Meet the musician empowering Hong Kong’s migrant workers with Pangyao, a social enterprise offering a voice to the city’s often ignored Filipino, Indonesian and South Asian communities

When Pangyao’s co-founders Aileen Alonzo-Hayward and Martin Turner sat down to discuss their then-modest ambitions, they kept coming back to the same question: “Why has no one done this before?”

As novel as it might be to the community it serves, Pangyao – a first-of-its-kind social platform and magazine for migrants and domestic workers living in Hong Kong – has a surprisingly unheroic origin story.

It all began with a relatively simple idea: to make relevant news and useful information more readily accessible to domestic workers. But that quickly grew into bigger vision: to create greater awareness of the issues faced by the community and help to address the real-world challenges that employers, neighbours and the authorities sometimes prefer to ignore.

“When we launched in 2019, one of the drivers was the realisation that, even though migrant workers account for a significant percentage of Hong Kong’s population, essential information and resources were often scattered and hard to find, particularly for those new to the city,” says Alonzo-Hayward, a musician and the Hong Kong-born Filipino writer and editor behind much of the platform’s content.

“Our initial aim was to bring these resources together in one place, along with input from the many excellent migrant-focused organisations.”

Fast forward to today, and that seed of an idea has sprouted into a multi-platform movement: the Pangyao ecosystem now consists of a website, an app, a 75,000-strong Facebook community dealing with all the diverse aspects of migrant life, and a bimonthly print magazine.