Fighting for Rights

Judy Kan, executive director of Her Fund, and Patricia Ho, founder of Hong Kong Dignity Institute, both Front & Female Awards Hong Kong 2023 winners, discuss supporting women and girls, philanthropic challenges and opportunities, and how they want to shape the future

- Rachel Duffell

Twenty years ago, research by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service on the behaviour of charitable donors found that while most were willing to give to children, education and elderly people, the proportion of donations to human rights and women’s rights was less than five per cent. 

It’s a number that Patricia Ho, human rights lawyer, law lecturer and founder of the Hong Kong Dignity Institute, a non-profit whose mission is to restore dignity to and advocate for the rights of Hong Kong’s most vulnerable, doesn’t think will have changed much—or if it did then Covid has set it back again.

Yet it’s a number that hasn’t stopped Her Fund, which was founded 20 years ago, and where Judy Kan is executive director. She has been with the organisation for 16 of those years and she’s proud of the determination and passion that has got Her Fund to where it is today. 

“It’s super-difficult to mobilise resources for gender issues,” she says. Yet the past two decades have seen Her Fund make grants to almost 100 organisations supporting underprivileged and marginalised women, for about 70 per cent of which Her Fund is the sole funder. “So they are extremely small; people usually can’t see them,” says Kan.

For Her Fund—and Kan—the work doesn’t stop with funding. Her Fund is dedicated to understanding the challenges of the organisations it supports and seeing how else it can support them. “We can walk further together,” says Kan.