About Us

Chinese Welfare Trust is a national charity that brings together like-minded individuals and organisations of various backgrounds, with the common goal of working towards a better future for the Chinese community in the UK.

CWT was co-founded by Eddie Chan, then Director of the National Chinese Healthy Living Centre, and Stephen Perry, Chairman of The 48 Group Club on 7 March 2008 . Both strongly believed in the need to establish a national organisation to help the elderly and others in the Chinese community in the UK. Stephen was a trustee until 1 June 2018 when he became the Honorary President of CWT.

The Trust is currently co-chaired by Mei Sim Lai OBE DL and Eddie Chan. Trustees bring to the Board the experience, understanding and skills which are vital for realising the Trust's goals.

Our core priority is to meet the needs of people with Chinese heritage who find themselves isolated, marginalised and who may have a language barrier.

We are delighted to see many regional Chinese community organisations scattered across the country that do excellent work in their local communities.

We will continue to partner with local and national non-profits to identify the needs of the most vulnerable in our community to ensure that no one is left behind.

Mei Sim Lai OBE DL, co-chair

Mei Sim is founder and Principal of Lai Peters & Co and Managing Director of the management and consulting firm Lai Peters Limited. She is deputy Lieutenant of Greater London and Representative Deputy Lieutenant for the London Borough of Brent. Born and educated in Malaysia, Mei Sim came to London in 1970 to train as a Chartered Accountant. In 1979 she became the first Chinese and female Partner at the leading firm of City Chartered Accountants, Pridie Brewster, established in 1914. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales and a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountant. Since 1991,Mei Sim holds and has held several Non Executive and Board appointments in the Public, Private, City, International business and Charity and Voluntary sectors.

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Eddie Chan MBE, co-chair

Eddie Chan has been a founding member of London Chinese Community Network and the Chinese Welfare Trust and chairs of both organizations for many years. He is also a chartered civil and structural engineer and chartered manager with a MBA degree, and has over 20 years’ experience of working in consultancy on infrastructure development worldwide. In 2003, with the then Labour government, Eddie established the British Chinese All-Party Parliamentary Group and also became the prime promoter to encourage the Chinese community to participate in voting. Before retiring Eddie was the Director of the Chinese National Healthy Living Centre from August 2000 and February 2019. This role has earned him a lot of recognition and praise as an effective change-maker: he transformed the Centre into a highly regarded organisation. Eddie has been a member of various UK government departments’ ministerial advisory groups and was a Steering Group member of Westminster LINK (Local Involvement Network) from 2009 to 2013 and Committee Member for Westminster Healthwatch from 2013 to 2018. He also chaired the BME Health Forum in London between 2010 and 2019.

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Dr Mark Lim, trustee

Mark was born in London to Malaysian Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese parents and has worked in the NHS for 18 years, specialising as a public health doctor in 2007.

Mark currently works in Norwich as a Director for Clinical Services and Clinical Transformation and over the years has led on various initiatives aimed at improving care for the frail elderly, those with dementia, patients with mental illness, and sufferers of stroke, diabetes, lung disease and heart disease.

During the pandemic, he has also worked with clinical colleagues and digital experts on projects to keep patients in touch with critical services using technology.

Mark is also a keen chess player, Arsenal supporter, and was the Conservative Candidate for Islington South and Finsbury at the 2015 general election.

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Geoffrey Yeung, trustee

After graduating from Harrow School as a scholar, Geoffrey Yeung went on to majoring in economics with honours at University College, London. He spent the next ten years working as a human rights lawyer with a passion for immigration, ethnic communities and civil liberties.

Over the years, he campaigned with various charities including Care4Calais where he volunteered in "the Jungle" refugee camp, as well as speaking on numerous mainstream media, such as BBC News, LBC Radio and China's Phoenix TV as a UK immigration expert.

Geoffrey founded the widely acclaimed British Chinese Food Awards® (www.britishchinesefoodawards.co.uk), which celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit, hard work and talent of Chinese restauranteurs across the UK every year. The first ever UK Chinese food competition of this scale brought together hundreds of participants across the nation and the sold out event served as an excellent platform to celebrate the achievements of those ambitious business people in the industry.

Having developed a knack for business development and marketing, Geoffrey's focus as Director of Communications at the Chinese Welfare Trust is to deliver our vision and clear communication campaigns to all our stakeholders. He works closely with our dedicated team to launch highly successful events and continues to raise awareness for those who are most vulnerable and needy amongst the Chinese community in the UK.

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Fang Min Macdonald, trustee

Fang Min began her career as a banker at UBS Head Office in Zurich, later moving to UBS Hong Kong where she was also responsible for the opening of UBS' representative office in Shanghai. During her career at UBS Fang Min led many important client conferences and events. In 1998 Fang Min moved to London with her new family and since that time has been involved in promoting projects in the creative industries, with a focus on fine art and music.

