities established to offer those services. The work in SE will support other audience, like middle to high income families and schools, that are not covered by our charity's service. 

For EDiversity's work, we will be mostly relying of funders' support, who would normally give us 1-3 years funding on programmes we started. We will continue to provide predominantly free service and more experimental ones through our charity's funding. During Covid 19, this funding proves to be vital, as these big funders have continued to support, and we can sustain without difficulty.   

For EDiversity SE, it will be self-reliant. Now I am working voluntarily for it. a few of our paid staff who support other programmes take some of their time to work on this as well. There will be a few lines of business: 

1) workshops and training courses for students, teachers and parents

2) publications: in plan is making a series of 12 picture books for up to age 8 on respecting diversity with training programmes; making pop up books about inspiring stories on learning and teaching. 

3) My happy school map: we are now taking a small funding to do a Happy School research in HK. The result will be used to support all our work, and with funding, we can revamp the current My Happy School Map, which we created voluntarily in 2016, and is growing organically. we can do campaigns for regular community-wide surveys to collect different stakeholders views of each school in HK, taking UNESCO Happy School Framework as a reference. When we have enough data, we can will offer school with consultancy service based on those data. 

Our Jockey Club "Learning by Doing" Academy is funded by HK Jockey Club Charities Trust.

Our "Parenting for a peaceful world-Together we build a connected childhood" project (2018-2021) is funded by he D.H.Chen Foundation. 

Our Happy Classroom Day project is co-funded by The Swire Charitable Trust and Leung Hon Hung Scholarship Fund for 2019-2020. 

These are all grants, and together they cover over 92% of our operation costs. 

We have some revenue coming from sales of books. 

As mentioned earlier, all this funding goes directly to the projects and despite the large amount, our staff for these projects are underpaid, and there is not enough headcount to cover the workload, which makes it hard for them to spare their time to do other things. 

We are looking for a grant of about USD 430,000 which will cover 2 years of salaries for 3-4 staff doing fundraising, project management, digital marketing, accounting, and the development costs of 12 picture books and 1 pop up book.

If we can get some towards this whole sum, we will use it to develop the books first and hire the accounting staff and project management which is most important for the time being. Receiving the grant within this year will be most helpful. 

It's estimated to be about USD 852,000, 92% of which is estimate espenses of our 3 funded projects, 8% is expected costs of projects for EDiversity SE. 

I am applying because the Prize will help me access to funding and other precious resources that could help spread the messages of EDiversity to a wider audience, especially the Chinese community.

Chinese are traditionally a people who are generally benign and obedient, which has its virtue and obvious problems. Our culture, parenting and education style has much to learn to become more open to listening to children's needs, and adopting a less controlling approach, at home and at school and in society.

I personally feel a lot of the present day problems in HK come from this: Children have been fulfilling parents' and schools' needs throughout most of their lives, and have been given few chances to express their feelings, explore and develop themselves. When education has become meaningless, and they have been living a life mainly arranged by their school and parents, the consequences of suppressed emotions could be explosive and violent when there is an opportunity, as we have seen not only in HK, but across the world.  Empathy and boundaries should be taught from a young age, but not in a highly pressured and top-down only way. There should be understanding and dialogue. Our work addresses this issue through education, which means it will take time for the community to evolve. 

This prize will help us to have enough to hire the right people to help execute the plans we have. The professional management, mentorship and media campaign may help us grow too. 

Funding for us to hire employees is utmost important. We have only a part-time accounting staff hired using one of the programmes' budget. We need at least 1.5 people to do this job properly for the whole organisation. 

The funding partner can help support our staffing needs, especially a  fundraising officer who can help ensure our annual fundraise needs is met. It's best if we can collaborate with a community organisation with some of the fundraise, so we can help our partners to grow too. 

Partnership with a media strategist who can help us with a cohesive marketing and media exposure is important too, as all our programmes have some relationship with one another.

Lastly, some partnership in evaluation. We would need some advice about how to do it so it will be both effective and won't drain our manpower. 

We are very open, and we do seek collaboration actively according to the needs of our programmes. 

We constantly need IT help. Partnering with an IT /management company who can give advice and help us streamline our project management work, offering us tools and teaching us how to use those tools, supporting our IT needs, e.g. our parenting mobile app design, and the future revamping of My Happy School Map would be very helpful. 

UNESCO Happy School Project would be one organisation which we would like to work more with. Our LBD project has entered their Hall of Happiness last year, and we have some preliminary communications with them. It would be good if we can seek their advice and even support in our future work, esp. in My Happy School Map.