Vivien Luk

Vivien Luk is the executive director at WORK, an organization with a mission to accompany families in Haiti out of poverty through good, dignified work. During the past few years, WORK has expanded its mission beyond Haiti through its First Mile initiative, where they accompany informal waste collectors globally to collect raw material bound for landfills and waterways and supply them to brand partners that are incorporating responsibly sourced recycled material into their products, such as HP and CPI Card Group. This work includes setting human rights standards for collection at the “first mile” and implementing programming to support the improvement of standards. First Mile believes that the most important asset in cleaning up the environment is the people who have been doing it for decades. First Mile supports waste collectors in Haiti, Honduras and Taiwan to improve their livelihoods while providing their brand partners access to the material they collect. They also help brands create and implement human rights standards in their raw material supply chains to ensure that all material can be sourced while respecting human rights.

Prior to WORK, Luk was a program officer at The Forbes Funds in Pittsburgh, serving the region’s nonprofits by building their capacity to perform and advocating for resources to serve its constituents. She has a Master of Public Policy and Management from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University and a philosophy and a public policy degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.