The Hua Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, founded in fall of 2013, and launched in November 2013. It was founded by youth organizers Claudia Li (Chinese-born Canadian), Kevin Huang (Taiwanese-Canadian) and Bard Suen (Chinese-born Canadian) to build community engagement in environmentalism and sustainability.
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Its mission is "to create and support community-based solutions that honour our individual histories and collective heritage to strengthen our community’s capacity for social change." The foundation evolved out of Li and Huang's shark conservation campaign, Shark Truth. It is a program of the Global Youth Education Network Society (genius), a federally registered charity.
Programs
The Hua Foundation's programs address environmental issues in food security and in cultural food knowledge.
Reconnecting
In 2013, The foundation hosted a wonton workshop, the first of a series of cooking classes called the "G-Ma Kitchen Table Series." The classes aim to reconnect Chinese youth with their traditional foods and practices by decreasing the intergenerational knowledge gap. Hua's "reconnecting" program aims to ensure the passage of traditional knowledge, stories and cultural traditional to younger generations.
The Choi Project
The Choi Project is the Hua Foundation's food security and food literacy program. It aims to provide more local, pesticide-, and hormone-free food products that can be used in traditional cuisine. The organization is partnered with various Metro Vancouver area groups such as the Richmond Food Security Society, Vancouver Food Policy Council and urban growers.
Shark Truth
In 2009, Claudia Li founded Shark Truth, an organization aiming to protect sharks from extinction through reduction of shark finning, using incorporating cross-cultural messaging, such as its Happy Hearts Love Sharks wedding contest. In 2012, Shark Truth offered wedding couples who vowed to go "Fin Free" at their weddings a chance to win a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Shark Truth campaigns saved nearly 8,000 sharks by diverting over 80,000 bowls of shark fin from consumption.
The issue of shark-fin soup caused controversy and divides in the Chinese and environmental communities. The move toward local bans in Canadian municipalities — and Shark Truth's role — was covered in the South China Morning Post and numerous national and international outlets.