Fang Min is delighted to join the Chinese Welfare Trust as she believes the charity has a vital role to play in our society. She looks forward to doing more to help the elderly and disadvantaged in the Chinese community in the UK.

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Kam Lee, trustee

Mr Kam Yee Lee was born in Hong Kong. He migrated to UK in 1982. He qualified as a Chartered Certified Accountant in 1990 and set up his professional practice in Central London in 1991. He was invited to join the then newly formed Chinese Conservative Group as its Vice Chairman in 1992. The Chinese Conservative Group was the first political group of its kind established by British Chinese in this country in 1991. In 2002, Mr Lee was invited to take over as Chairman of the group. He had then re-organized and expanded the group to build up a national network with branches in many cities all over the country.

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Lisa Yeung-Donaldson, project director

Lisa holds a doctorate degree in Sociology from the University of Sussex and was the recipient of Sir Run-Run Shaw Scholarship for two years during her studies.

She has previously worked for the Chinese Information and Advice Centre as well as for the Southwark Citizens Advice Bureau where she helped to launch and lead an outreach advice service for refugees and asylum seekers.

She has returned from a stint living abroad, where she volunteered as a campaigner for Amnesty International Schweiz based in Zurich Switzerland.

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Joe Hung, support worker

Joe has over twenty years of experience working in a variety of roles in different Chinese community organisations in London. He has also worked in a support capacity in a Westminster-based housing association with a higher-than-average number of older Chinese tenants. He is regarded as a trusted and knowledgeable frontline community worker. Currently, he provides outreach support mainly to Chinese residents living in Westminster and Camden, and occasionally, outer London boroughs. Local authorities, hospitals, churches and other Chinese community centres make referrals to Joe.

What we do

We help all people of Chinese heritage who live in the UK, young and old, and wherever they may have originated - China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and elsewhere.

In recent years, we have a built up a track record of working alongside a number of regional Chinese community organisations in tackling hate crime against East and Southeast Asian people and raising awareness of brain health. Our trail-blazing specialist dementia support service in partnership with Dementia UK has also attracted attention from Chinese community organisations outside of London who are looking into setting up a similar service for their local beneficiaries. We continue to provide a Cantonese- and Mandarin- speaking counselling service to people who prefer to access help from counsellors that are sensitive to their cultural needs.

We have the long term vision of building an extra-care home in London.

Meet The Team

Privacy and GDPR

Chinese Welfare Trust (hereafter ‘CWT’) is committed to protecting your privacy in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and we want to ensure that you feel comfortable with our data and privacy processes. This Privacy Notice sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information (information that identifies or could identify you.

CWT is a national charity (no.1126505) that aims to help vulnerable and isolated Chinese elderly in the UK. We defend the rights and improve the welfare of older Chinese and East Asians by providing outreach support for individuals. From time to time we also hold fundraising and awareness-raising activities. We only collect and process data which is necessary to support these aims and activities.

For the purposes of GDPR, we are a “data controller” which means that we are responsible for determining the purposes and means of processing your personal information. For the delivery of our services we may rely on “data processors”, such as email delivery platforms. These “data processors” will be responsible for processing your data and will not share your data with third parties unless you have given them express consent to do so.

When you visit our website we gather anonymised browsing information, which includes things like which pages you visit, how you arrived at the site (via a search engine or social media, for example). We may use ‘cookies’ which are stored on your computer and help us recognise you when you revisit our website and to help us monitor traffic. We may also track which pages you visit when you click on links in our emails or other communications.

If you sign up for our email newsletter we will ask for your first name, surname and email address. By signing up to our newsletter you will receive up to four emails in a calendar year on the latest news and initiatives relating to the work of CWT and elderly welfare in the UK. You can opt out of these emails at any time by clicking unsubscribe at the bottom of the email or by contacting us here.

If making a monetary donation to CWT we may collect certain information via a third party donation platform such as Charities Aid Foundation. This information will include the data needed to process the donation and associated actions such as Gift Aid. This data will not be used for other purposes such as news updates unless you have given your express consent.

We only keep your data for as long as is reasonable and necessary for the relevant activity. For ongoing activities such as newsletter updates, we will keep your data until such time as you request otherwise.

You retain your rights to the personal information that we hold about you. These include the right to:

request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you, and information about why we use it, who we share it with and how long we keep it.
object to the way in which we process your personal information.
withdraw your consent at any time.
ask us to rectify and inaccurate or incomplete personal information about you.
ask us to delete your personal information if you have withdrawn consent or we have no lawful basis for keeping it

You can exercise any of these rights, make a complaint or request more information about our privacy processes by contacting us here.