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20 Year Success Story – Joy Leney
“There is nothing more important than teaching compassion to children, not just towards other people, but towards animals and the environment. The holistic view that ACTAsia takes is absolutely right.”
For nearly two decades, Joy Leney has been one of the quiet guiding forces behind ACTAsia’s growth and development.
With a long and respected career in international animal welfare, including many years with the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), Joy brought not only deep knowledge and experience to ACTAsia in its earliest days, but also encouragement, stability, and belief in the organisation’s vision.
As Pei began building ACTAsia while also raising a young family, Joy became both a mentor and trusted source of support, helping guide the charity through the many challenges that come with establishing a new organisation and pioneering a new approach to animal welfare and compassionate education in Asia.
Although much of her contribution has happened behind the scenes, Joy’s influence on ACTAsia has been profound. Her experience, wisdom, and unwavering support helped shape the foundations of the organisation and gave confidence during some of its most important early years. This year, as ACTAsia celebrates its 20th anniversary, we recognise Joy as one of the organisation’s unsung heroes: someone whose compassion, guidance, and belief in long-term change have helped make ACTAsia what it is today.
Joy’s path into animal welfare spanned decades and continents – from a country veterinary practice in England at Wood Green Animal Shelters to international fieldwork with WSPA. It was on a trip to Taiwan in the early 1990s that she first met ACTAsia CEO and founder, Pei.
Meeting Pei, and the Seeds of ACTAsia
Joy’s introduction to Taiwan came through a WSPA investigation into the trafficking of tigers and bears. There, Joy met Pei Feng and her colleague Wuhan, two young Taiwanese activists just beginning to find their voice in a newly democratic country where NGOs were springing up for the first time. What immediately set them apart, in Joy’s eyes, was their extraordinary hunger to learn.
“With lots of groups, when you try to help them, they sometimes feel you’re telling them what they shouldn’t do – there’s a barrier. Pei and Wuhan lapped up everything anybody offered and then looked at whether it could work in their context.”
Joy invited Pei to stay with her in London, where Pei enrolled in language school and studied social policy at the University of Winchester. “She had very little money and she still wasn’t fully fluent in English,” says Joy. “But she did it. She worked incredibly hard and she did it.”
From there, Pei went on to work at WSPA, and when she left, she co-organised an ambitious international training programme called Pioneer Training, held at a patron’s estate in Italy. Participants came from eleven countries. It was, Joy says simply, “absolutely extraordinary.”
That gathering became the genesis of ACTAsia, says Joy. “It came out of the experiences in Pioneer Training,” she explains. “And then it was Pei and her colleague who actually went and started it. There was no money, no staff. Everyone working as a volunteer for the first nine years.”
Joy’s Journey with ACTAsia
Joy’s contribution to ACTAsia’s early years was largely focused on helping establish the Caring for Life education programme, ACTAsia’s flagship initiative bringing humane education into schools across China and beyond. “I like to be a facilitator,” she says. “I like to see things happen. That’s what gives me pleasure.”
Getting it off the ground was far from straightforward. Introducing new ideas into classrooms, navigating cultural differences, and finding teachers receptive to a different kind of lesson all presented real challenges. But Joy saw signs of change that gave her genuine hope. “When I first visited schools in China, children sat in rows and chanted back what the teacher said. But before I stopped going, some schools had children sitting in circles, discussing ideas together, with the teacher facilitating. That was a genuinely revolutionary thing to witness.”
The programme has since grown and evolved considerably, and Joy believes it represents something fundamental. “There is nothing more important than teaching compassion to children, not just towards other people, but towards animals and the environment. The holistic view that ACTAsia takes is absolutely right.”
She is also candid about why this kind of work is a difficult sell to funders: “People want immediate gratification: they want to buy food for a dog, get an animal re-homed, see results now. With humane education, you don’t see results for a long time. But things learned in childhood can come back to a person much later in life. That’s where lasting change comes from.”
Hopes for the Future
As ACTAsia enters its twentieth year, Joy’s hopes for the organisation are grounded in the same long-term thinking that has defined her entire career. She sees particular potential in what an embedding of humane education within China’s national curriculum could mean. This is something ACTAsia is actively working towards.
“China can do things very quickly when it wants to,” she says. “If compassionate education clicked with the government as something important, it would happen, and it would happen fast. That could be genuinely transformational.”
Above all, Joy’s faith in the organisation rests in its people. She is frank that what ACTAsia has built is something to be genuinely proud of, even if she doesn’t use the word herself. “I don’t use the word proud,” she says. “But I do feel that I’ve been so fortunate in what I’ve been able to do.”
What she will say, without hesitation, is this: “I’ve watched ACTAsia grow from good intentions and limited resources into something genuinely professional: an organisation that can compete in terms of quality with any in the field. I don’t think there are many that do it better.”
And at the centre of that, she says, is Pei: “She can hold her own in any room, anywhere in the world. It is her whole life. She is utterly relentless – and that is the only way you can be.”
For Joy Leney, twenty years on, that is more than enough. ACTAsia is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Joy Leney’s contribution to the organisation spans its entire history. Thank you, Joy, for your invaluable contributions.
As ACTAsia marks 20 years of education, compassion, and action, please consider supporting the work that Joy helped build. Together, we can create a more compassionate world for animals, people, and the planet.
