Tonye Stuurman was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. She and her family have lived in China for the past 12 years.

Drawing on her lived experiences of Apartheid South Africa, being a rape survivor and raising a daughter with anxiety, drives her to be a passionate and dedicated advocate for mental health and gender-based violence through public speaking, facilitation and creating safe spaces for survivors in the community.

Motivated by her traumatic experience, Tonye started a volunteer community group in her hometown in South Africa nearly 30 years ago to support survivors of gender-based violence.

Her years of community volunteer work honed her skills as a public speaker and workshop facilitator. She worked with various local and national non-governmental organisations doing training with communities, the police and medical students. She also had the privilege of testifying at a special United Nations hearing on Women’s Rights.

Tonye is a journalist by profession. She started her career in South Africa at a national newspaper and went on to work as a communications manager at a teachers’ organisation and later a university.

Inspired by her work in the field of gender-based violence, she later obtained a post-graduate degree in Women and Gender Studies.

Through her work as a volunteer at the Community Center Shanghai’s (CCS) Counselling Unit, Tonye has initiated various mental health and gender-based violence awareness campaigns and has raised funds to assist those who cannot afford counselling services.

She has co-facilitated Grief support groups, and during Covid she co-facilitated online support groups for teens and adults.  She has also facilitated mental health and gender-based violence workshops for teens.

In 2021 Tonye initiated the Clothesline Project to raise awareness around mental health. In the same year she and Carrie Jones started the annual CCS Grief Memorial event.

In 2023 she coordinated the first United Nations16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign in Shanghai.

Tonye has led the CCS Teen Mental Health Advocates for the past few years. She also recently started the CCS Thrive Tribe for teens.

Tonye is one of the first volunteer co-facilitators of the UFH Sexual Trauma Support Groups. Using her writing background and her experiences of working in the field of sexual trauma, she has also developed the Writing Wounds into Healing workshop, an in-depth writing workshop for survivors.

Ashley Dudarenok (www.ashleydudarenok.com) is a naturalised Chinese serial entrepreneur, investor, award winning digital expert and book author, recognised by Thinkers50 as a “Guru on fast-evolving trends in China”. Among others, she is the founder of ChoZan 超赞
 (www.chozan.co), China digital transformation consultancy and Alarice (www.alarice.com.hk), China-focused digital marketing agency.

Ashley and her team help world’s top companies to learn for and from China through research, China learning expeditions, and consulting projects.

She’s also a sought after professional speaker covering topics around customer centricity, the future of retail, technology in action. Ashley is the author of 11 books on digital China.

She has over 95,000 followers on LinkedIn, and runs a popular China themed channel on YouTube with over 380,000 subscribers.