Alumni Feature: Fion Leung ‘06

Fion Leung is the co-founder and CEO of Time Auction, a charity that advocates volunteerism, . a mindfulness enthusiast, as the co-creator of Mindfulness Movement, and most importantly, a CIS alum. Fion graciously sat down with Xiao Hua to discuss what entrepreneurship and service means to her.

Can you give us a little introduction about yourself?

I’m Fion. I run a charity called Time Auction. It’s a charity with a mission to advocate volunteerism, basically to get more people to volunteer. What we do mainly is two things. The first one is we have a lot of great educational opportunities and incentives that people can redeem with a certain number of volunteer hours. For example, they can redeem say 10 volunteer hours to redeem let’s say a mentorship dinner with someone really inspiring or a creative workshop. So hopefully all these great incentives will get more people to volunteer more, and then they enjoy those experiences and they go out and volunteer even more. That’s the first program that we run.

The second program is because a lot of the people who join the first program are actually students and working professionals, they’re all really educated and talented. So, the second program we run is to help other charities to find skilled volunteers. So, any volunteer who can help them with a bit of design work, translation, teaching yoga, any kind of skill, you name it. So on our platform they can apply to these projects to help other charities. 2006. And then I went to arts school for a bit and did my undergrad in Hong Kong, at HKUST, for a business degree, then went into banking. I started Time Auction as a side project, then started doing it full time.

Entrepreneurship has been a new spirit for change and creation, how did you kickstart and grow your tech innovation in Hong Kong?Where did you get your inspiration to initiate Time Auction?

How we started was my friend and I used to work in finance, and we used to go to a lot of startup events, so we were really interested in how technology can scale so fast and change the world in so many different ways. So one night after a startup event, we just thought, “Hey! Why don’t we try to do this idea by hosting inspiring leaders for a meal. Anyone can join if they volunteer a certain number of volunteer hours through any charity”. So, in a way we can help many young people learn from many different leaders and also get more people to volunteer. So, it really started as a side project, as a hobby. For the first two years, we just did that during lunch time on the weekend and then over those two years, doing outside of our full time job, we hosted something like sixty events. And people have volunteered 6000 something hours to join these events. We literally only spend a couple

hundred dollars to print flyers, to hand it out at school and we had all this impact. And then we decided to register as a charity and started growing it properly. But how we started was just as a side project, just something that we thought would be fun and interesting to do.

For us, we’re really interested in tech startups. So, after I quit my job in banking, I actually worked in NOTI? which is actually started by another CIS alumni, which is a tech media startup. So I got to know about the startup world, like how startup platforms scale, how do you apply the startup mentality in growing businesses and I think a lot of what we do at Time Auction, we try to apply the startup mentality to philanthropy in a way that how do we make sure that with the limited amount of resources we can have the biggest impact. So, that's why we are a tech platform, that's why we serve 500 volunteers would be similar to how we serve 50000 volunteers.

What is the most rewarding experience you have had since you have started your career?

I think it’s always really motivating to see how you create something and how the end users will use it. So, to give you two examples because we run two programs, so the first one with the incentive program, we have a lot of mentorship events. So we host dinner or lunch with inspiring entrepreneurs and many different kinds of industry leaders. And, I remember after we first started, there was this one kid. He was this really driven 15 year old kid, and I got to know him. He’s in an ethnic minority school, which is a really under-resourced school. He found out about Time Auction through one of the school promotions and then he thought “Wow! This is amazing” because he’s always wanted to be an entrepreneur. You can imagine this 15 year old kid, super excited about the tech world, entrepreneurship, but in school he didn’t have any exposure or access to understand more about entrepreneurship. So, he spent the whole summer, every weekend, he went to Food Angel to pack food and he accumulated something like 30 volunteer hours and he came to three of our events. He met with a few entrepreneurs, like the founder of GoGoVan. And after those events, he thought, “Wow!”, listening to these entrepreneurs, he was even more sure that this was what he wanted to do. Then, he took a gap year just to work at a startup and then he started working on his startup idea. I think for me, it’s so rewarding because we just decided to do this fun side project, but it kind of changed this little kid's career exploration and path.

The second example I can think of is, as you know with Covid, it affects everything, so last year when Covid hit, it was only in March or April that it was already reported that 90% of charities in Hong Kong had lost a lot of funding. They could no longer do their galas, they could no longer do flag-selling. At the same time, obviously the demand for the services was increasing a lot, there are more homeless people, there are more people needing their help. They also can’t do any offline event, so they all had to pivot. One example I saw is we held a Books and Beyond reading club, which is an educational charity. They usually have a lot of weekend classes going to underprivileged schools, primary schools and high schools to teach kids english and prepare them for tests, and also to teach emotional intelligence. It’s quite well rounded. But, obviously with school closure they can’t do any of those classes, and they usually have something like 300 classes a year. We helped them find nine video editors to change the whole education curriculum into an online course. And then the students, when they were at home on the weekend, they can watch the classes and then they can have the zoom classes. The teachers came back and said, hey, this is amazing, because of these videos the primary school students exam results are 40% better than last year. So, it’s really heartwarming to see how technology can connect people and then they can gather themselves together to work towards How did you adapt to the changes caused by Covid-19? What are some projects that you are working on that you are excited about right now?

