Changemaker Encounters – Victoria Chok

This week, Changemaker Encounters catches up with Victoria Chok, a Global Changemaker from Canada.She currently serves as Senior Vice President at Nspire Innovation Network

Victoria, it’s a pleasure to speak to you. First of all, let’s talk about your background. Where are you from?

I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. However, my parents immigrated from Hong Kong and Burma.

What are the wages of having such a diverse background? How has it shaped you?

I was lucky to grow up in such a culturally diverse nation such as Canada. It’s really a mosaic where cultural identity is encouraged and one can take pride in their ethnicity while sharing their history with others. I found that this strongly helped my sense of self-worth and to truly appreciate the beauty in diversity. It has taught me that your background is something to be cherished and shared. Every individual is unique and demands utmost respect and equality.

It’s interesting to see how such a background inflected your own thinking in that way. I’d like to go a little further back though – what’s the first injustice you can remember?

I never experienced cultural discrimination but have felt the toll of gender inequality in many ways. In most of my endeavours, I would notice that the majority of my peers were male, reinforcing the power struggle. I found it disheartening to see that so many of my female peers were not as ambitious as our male counterparts to tackle larger positions of impact. I would like to extend a message to all females that it is highly respected to pursue leadership and to not become intimidated if you are the only female. You are required to take first step to initiate the start of change.

You certainly were faithful to that piece of advice from a young – tell us about the first time you initiated the “start of change”? When did you start pursuing leadership?

It’s funny you ask that question Daniel, as a young child I would have never thought of myself as a leader. I was the kid that would loiter in the playground by myself and also follow the main crowd. I had a period where I was bullied and my self-esteem took a great toll from that.

Then my life took a turn for the better. Upon entering high school at the age of 14, we were required to fulfill a number of volunteer hours. During my time at a senior home, I met an individual who, like me, had a strong passion for the arts. In the summer of 2006, we organized our first charity talent show to support local artists in my community. And to this day, our non-profit is still running.

My journey in becoming a leader was nothing close to smooth sailing. We started from scratch. I would have to cold call potential sponsors. As you are familiar, the charitable world of funding is unforgiving. And I’m glad it was-it helped me develop a thick skin. Little by little, I developed a tenacious character. My greatest lesson on leadership through this experience: good things do not come to those who wait, but to those who pursue it.

You touched on how a coincidental experience pushed you towards creating a non-profit. Tell us a little bit more about Markham Getting Together.

Markham Getting Together (MGT) was formally known as Markham’s Got Talent, a fundraising event dedicate to providing showcasing opportunities to diverse artists to raise support for their projects. It was founded on the belief that young budding artists were challenged with expanding their ‘basement projects’ to something more tangible, something they could develop so they can pursue their passion. I was trained professionally in ballet and knew first-hand the difficulty of pursuing a discipline in the arts. To this day, we have showcased over 1000 performers, built partnerships with 38 community organizations, and raised over $100,000 to support local artists through resource allocation and funding support.

That’s wonderful. And I understand your interest in activism has spilled over past your school years into university. What are you working on at the moment?

As I transition from high school to university it naturally made sense to broaden my involvement and activities. In 2011, I was selected to join Nspire Innovation Network, Canada’s largest youth-run non-profit that is dedicated to building leaders in a business and technology space. Our mantra is to disrupt mind-sets and enable action. Currently, I serve as Senior Vice President, leading a national team of 70 members to extend our outreach to an annual global audience of 1,000,000 and building partnerships with 60 organizations. It was through this experience where I fell in love with innovation-the idea to surround yourself with great people to turn any vision into a reality.

I am also a student advisor with Pearson Education, the world’s largest learning company. My role was to develop and implement online learning systems across emerging markets. I was also able to construct strategy and pilot the world’s largest e-learning system used in international campuses.

Due to my work in youth innovation, I was recognized as a Global Teen Leader by Three Dot Dash, one of Canada’s Top 20 Under 20, and the youngest scholar to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival by the Aspen Institute.

