Reflections from Resolve Foundation’s 9th Anniversary in Hong Kong
We talk a great deal about inclusion. We write policies, develop strategies and run programmes.
But do we pay enough attention to the small, everyday interactions that determine whether people actually feel included?
On 15 October, we attended Resolve Foundation’s 9th Anniversary Lunch in Hong Kong, themed Together in Our Diversity. It was a wonderful celebration of people working to create a more inclusive society. It also left us thinking about how we turn good intentions into meaningful change.
Everyone has a voice. But are we really listening?
One of the highlights was sharing a table with Sa’diyya Nesar, a disability inclusion advocate whose reflections on courage and finding the strength to use your voice stayed with us. It made us think about how easily we confuse visibility with capability. The loudest person in the room is not necessarily the one with the best ideas. Someone whose experiences or abilities differ from our own may see things we have completely overlooked.
Yet how often do we make the effort to listen?
The small things matter
Inclusion is often discussed in terms of representation, policies and institutional commitments. All important, of course. But it’s also shaped by what happens between people every day.
How are we making room for someone who communicates differently? Are we genuinely curious when someone challenges our perspective and open to learning more? Do we notice whose contributions are consistently overlooked?
These small moments of inclusion, or exclusion, can seem trivial. But collectively, they determine whether people feel valued and able to contribute.
This is something we think about a great deal within our work. For most of us, we like to believe we are fair, empathetic and open-minded. But how we actually behave, particularly under pressure or when confronted with differences, can tell another story.
There is often an intention-action gap between what we believe, what we intend and what we do.
Building capacity, not just awareness
What we particularly admire about Resolve is its focus on developing people, not simply advocating on their behalf. Through its Community Changemaker Fellowship, Resolve invests in grassroots leaders. It gives them opportunities to develop their skills, build connections and influence change within their communities. Rather than assuming people need others to speak for them, Resolve recognises the capacity they already possess and helps create the conditions for it to flourish.
There is a lesson here for organisations.
We spend considerable time teaching people about empathy, inclusion and leadership. But knowing what good leadership looks like does not necessarily make someone a good leader. People need opportunities to practise, receive feedback, challenge their assumptions and learn to respond differently. Organisations also need to create environments where those behaviours are encouraged rather than undermined.
But how do we know if it’s working?
One of the questions that comes up often is the difficulty of measuring capacity building. We can count how many people attend a workshop or complete a programme. But does that tell us whether anything has changed? Or hat people are listening more carefully? Or are they more willing to engage with different perspectives? Do those around them actually feel more included?
At Cognitive Humanity, this is a question we are actively exploring. How do we measure and develop human capacities such as empathy, perspective-taking and relational judgement in ways that reflect real behaviour?
We found ourselves wondering what a Community Inclusion Scorecard might look like.
Not another set of numbers for reporting purposes, but something that helps communities understand whether people feel heard, whether their contributions influence decisions and whether participation is becoming more meaningful. (
Human behaviour is complex, and not everything that matters can be reduced to a score. But surely we should be as interested in understanding changes in human behaviour as we are in measuring programme participation.
Twenty-two prizes. Zero wins. Plenty to celebrate.
We should probably confess that we also became rather invested in the lucky draw. With 22 prizes up for grabs, we thought our chances were looking pretty good. Especially when ticket numbers immediately before and after ours kept being called.
Surely ours would be next?
Apparently not.
Twenty-two prizes later, we had won precisely nothing. Not even a consolation prize for optimism! But we left feeling like winners nonetheless. Not because of anything we took home (although Colby was pretty excited about the umbrella in the gift bag), but because of what we had witnessed: nine years of hard work, commitment and a community of people determined to make inclusion a reality.
And that is worth far more than a raffle prize. Although, for the record, we would happily have accepted one.
What happens after the celebration?
During the keynote, the speaker shared a beautiful line attributed to Rumi:
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
It felt particularly fitting for the occasion. Resolve’s nine years of work remind us what can happen when we recognise the potential in people and give them opportunities to use it.
We left thinking about the importance of human connection, but also about the responsibility that comes with it. We cannot claim to value diversity if we are unwilling to be challenged by it. And we cannot claim to be inclusive simply because we have invited people into the room.
The real question is whether their presence, perspectives and voices change anything.
What might change if we treated inclusion not simply as an organisational commitment, but as a human capacity that needs to be continually developed? What if we became as interested in how people behave in everyday interactions as we are in the policies and programmes we introduce? And what if the measure of our success was not only how many people we reached, but how differently people experienced the world because of our work?
At Cognitive Humanity, these are the questions that continue to motivate us. We are interested in the space between what people know, what they intend and what they actually do. Because ultimately, the test of inclusion is not whether we say everyone has a voice.
It’s whether we have developed the capacity, courage, and willingness to listen, and whether what we hear changes what we do.
Congratulations to the Resolve Foundation on nine years of bringing people together, amplifying voices and building the capacity for meaningful change.
Thank you for reminding us that the work of inclusion is both deeply human and profoundly collective.