Ada Wong - Understanding Polarization

Countries and cities around the globe are faced with increasingly complex social challenges. The difficulty in solving them is aggravated by polarization, misinformation, and people’s distrust in leaders. We’ll look at how some changemakers in Asia are turning that around by fostering citizens’ engagement in the design of public services and problem-solving. What made such unlikely co-creation possible in the Asian context? How is the citizen-government relationship redefined in the process? Social innovators from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea will share their successes and challenges of navigating between decision makers and the public to innovate for a more inclusive and effective public square. Ada Y K WONG, JP Executive Chair, Good Lab Foundation Director, Ednovators Chairperson, Make A Difference Institute Ada has led a varied career as solicitor, creative educator, cultural entrepreneur, social innovator, civil society advocate and local politician. She has set up and run many non-profit institutions in the education, culture, creativity and social innovation fields in the past 20 years. She founded Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture (HKICC) to advocate education innovation in 1998. Since 2006, HKICC founded the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, a unique senior secondary school dedicated to nurturing talents for arts and cultural innovation, and Ada is the school's Supervisor. In 2010, she co-founded the Make A Difference (MaD) initiative (www.mad.asia), a creativity for good platform for young changemakers in Asia. In the last 11 years, MaD has undertaken projects at the intersection of creativity and urban/social challenges, incubated social startups, and has worked with cross sector changemakers to come up with bottom-up innovative solutions. In 2012 Ada founded The Good Lab (www.goodlab.hk), a social innovation co-working space and hub, which later became a do tank and innovation consultancy to enable tri-sector collaborations for positive changes in society. Since 2016, in her capacity as a Director of Ednovators, Ada designed and led the Innopower Teacher Fellowship (jcinnopower.hk), a programme to build the innovation capacity of teachers in Hong Kong. Ada was an elected member of the Urban Council and Wan Chai District Council between 1995 and 2008 with the last four years as Chairperson of the Wan Chai District Council. She received her BA (Hons) from Pomona College, California USA, and M Ed from the University of Hong Kong. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lingnan University, Hong Kong Education University and the Hong Kong Baptist University.

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