Changing Mindsets

Lawyer Lisa Lam, co-chair and general counsel for the Gay Games, and Victoria Wisniewski Otero, founder of Resolve, a non-profit that seeks to create a more inclusive Hong Kong through the empowerment of future community leaders, discuss diversity, Hong Kong's comeback and what we can all do to drive inclusivity in the city

- Rachel Duffell

When Lisa Lam left Hong Kong to study in Canada, it was an opportunity to find herself. "I realised there are many minorities in this world in different contexts. Growing up in Hong Kong as a Chinese person, I was pretty normal, pretty mainstream, even though I didn't have the words or visibility about my sexual orientation. In Canada, I became a visible minority because of the colour of my skin, but then being queer was quite okay."

While there, Lam started a youth group for LGBTQ+ people, and while she experienced some overt negative discrimination including an arson attack on the group's office-being thrown together with people from different backgrounds made her realise that "we are more common than different", and she developed an interest in creating "a space where everyone could be themselves regardless of background or identity".

Lam went on to a two-decade corporate career in law where she was less directly involved in diversity and inclusion. When she left that work in 2017, she returned to inclusion work, taking on a role at the volunteer-run Gay Games in 2018, where she again aims to create a safe space for people from different backgrounds.

When Victoria Wisniewski Otero moved to Hong Kong ten years ago, she worked with refugees before founding Resolve, because she wanted to help people tell their own story rather than speaking on their behalf, and to do so across different communities, from domestic workers to LGBTQ+ people to the disability community.