Cultivating youth engagement in safeguarding children’s dreams 

Mr Chan Yik-yeung has been doing volunteering work with great enthusiasm since his days as a student. After becoming a teacher, he often brings his students to join various kinds of volunteering work. In 2019, Mr Chan went to Cambodia with his students for a volunteer teaching programme, during which they visited a local garbage dump and witnessed the terrible living condition there. “Whenever a garbage truck arrives, the children living there will rush to the truck for ‘treasure hunting’. For us, that was just garbage; but for those children, it could be some treasure worth chasing after.” 

After the trip, Mr Chan founded “Dream Compassioneers” with an aim to support the educational and daily needs of children living in poverty, hoping to make positive changes to their lives, the opportunity of enjoying their childhood and a future with hope. To inspire volunteers to understand the needs of the underprivileged, he led the team to experience the life of hearing-impaired people and visit people who are living in subdivided flats. He has also been to Cambodia and Vietnam for volunteer teaching. “In a graduation ceremony, a hearing-impaired boy went through great effort to give a complete speech to thank the volunteers that have taught him. Experiences like this allow us to understand the actual needs of our service targets and show us the meaningfulness of helping others.” 

Mr Chan and his team advocate volunteering, through activities like “Hong Kong Student Service Lenders Award”, to encourage more young people to help others in the society. “As the power of an individual is limited, we hope to cultivate youth engagement in social services and pass on the humanitarian spirit to the next generation.” Mr Chan is passionate about his teaching work and social service projects. For him, as long as a project is meaningful, it is worth his full commitment. He hopes to inspire more people to join the cause of safeguarding children’s dream and making a difference in people’s lives. “Very often volunteers will take the initiative to help after they understand about the needs of children. Their enthusiasm gives me a great sense of satisfaction, which motivates me to devote my energies to volunteer work. No matter what the result may be, some differences will be made during the process. If we all do a little bit more, we can make big changes to the world.”    

Humanity is holding fast to virtuous values and walking together with children in need.