When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I thought I had a fairly clear idea of what my Leadership-in-Action project would look like. I had spent weeks researching the legal and financial circumstances of migrant domestic workers, and I was eager to translate that research into a practical anti-scam and fraud prevention workshop. I had a curriculum to develop, materials to prepare, and a relatively straightforward measure of success: whether participants left the workshop with greater knowledge and confidence.
Six weeks later, I left Hong Kong with a much more complicated understanding of what it means to lead. I had delivered the workshop, helped facilitate a legal literacy program for secondary school students, and worked with Justice Without Borders on community outreach and legal casework. More importantly, I had learned that meaningful leadership often begins with recognizing how much you do not know.
Character: Learning to Approach Communities with Humility
One of the most formative experiences of my placement was participating in Justice Without Borders' Healthcheck initiative, which involved speaking directly with Indonesian migrant domestic workers about their employment conditions and experiences in Hong Kong.
Before the Healthcheck, much of my understanding of migrant domestic workers' circumstances came from legal research, organizational reports, and individual case documents. During the conversations, however, participants described experiences that made those structural problems much more tangible. They spoke about being required to perform work outside their contracts, being exposed to unsafe working conditions, experiencing sexual harassment, and living in spaces that offered almost no privacy.
I was struck by how much these conversations revealed that I could not have fully understood through research alone. My initial instinct when learning about a problem is often to think about what can be done to address it, but the Healthcheck taught me that acting responsibly first requires understanding the problem from the perspective of the people experiencing it.
This challenged me to develop humility and humanity alongside my existing sense of determination. I began to understand that working with a community is fundamentally different from designing an intervention for one. The distinction matters because even well-intentioned projects can reproduce the assumptions of the people designing them if they do not make room for the voices of those they are meant to serve.
Leadership: Balancing Initiative with the Willingness to Listen
My understanding of leadership also changed throughout the placement. At the beginning, I associated effective leadership with taking ownership, organizing people, and producing tangible outcomes. These skills were certainly important when developing the three-hour EmpowerU workshop. I took primary responsibility for the presentation, run-of-show, and simulation materials, and I learned how much iteration and collaboration are required to turn an initial idea into a successful program.
However, my work with Justice Without Borders presented a different challenge. While organizing a long-running legal case, another intern and I identified inconsistencies in a client's account. I felt strongly that we needed to clarify them before continuing to develop the case narrative. After raising the issue with our manager, I learned more about the client's limited English proficiency, lack of resources, and the procedural history that had made the situation particularly difficult.
The experience challenged my initial interpretation. I had identified a potential problem, but I had not fully understood the circumstances behind it. I learned that effective advocacy requires both the courage to question an existing approach and the humility to recognize that other people may have important context that I lack.
This is a lesson I hope to carry into my future academic and professional work. Leadership should not mean being the person who always has an answer. It should mean being willing to take responsibility, ask difficult questions, and revise your perspective when the situation demands it.
Global Mindset: Understanding the Systems Behind Individual Experiences
Living and working in Hong Kong also expanded my understanding of what it means to have a global mindset. Before this experience, I tended to approach issues of access to justice through frameworks shaped primarily by my familiarity with the American legal system. Learning about Hong Kong's institutions, employment regulations, and migrant worker protections forced me to reconsider some of my assumptions.
I also became more attentive to the relationship between language and access. Although I speak Mandarin, Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong, and I quickly realized that even having some linguistic familiarity did not mean I could navigate every interaction comfortably. Through my conversations with other interns at Equal Justice, I also learned about the experiences of African and South Asian ethnic minority communities, whose relationships with public institutions and the legal system presented different challenges from those facing migrant domestic workers.
These experiences reinforced that marginalized communities are not interchangeable, and that there is no universal solution to barriers to justice. Understanding a problem in a global context requires taking institutional, cultural, and historical differences seriously rather than assuming that approaches developed in one environment can simply be transferred to another.
Perhaps the most important realization was that the legal problems I encountered were rarely just legal problems. A worker's ability to pursue a claim could depend on her financial circumstances, language proficiency, employment status, and trust in the institutions around her. Access to justice is therefore inseparable from the broader social and economic conditions in which people live.
Beyond the Scholarship: Continuing to Act as a Global Citizen
I am leaving this experience with a greater appreciation for the limitations of individual interventions, but not with a diminished sense of their importance. The anti-scam workshop could not resolve the structural inequalities facing migrant domestic workers, and the legal assistance provided by JWB could not independently change the employment system. Yet both forms of work offered meaningful ways to help individuals navigate difficult circumstances.
Going forward, I hope to continue acting as a global citizen by approaching unfamiliar communities with curiosity rather than assumptions, supporting organizations working to expand access to justice, and remaining attentive to the structural causes of the problems I encounter. In my future work, particularly at the intersection of law, economics, and public policy, I want to be equally committed to rigorous analysis and an understanding of the people behind the data.
The most lasting lesson of my Leadership-in-Action experience is that ethical leadership is not simply about having the initiative to act. It is about knowing when to listen, recognizing the limits of your own perspective, and taking responsibility for the consequences of your work. I arrived in Hong Kong hoping to make legal knowledge more accessible. I left with a deeper understanding of what it means to make that work genuinely responsive to the people it is intended to serve.