When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Hong Kong, I watched as one of the most vulnerable groups in my city, refugees waiting on their asylum claims, became almost invisible. They were barred from formal work, had little access to healthcare, and were suddenly cut off from the informal support networks that had helped them get by before lockdowns began. As a full-time student, the practical choice in front of me was obvious: focus on my classes, get good grades to get into college, and let the adults and established organisations handle a crisis of this scale. Starting something myself, an NGO with no funding, no staff, and no experience, seemed impractical and bordering on unrealistic. But the more I learned about how many refugee families were going without basic food and clothing, the harder it became to justify doing nothing simply because doing something was inconvenient.
I decided to found Hong Kong Refugee Awareness anyway. I organised fundraising drives for food and clothing donations, and I began teaching biweekly art, English, and math classes to refugee children, all while keeping up with my own schoolwork and extracurriculars. It was not a decision that made my life easier. I had less free time, less certainty that any of it would work, and no idea whether what I was doing could make a meaningful impact in a crisis this large. I decided based on a simple principle: if I could help and chose not to because it was inconvenient, that inaction would say something about my values that I did not want to be true. The scale of the problem did not change the fact that I could do something, even if it was small.
Looking back, I still believe it was the right decision. Within three months, I had raised $4,000 for grassroots projects supporting refugees, and I was finally able to see the impact of what had started as a passion project come to fruition. At the time, I measured the decision by whether it “worked,” whether the donations added up to something significant, and whether the classes actually helped the kids learn. Now, I evaluate it differently. The lasting value was not just in the money raised or the lessons taught, but in what the experience taught me about the gap between caring about an issue and acting on it. It is easy to feel sympathy for people in crisis from a safe distance; it is much harder to reorganise your own time and energy around actually helping them. I also learned that impact does not have to be large to be legitimate. A biweekly English class for a handful of refugee children will not fix a humanitarian crisis, but it was real, and it mattered to the kids who showed up.
What I want readers to take from this is not that they should found an NGO the next time they see injustice. It is that practicality is often used as an excuse to avoid the discomfort of acting on our principles, and that excuse deserves more scrutiny than we usually give it. Choosing what is right over what is easy rarely comes with proof up front that it will work, or even that it will matter. I did not know, when I started my NGO, whether it would amount to anything. I only knew that not trying was something I’d regret.