We spoke to the Impact Lab students interns at FSI during the Spring 2021 semester to find out their learnings and experiences at the Impact Lab, as well as their take on social impact.
In this series, meet Leo Fu, Community Business Support Intern at Foundation for Shared Impact.
Tell us about yourself? Which year are you in and what subject are you majoring in? What is one fun fact that people don’t know about you? What is the best thing about being you right now?
Hi! I am a year two student majoring in Economics and Finance (BEcon & Fin) at HKU. I love sports but I hate sweating. I think what is the best thing being me right now is to be a university student and participating in the Impact Lab student internship program.
Tell us about your experience at Impact Lab? What are your roles and responsibilities?
My role is to visualize data collected from the client company and to show Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for them to trace performance.
What is unique about the company that you work at?
I think it is unique to have a fun boss and it is also unique in FSI to have a supportive working and learning environment, with other friendly student interns.
What are the major learnings that you gained from participating in Impact Lab? How has the experience helped your understanding of social impact?
One fundamental thing I have gained from this Impact Lab experience is knowing the characteristics of start-ups. For start-ups, their main focus is on achieving their aims, delivering the service they have promised, etc. That is why they won’t spend much time on organizing or filing data, which is crucial when they need to scale up. Being in FSI helped me in learning how to help start-ups overcome these issues.
How has this experience benefited your personal growth? How will this experience benefit your future, in terms of your career and/or other endeavors?
This experience gave me a whole new vision of how working with a social enterprise is like and helped me to learn how to maximize output with a limited amount of fundings. This experience is totally in reverse of what it’s like to work in a big, well-funded company. Therefore, this internship will surely be beneficial for my career.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you?
The pandemic made me adopt a new habit of staying at home. I have explored more online learning tools such as Zoom, Camtasia, etc. Also, since I have been staying at home, I also started to explore home workouts which made me realize that there has always been this alternative for me.
The pandemic has caused many unprecedented challenges for social impact organizations. From working at the company, how do you think the pandemic has affected the organization, its leaders, and its beneficiaries?
I think it’s beneficial to our company as the pandemic has made our team more efficient. FSI’s Community Business Support team provides the implementation of services in order to help other social enterprises scale up. During this semester, we focused on making things digital. With the pandemic, virtual meetings become a new trend and it has saved everyone’s time, allowing us to have instant updates on different matters.
If there is one thing you can do for the world right now, what would it be?
It will be to make freedom available for everyone. Freedom to think, to explore, to achieve whatever people want to achieve, creating a utopia for everyone. However, I don’t know how to make this true since it’s just a wish.
Would you recommend the Impact Lab to other students? Why?
Yes definitely. It is a great chance for students to have a taste of the experience to work in social impact organizations, gain more knowledge about the struggles these companies are facing, and reflect on how we can make the world a better place in the future when we have the power to do so.
