June 24, 2026

Donor Profile: Yin Ling Leung

by Ms. Foundation

Just as Yin Ling Leung was about to become the Ms. Foundation board chair in 2024, she was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. Alongside her spouse, Shaibal Roy, Yin responded to this news with a bold reaffirmation of her lifelong commitment to care based philanthropy. 

Yin first encountered Ms. Foundation in her 20s as an Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) organizer. She recalled feeling resonance with the Foundation’s power-building ethos, noting, “35 years ago, we did not have the language of intersectional feminist organizing, but we knew that the toxic combination of racial, class, and gender discrimination were indivisible and Ms. Foundation held that understanding with us.”

Later, Yin helped revive Asian Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health and created a joint project with an environmental justice group, Asian Pacific Environmental Network. Through a Ms. Foundation partnership these groups developed the leadership of young women from refugee communities to confront environmental racism. This program expanded the notion of reproductive rights, which Yin documented in a report on how the feminist movement could build bridges and alliances with others like environmental justice, LGBTQ+ and gender justice, and immigrant rights groups. Yin’s work captured the early formation of what would become the reproductive justice movement alongside other groups forming at the time, like SisterSong and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Eventually Yin’s work led to her founding Applied Research Works, a health information tech company, with Shibal. Her years in women’s health and advocacy demonstrated how healthcare inequities cut across every community and lead to devastating outcomes. “When we started our company, we were looking at where our tech platform could be most helpful. Shaibal and I decided to focus on healthcare because even if we failed, we knew it would be worthwhile.” Through their platform, Cozeva, Yin’s company attempted to solve the problem of fragmented and burdensome data management in healthcare by transforming traditional, paper-intensive systems into efficient, value-based care models. 

As Yin shifted full-time into growing the company, her relationship to Ms. Foundation also moved into a new chapter as a major donor. Reflecting back on this transition, Yin shared, “I also appreciate how Ms. Foundation values and promotes who is seen as a ‘philanthropist.’ If you give at a level that is meaningful to you, you’re a philanthropist. When I worked as a low-paid community organizer, I felt the need to contribute what I could to other organizing groups and to Ms. Foundation too. Small donations made consistently and at scale can really add up to big movement money. There’s also something very meaningful and powerful about putting your own money behind what you believe in.” This is exactly what she and Shaibal were able to do following the sale of their company in 2025, a milestone that empowered their family to make a transformational stock gift to the Foundation.

When asked why Ms. Foundation, Yin shared, “it takes risk-taking money to fund movements. In the tech funding world, we have people who are seed investors, people who take big risks by funding innovators when no one else understands what they are doing. Ms. Foundation has been a seed funder for movement building for over five decades, and we have an excellent track record of funding the earliest work on women’s safety, economic justice, and reproductive justice–just to name a few. My personal vision is for Ms. Foundation to grow and become an even bigger financial force to create change at the scope and scale women and girls deserve.”