Announcement

Dear community friends, colleagues and co-workers,

As you may know the word “I” is seldom used in Inno. I will take this opportunity to use it wisely and greedily.

2023 marks the 16th anniversary of Inno Community Development Organisation. Inno started as a tiny hotline initiative in 2007. And now it takes months to review 32000 cases solved by our Handshake Worker’s Hotline programme. It is also challenging to acknowledge everyone among 182 Innoers who ever fought together, millions of workers seeking for help, their children left behind, people living with hepatitis discriminated against in the workplace, people with disabilities longing for decent work, and female workers subjected to gender-based violence. We cruised along with our colleagues in every long and oppressive battle of advocacy and policy making. Within the limited space we managed to improve the infrastructure for workplace human rights. Moreover, partners around the world call upon us to expand our impact across Asia. For a 4-year challenge of building the Inno Asia team, we were able to fab ri cate a team of 8 versatile teammates locally for Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and India.

“If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.”says Irish poet Brendan Behan. Yet I go beyond mine even though I accepted them years ago. Inno team survived and augmented itself in the past 5 years when it has been the age of gloom for civil society in Asia. It could not have happened if it weren't for my 2 teammates, Ice Huang who managed to lead Inno China team to another epiphany and Mahendra Singh who built a robust team during such a captive time. I am increasingly convinced that my presence for Inno China team will only be a hindrance in creating more social good beyond innovation. And my international field work experience and lobbying skills might be made good use of for Inno Asia team.

Hence I am now stepping down as the Director for Inno China and will be taking on the role of full time Director for Inno Asia. Ice will be the Director of Inno China. Mahendra will act as the Deputy for Inno Asia. Though Ice has been doing a much better job to lead the team I will be assisting her to accomplish 3 tasks: 1. To help reconstruct a young and engaging board for the dynamic state in China; 2. To transform our toolkits widely used by many and for many years; 3. To summarise all the experience we gained in the sustainability sector. In the meantime, I will be working closely with Mahendra to achieve 3 goals for Inno Asia team: 1. To build different local resources networks across the region to plug in for our programmes like Fight Hepatitis; 2. To develop a decentralised SaaS together with the China team dedicated to the communities across the region; 3. To fully customise our programmes in the local context.

Everyday what keeps me going is that I feel blessed that I am still capable of making improvements in a shrinking space. Many say that we are good enough to stay strong. I will say that we are lucky enough to make it happen because of your support. If you are reading this, you must be one of many partners whom I can’t express enough gratitude for. But to whom I want to say thanks most are the kind, robust and diverse communities. They may not see this letter for being too long and not equally friendly(i.e the visually-impaired). But hey, you saw what I didn't see and you brought out the best in me. And we’ll be getting better.

PS: [email protected] is the contact point for China Programmes while [email protected] is for that in Asia outside of China.