Most recently, I just finished a role with PepsiCo as a Summer Finance Analyst and will be returning to my graduate year at Western University in science. I am also looking forward to be speaking at the World Volunteer Conference presented by the International Association of Volunteer Efforts in Australia at the end of September.

That’s terrifically exciting! You seem to have a wealth of experience. What’s the most salient lesson that’s emerged from your activism?

To narrow down my experience down to one lesson is difficult. However, if I had to pass along one message it would be to seek mentors and always be networking. In today’s age of interconnectivity it is easy to lose hindsight of the importance of authentic human connections. Yes, you can probably find the answer to everything on the web, but nothing trumps real life interactions.

It is because of the tremendous generosity of my mentors in providing me the support and advice that enabled me to achieve what I thought would be impossible. No man is an island. Develop the hunger for intelligent conversations, seek help, and always pay it forward to the community.

I’d like to ask you a question about education, given your past work in education, and the fact you’re currently studying to finish a science degree. What have you and haven’t you learned at university?

I’ve always asked this question myself. It would seem that what one would expect to learn in university would be to decide on your professional career. In fact, I found it was entirely the opposite. University for me was a place for self-discovery. The program I was in, I discovered, was not relevant to what I would like to pursue as a career. It was, however, a demanding discipline, and thus my sense of accountability and self-management heightened. University for me, was a place where I could leverage to take the most risks since the stakes weren’t too high. It was here where I developed the best work ethic from my coursework.

On the contrast, I found the most valuable experiences were garnered through my independent endeavours. No classroom would be able to teach me the life experience I collected through my travels and trials over the years. I stand by my cardinal rule: “No amount of studying will prepare you for the situation. What you memorize will never leave an imprint, it’s your actions that create the mark (desirable or not)”.

That’s a deeply instructive cardinal rule! Slightly tangentially, what problems in the world do you think need and are going to need the most changemakers?

You put me in a difficult position Daniel. I believe there are infinite opportunities for changemakers to better the world. What is lacking, is the courage and awareness of the need to implement such changes. I also find myself guilty at times to suffer from a challenge many youth in my generation face-the knowledge and motivation to be the pioneer of change. Our generation possess the most resources and accessibility than any other. However, there is the issue of apathy. I wish more young leaders will believe in themselves with stronger passion and know that one person can make a difference. Don’t follow in someone else’s footsteps when you can create your own legacy.

Apathy is a constant issue and concern for any person interesting in change. What do you think it’s origins are? Is it merely an issue of mentality, or there deeper, structural issues at hand, which also require addressing?

I’d like to make a disclaimer-I am not an expert in anthropology. But through my experiences, I have seen that as a collective, we are told too often that abiding by the rules is the only way to become successful. Coincidentally, many of my successes were done by breaking the right rules.

I believe that one of the causes of apathy is the fear of being rejected by society when we want to speak up on an issue or take action against the status quo. This leads us to turn a blind eye and stay blissfully ignorant on a matter that demands our attention. Civilization can only evolve when we have changemakers brave enough to be the innovators and continue to fuel the upward trajectory of human potential.

What’s an idea that’s really excited you of late?

At Nspire, we’re currently struggling with capturing our in person audience post-event. Many delegates would attend our events, become inspired and build lasting connections, but there was a void offline. As a team, we saw the opportunity to deepen our engagement by directly connecting to our audience offline.

Thus, Nteract is currently in development to find the ideal solution to address this opportunity. I was tasked to work with a team of talent software engineers and product managers to brainstorm and test this hypothesis. I thrive on challenges and this is the current project that’s keeping me up at night. We’re trying to chase a solution to a problem that we don’t even know actually exists and if such a service is required. But that’s what exciting to me, venturing into the unknown. Let this be the start of an exciting and impactful journey!

One book: The China Study (T. Colin Campbell & Thomas M. Campbell)

One song: Do it Again (Robyn)

2014_psls-7775 One law to implement: Eliminate all animal sourced products.