Chit Chong, Chair

Chit Chong, has been a committee member of Hackney Chinese Community Services for the past two years with the last year as its Secretary. He has been environmentalist for over three decades, both as a professional and campaigner.

As a professional he works on in sustainability for a large housing association. As an environmental campaigner, he was the first Green Party Councillor on Hackney Council and is currently campaigning with Extinction Rebellion protesting to stop climate change and with the Green Economics Institute specialises in rights for future generations.

 

He believes that East and South East Asian communities should play a full part in British political, environmental, economic and community life, to ensure that we are strongly represented in Britain's multicultural society. He is looking forward to the HCCS representing the East and South East Asian ommunity  so that we can support our members work in these areas for themselves, their individual communities and East and South East Asians as a whole.

 

Ben Lee, Treasurer​

Ben has been a resident in and around Hackney for over 15 years. He is a multi-disciplined entrepreneur with extensive experience within the finance and property investment industry, with a focus on sustainable investment and proptech. 

 

He is one of the founding members of the charity Hong Kong Assistant and Resettlement Community (HKARC) who aims to support the Hong Kong diaspora to integrate well within the UK communities. Ben has collaborated with HCCS on various occasions to provide consultations to the UK and local governments on Hongkongers-related policies. 

 

Ben spends his spare time on cooking , cycling and listing to electronic music.

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Sarah Yeh, Co-Secretary​

Sarah is an award winning Vietnamese/Chinese creative director in advertising and social media. She has worked in a number of leading multinational agencies on wide ranging international clients from youth brands, to charities and banks. 

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Sarah has long advocated for the East and South East community, in particular, with the award winning and pioneering Dimsum.co.uk which was the first online community magazine for the Chinese diaspora, between 2000 and 2010. Her work is featured nationally and internationally, mostly recently in the BBC's 'A Very British History – The British Chinese'. She has been a trustee to several cultural and civil rights groups for the East and Southeast Asian community, including the Vietnamese organisation An Viet Foundation.

 

Sarah has been on the HCCS committee for 5 years, as a treasurer and now a co-secretary. She has enjoyed working on the successful funding bids including the Good Growth Fund for the new building, as well as establishing HCCS's social media. She looks forward to supporting HCCS's development into a ESEA  organisation.

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Moi Tran, Co-Secretary​

Moi Tran is an award-winning Vietnamese/Chinese Multi-Disciplinary Artist, Performance maker and Set/ Costume designer for Theatre, Film, Dance, Opera, working nationally and internationally. Her practice advocates the power of Diaspora space as a site for decolonial inquiry and to celebrate alternative knowledge making in Global majority groups, with recent work exploring the role of sonic archiving, emotional wisdom and performance on identity construction, history, and heritage. 

 

As educator, Moi lectures at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Welsh and the Royal School of Speech and Drama.

 

Moi is founder of East Asian Ticket Club, an artistic and cultural engagement platform for the ESEA people. Collaborating with national Art and Cultural venues, such as The Royal Court Theatre, Design Museum, Hawkwood, Hampstead Theatre to build engagement programmes specifically for ESEA communities.

 

She is currently co-secretary for the HCCS managing committee and will contribute to the process as HCCS re-identifies as an expanded service to all ESEA communities. Moi will partake in the artistic and cultural working group for the upcoming Old Bath House project.

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Lisa Poon

Lisa was born in Hong Kong but have been living in London for 50+ years now. She has a lived experience of blending both Eastern and Western cultures and traditions and forming her own identity by combining social norms, practices and ethical values from across both ways of life.

Her working background was in Youth Work, which spanned 33 years – working in various voluntary and statutory youth services/provisions. She thrives on diversity and inclusivity which is reflected in the work she has undertaken with young people and communities from a variety of backgrounds. She is currently engaged in Family Support Work working with children and families.

Her experiences include partaking and supporting numerous voluntary community organisations, projects and campaigns, which also entailed my role as a management committee member in different organisations throughout my earlier years. She has been on the Hackney Chinese Community
Services management committee for the past 3-4 years.

