How TFHK Champions Cross-Sector Collaboration
cross-sector collaboration also sows the seed for multiplying impact, outside the immediate classroom. They get people in various industries to become invested in education.
In our last article, we discussed how cross-sector collaboration can remedy what is arguably the most impactful dimension of education inequity: grassroots students’ lack of access to exposure, the significant gap in their experience horizon.
But cross-sector collaboration also sows the seed for multiplying impact, outside the immediate classroom. They get people in various industries to become invested in education. After their Fellowship experience, for example, our Alumni become lifelong champions of educational equity, going on to drive changes across sectors.
Angel Ng, CEO of Citi Hong Kong and Macau, summarizes her support of Teach for Hong Kong this way: “It’s not just the teaching experience, it’s the social dimension of the Fellowship - it gives students maturity. Through that, they get to know themselves, their passion and their values more. This is a great impact on the Fellows themselves.”
During his Fellowship, Sonam Wangchuk (Fellow 2020-2021) saw the exposure gap for himself. With mentoring from Grosvenor and The D. H. Chen Foundation, he partnered with EY, FactSet, and Grosvenor to organise business exposure activities for students. They got to do consulting work with a real company or social enterprise, attend CV writing workshops and visit corporate offices. But the experience also inspired Sonam himself to launch his third social enterprise, TimeTutor, focusing on giving students with exposure and learning opportunities.
Ernest Chau (Fellow 2020-2021) was similarly affected by his observation of the lagging technology use in local schools. During his Fellowship, he introduced e-learning tools to his classes and created an online course about e-learning to empower peer teachers. Now, beyond the Fellowship, he is pursuing a master’s degree in Education Technology, to understand how to maximise e-learning to benefit teachers and students even more.
Fei Cheung (Fellow 16-17), a Physics graduate with R&D engineering experience, joined the Fellowship with a vision to introduce STEM education to local schools. During his year as Fellow, he designed a special STEM Arduino curriculum for his F.3 classes. It was a total success. Under his leadership, upper secondary school students who were interested in STEM participated in even more competitions. The experience was particularly transformative for one of his students, Oscar (hyperlink to the Nov #4 blog post). For Fei himself, it furthered his journey into education technology: he went on to pursue a master’s degree in Machine Learning at University College London and along with two other Fellows in his cohort, Nikita and Princeton, founded the company HKSTEAMaker which provides STEAM curriculum consultation and after-sale services to schools. He hopes to work on developing more teaching resources for schools through modern teaching tools and applications.