Heena Sinha Cheung - Movement of Many II

Heena Sinha Cheung is a busy woman. When we speak, she has just been named 2025 Woman of the year by the Women’s Economic Forum and I’m lucky to catch her before she jets back to India for the Christmas break. 

After relocating to Australia from India just over a decade ago, she founded NDIS accommodation provider My Second Home, is Vice President of the Communities Council on Ethnic Issues, and author of a safety education book for children and families. Her work sits at the intersection of child safety, climate justice, multiculturalism, empowerment and community wellbeing. 

While not running between her various speaking engagements around Melbourne or attending climate community forums, Cheung lives with her husband and children in the leafy suburb of Warrandyte in Melbourne’s northeast, where she says she can easily access nature all around. 

“What I love the most about where I’m living is actually raising kids in an environment where kangaroos can visit our doorstep. I often take walks when I feel stressed working. You know, that’s like the immediate boost to my mood when I just walk in nature and hear the leaves rustling, and it’s calming. I love that my kids get to interact with nature and greenery on a daily basis.”

Growing up in Gujarat on the west coast of India, she remembers visiting national parks with her family which was the first time she saw animals in their natural environment and picking leaves from a particular tree to make fritters at home.  

“As a four-year-old, I vividly remember my first interaction with nature in those parks. Growing up in a Hindu family, we always respected nature. I remember from the stories that our grandparents used to say that we need to look after our Mother Earth. We would be like, “Oh, don’t take the leaves or break the flowers because actually they’re living things, and we should look after them and respect them.”

Cheung was in Gujarat in 2001 when a devastating earthquake occurred and says that the experience of bearing witness to such an extreme weather event was a key driver in how she began connecting climate events with displacement and safety risks. As a survivor of child sexual abuse, it is an issue she is actively campaigning to bring out into the open. 

She recalls there were buildings that had collapsed and her family were forced to move into one and many others followed. “From my experience, and what I’ve witnessed is that when these extreme weather events happen, there is a lot of displacement of the families. It’s not just the homes and the power that’s lost, but it also created an environment where children were unsafe. Because I was affected by it, I started talking about it.” 

Cheung says this led her to researching the Black Saturday bushfires in Australia and discovering that incidence of family violence also rose by 59% at that time. “I soon realised it wasn’t just me – this is actually impacting a lot of people. AND It’s not just in other countries, or somewhere else. It’s happening in Australia as well. So we need to learn from the lessons and take action now.”

It has become part of her core mission now to normalise talking about issues of child safety in the climate crisis. “Yes, it results in loss of property and financial loss but it also creates circumstances where children’s safety can be compromised.” 

Like many migrants to Australia, Heena says when she first started attending climate forums she would rarely see “people that looked like me” because migrants were rarely part of the conversation. “Being an extrovert, I would still show up, but I’ve noticed a lot of people from my community do want to be part of this conversation. I guess there was a feeling that climate action is something that white people do so people felt they don’t belong in that room.”

Despite the challenges she has endured and overcome, Cheung says she still believes in human intelligence and that we have the capacity to learn from our mistakes. “So that’s what gives me hope, that human beings have an amazing capacity to adapt, to learn and reflect. We have the opportunity to honor the lives which have been lost, and work towards making sure that we have a liveable earth by the end of it.”