She strongly believes in enabling and empowering the community to have a voice and self- determination, and the unity of the East and South East Asian Communities….. a vision which we strive to achieve together in the forthcoming years. She believes that it is going to be challenging and exciting years ahead, and she hopes that more will join force to achieve that important common goal so appropriate services can be developed for them.

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Alex Jarosy

Alex Jarosy is a retired local authority Officer with a background in public sector housing for both local authorities and for housing associations. Additionally, Alex has managed a medium sized community
development project in Kings Cross offering a range of outreach, youth and advocacy services.

 

Alex’s last employment prior to retirement was as Head of Corporate Performance and Complaints within the Housing service and since retiring Alex has contributed to several important charities in North Hertfordshire including the Citizens Advice Service, the Samaritans and the North Herts and Stevenage Centre for Voluntary Service ( CVS) for which he has been Chair of the Board of Trustees for
three years.

 

Alex has been a member of the HCCS Management Committee for two years and has contributed to discussions with local authorities in connection with the Old Bath House renovation for the Chinese and East Asian Community.

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Jenny Lau

Jenny Lau is a communications consultant with over a decade of experience in social media and content strategy. In her spare time she is the founder of Celestial Peach, a platform that tells stories about Chinese food in the diaspora. She curates food-based events for the ESEA community, from potlucks and supper clubs to congee gatherings. Jenny believes in using the soft power of food as a way to bring different communities together, as well as as a personal tool to explore heritage and identity. Her passion is driven by a desire to nourish and connect with people who feel a similar sense of unrooted-ness. She will be working with HCCS on building the community kitchen and the food outreach programme at the new ESEA centre. 

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Dora Lam

Dora Lam is a British-Chinese Hackney-based interdisciplinary artist. Her artistic practice navigates notions of identity and diaspora, and deals with cultural complexity and displacement on personal and wider levels. She works with performance, moving image, craft, writing and has a particular interest in social/participatory art.  She seeks to use contemporary art practices to mine, construct and preserve more nuanced forms of cultural heritage. Dora has worked with HCCS on digital inclusion training sessions, virtual art workshops during the lockdown and co-hosts the monthly book club ESEA Archives. Her aims are to continue to enhance the artistic/cultural programming of the growing community centre and foster cross-cultural spaces for the voices and expressions of the community to be seen, heard and shared.

 

Links: 

www.doralam.com

www.instagram.com/dorathedrawer

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Cường Phạm

Cường Phạm works between sound and community, sometimes they intersect, sometimes they don’t. He finds himself trying to constantly negotiate and situate himself in relation to cultural identity, movement, sites of community, and geographical spaces. He holds a Master’s in Southeast Asia studies at SOAS, where his thesis explored the Vietnamese diasporic experience through hip-hop.

 

Through his work at the grassroots, he has co-curated ‘Record, Retrieve, Reactivate’ (An Viet Foundation) and ‘Resettled Spaces’ (Lien Viet) which explored the history, memory, and language of the East and South East Asian migration experience. He, along with others, is currently in the process of setting up the An Viet Archive, a collection of documents, photos, and other artefacts relating to the British-Vietnamese experience. Under the handle Phambinho he also hosts a monthly show NTS, an independent online radio platform. In which he, and occasional guests, attempts to musically reframe ‘Asia’ as a contested paradigm. Alongside Breakwater Collective, he is working on a four part art radio series which explores mental health and wellbeing of various ESEA groups.

 

He has also appeared on BBC Asian Network, Netil Radio, Dublab, no10.as, DSTRACKTD, A:\files, Vinyl Factory, he has performed at Tate Modern and alongside collectives/labels Eastern Margins, Chinabot, Rumah Fest and Nhạc Gãy and has/had other projects with SOAS, AAA Radio, and East Asian Ticket Club x Royal Court, and Chisenhale Gallery. Cường is also an associate of Asia-Art-Activism, and he recently co-curated the online programme ‘Till We Meet Again IRL’.

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