Before Covid, we had a lot of events. wWe had a lot of those mentorship lunches and dinners. In Hong Kong every week, we had about two and we also expanded to seven other cities. We were about to launch two more in London and Toronto. We were about to scale up our Singapore operations. When Covid hit, obviously everything had to be put on hold. Hong Kong is one of the few places where we have it relatively good, so everything else we have to just hit pause and see what happens after Covid. That’s obviously a great challenge for us because none of our activities can happen. But going back to our mission, our mission is really to get people to volunteer. So, it just so happened that right before Covid, we started the skill volunteer matching program, so that has actually taken off faster than we thought because of Covid, because on the one hand, you have a lot of NGOs needing skill volunteers to help them pivot to do online activities. On the other hand you have a lot of people who are stuck at home, and can't travel. A lot of them have unpaid leave or are out of a job. It just so happened that skill volunteering, because it happens on a virtual basis most of the time, they can do it at home, a lot of these projects are done remotely, so this has really taken off. A lot of people want to help this way. A lot of charities have need. So, we got lucky that we started this program before Covid. A lot of people say, “Wow, you guys are so smart. You changed so quickly. Because of Covid, you’re launching this new program.”. But, it’s just great timing. In the short period of time, since late 2019 when we started, we have so far connected almost 4000 people to over 300 charities on almost 700 projects, so you know marketing, photography, design, all kinds of projects. So, it’s really kind of cool to see there is a positive impact of the pandemic on volunteering.

In a way, a lot of people see how unequal the world is because of Covid. We’re all facing this common enemy and you see that there are people who find it super hard to find masks and there are people who have boxes of masks at home. So, I think there’s a stronger sense of how unequal the world is and of wanting to help.

What is your belief and value behind creating the “Mindfulness Movement”?

My cofounder and I at Time Auction, her name is Suetyi, we are also really into mindfulness. How it started was, I think two years ago, she took a career break and she wanted to do something in mindfulness to get more people to meditate. So, we started again another side project called Mindful Movement. In the pre-Covid days we had again a lot of events, bringing a group of people together to meditate could be 20 to 100. The goal was to bring awareness and kind of a taste to people who had never tried it before. What we wanted to do is to get more people to try to meditate. I think it’s very much needed in Hong Kong. How we got into it was because when we were running Time Auction as a side project, we also had a full time job and we also had our personal lives, so it was a lot happening and it felt like you’re being dragged in many different directions. We thought, there has to be a better way than being stressed out about all this because there are people who have achieved way more than we have and they seem to be doing quite well. So, we looked around and we found Headspace, which is a meditation app and we started doing five to ten minutes of meditation a day and realized what a tremendous difference it makes to your mindset. I think just a simple five to ten minutes in the morning or at night, once you have it as a habit, you find that you’re less reactive to external circumstances and you have more clarity within what you want to do, how you feel, what decisions you should make. It’s kind of magical, it’s such a simple exercise.

What is a motto/ motivation that you stand by?

I think at the core, we feel that growing and giving makes a meaningful life. It kind of includes you know there’s no destination, it’s the journey that really counts. What the journey looks like and how you make progress is in a way how you can contribute to something that you think matters and that gives you a lot of satisfaction and motivation. At the same time, you need to kind of constantly be growing and learning. Both sides add to progress and progress means happiness. It’s part of the journey that makes it interesting and keeps you going.

I guess CIS is a great place, in the way that it really instills in us that we should go for what we are passionate about doing. I can’t say that that would be the same for all schools out there, for the std=students I meet. Whether you’re into science or art, I think CIS really gives you a lot of ressources and directions that you can go explore further. I think the same thing could be applied to people who are about to enter college or real life. I think the key is to try everything. Because when I was in school, I didn’t know what to do. I went to art school and then I went to business school. Everyone at business school said you should make money and that should be your motivation. People at art school said you find something you’re passionate about, money will come second. At the end of the day, everybody is lost, everyone is confused at that age. But what really helped me when I got into banking, I really felt that wasn’t my path and I needed to find something that I liked doing, so I tried exploring a lot of different paths by doing it and testing it out. For example, I tried starting a fashion company with my friend and it turns out I hated it. I didn’t like looking at fabrics and I hated going to SHam Shui Po, so I realized that's probably not what I wanted to do. And then I went to volunteer at this education event where we mentor and teach girls how to code. I realized I like working with young people and I like helping them learn new things and that kind of steered my direction towards young people and something that has an impact and something innovative, and that would make me happy doing it. I think trying a lot of different things and then you narrow down the direction of what you are excited about doing and then just following that emotion and passion. Then eventually, you’ll find something you like doing, hopefully for the next 30 or 40 years of your life.

How do you hope CIS student groups/ extra-curricular groups could make use of the Time Auction platform?

It’s amazing to see there are so many non profit initiatives that the students at CIS are runinng. It’s really inspiring. There are two things that students who are running initiatives can get involved in at Time Auction. One is if they have any initiative that they’re running, they can use our platform to find any kind of mentors or skill volunteers. For example, if they need someone to tell them about product design, they can find a product design mentor on here or someone to help them do marketing or any kind of skill volunteer, because our platform is open to all the non profit initiatives or charities. The second thing people can get involved in is if you don’t have your own project, but I know a lot of CIS students are super talented, so using your talent to help charity is actually super valuable in the way that it helps you understand the causes that you want to help better. You can talk to the charities and understand what challenges they are facing and then understand more about how to solve this problem. At the same time, you can polish your own skills. So, a lot of the time people joining these volunteer projects, they might be trying to explore a career path in let’s say digital marketing, and then they have some basic knowledge in it and then they have a charity to do a digital marketing project. Then, they really can see if they like doing this type of project or not. Back to my earlier point about exploring different paths, I think volunteering is also a great way to find out what you like, what you’re good at, and what you want to develop later on.