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The Law for Change Student Competition is an opportunity for students to incubate their own social change projects with:

  • Mentorship with lawyers and/or professionals from other disciplines
  • Workshops and one-on-one consultations on project design and implementation
  • Networking opportunities with like-minded students
  • Partnership opportunities with non-governmental organizations and social enterprises
  • HKD10,000 to prototype their project (for the six finalist teams) 
  • HKD50,000 to implement their project (for the three winning teams)

 Through this Student Competition, PILnet hopes to encourage the next generation to use the law for public interest.

Focus areas

Students are encouraged to develop project ideas in the following focus areas:

  • Environment and climate change: Solutions that have the potential to advance protection of the environment or fight climate change.
  • Health and wellbeing: Health and wellbeing are defined as holistic concepts and projects may also consider mental, spiritual, and social needs.
  • Decent living: Solutions to the housing concerns and housing crisis in Hong Kong. 

Projects outside the focus areas above will also be considered but these projects should target underserved communities in Hong Kong or bring creative solutions to a social problem.

Recent Winners

All project updates

Port-of-Call Initiative

Port-of-Call Initiative aims to empower the asylum seeker and refugee community in Hong Kong educationally and to reduce the current bias of the local community towards asylum seekers and refugees.

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TransForm

TransForm aims to empower ethnic minorities in accessing legal resources by reducing language barriers.

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WholeHearted

WholeHearted is an initiative aimed at providing both legal and personal support to the single father community in Hong Kong.

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2020 Winners

All project updates

Homecoming (2020 Winning Team)

Homecoming aims to empower local homeless people in Hong Kong by enhancing homeless people’s knowledge of their rights and providing them with social and legal services. To strengthen homeless people's rights, this proposal puts forward a project with three phases.

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Employees’ Compensation Personal Injuries Network (2020 Runner-up Team)

Employees’ Compensation Personal Injuries Network (“EC-PIN”) is a student-led pro bono legal project, which strives for easy protection of workers’ rights to injury compensation. This project aims to empower both workers whose right to employees’ compensation is statutorily protected and workers whose rights have not been recognized through (1) developing an ECPI calculator, (2) public promotion through publishing case articles and information packages and (3) policy advocacy work with the help of NGOs and lawyers.

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Volunteer Rental Mediation Scheme (VRMS) (2020 Runner-up Team)

The Volunteer Rental Mediation Scheme (VRMS) team provides a platform for tenants and landlords to have free mediation over rental issues under the Covid-19 pandemic.

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