Designing and Implementing New Service Models to Impact Children and Youth Services in Hong Kong, Cambodia and Myanmar Through the City-Youth Empowering Project (CYEP)

Introduction

The City-Youth Empowerment Project (CYEP) was established in 2005 at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) in the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences (SS Department). From its inception, CYEP has mobilized firstly 150 enrolled volunteers and 6 community projects to serve children and youth with different needs. It then grows to reach an annual highest enrolment of over 2,000 volunteers in 2015/16 and over 30 local and international children and youth community projects; and its annual total number of service hours reached over 30,000 in 2015–16. Its aims are to mobilize young people from university to serve the vulnerable children and youth, to fill the agency service gaps, and to integrate youth with the community. With an overarching mission of promoting social change in local communities, understanding socially-unique values and structural obstacles, social inclusion is gained through community volunteer services. Over the years with the input of both theoretical concepts and skills on positive youth development, youth empowerment, sustained volunteerism, and community capacity building, CYEP has built a simple and person-centred human connection infrastructure that has successfully organized students’ energy on campus to meaningful group synergy and institutional mission.

From individual to community level, we have learned that, youth volunteering is a meaningful process which recognizes youth’s self-determination to not only relate to their society, but reciprocally when they serve the society, the society also serves as a good platform to actualize youth’s needs to be better connected with the society. CYEP leans heavily on such youth empowering through its Volunteering Process Model (VPM) for contextualizing its creation, rationale, and development process. The uniqueness of the RVPM is that we see the volunteering process as a two-ways process, a mutual process for volunteers and the service recipients. We also embrace two groups of people as targets for empowering the university students who will benefit from serving, and the NGOs and their service recipients, who will benefit from connecting with the university volunteers and the university environment. The role of the CYEP is to create a process and to heighten some interactions for both the volunteers and the serving target groups to benefit.

Building a CYEP coaching model for volunteering

CYEP offers a unique and supportive learning framework for its volunteers with a strong emphasis placed on training and coaching elements. The volunteers are trained by experienced project officers, who are frequently registered social workers possessing skills in problem-solving, relationships, communication, effective community development, and personal development. Student volunteers are taught to identify underlying social problems, so as to effectively provide support in their specific service. The volunteers’ personal growth is reflected in the services they deliver to those in need, and in their own learning. As indicated in the below figure, the coaching model consists of seven stages of engaging volunteers, the ultimate goal is to empower youth from recruitment to becoming life-long sustainable volun

CYEP Coaching Model for Volunteering

Achievements on policy, NGOs and community

Various Collaborative Projects, Partners and Activities of CYEP’s Regular Services (2005 -2018)

Regular Services only those collaborations lasted for 3 Years or above are listed)

Various Collaborative Projects, Partners and Activities of CYEP’s One-off Services (2010 -2018)

One-off Services (only those collaborations lasted for 3 Years or above are listed)

Number of volunteers, service recipients, and service hours served by CYEP

CYEP volunteer service delivery model for children developmental work

CYEP recent research on youth volunteering (2017-2018):

CYEP is found to be a successful model for promoting youth prosocial behavioural and their commitment and connection to community. To further promote this model of youth volunteering, CYEP has been engaged in many researches in order to provide evidences for such a model of work. Here is an example of our recent research activity.
 

Demographic and Social Indicators of Youth Volunteering in Hong Kong (香港青年參與義務工作的人口背境和社會指標), funded by PICO (Policy Innovation Co-ordination Office) of Hong Kong SAR Government
Research results submitted to PICO and presented in:

• International Association Volunteer Effort (IAVE) international conference in Augsburg Germany Oct 2018
• Social Welfare Department Steering Committee for Promotion of Volunteering, May 2019

Other research, conference and publication

Besides mobilizing our project staff to systematically collect data on youth volunteering, we also applied to other research and programme funding sources to facilitate and measure our impact on our volunteers and service recipients. From 2013 to 2018, we were funded by the UGC Knowledge Transfer Earmarked Fund for five consecutive years for these goals. Our last proposal for the Knowledge Transfer Fund in 2017–18 was entitled: “Reciprocity as Empowerment – A Bi-directional Knowledge Transfer Project to Enhance Students’ and Service Recipients’ Development through Examining Perceived and Experienced Mutual Benefits.” From our knowledge transfer funding, we received two awards for its excellent impact on volunteering work, and for serving different service recipients; the first was the Excellence in Knowledge Transfer Award in 2014, and the second was the Certificate of Merit in Knowledge Transfer in 2013.

Since 2010, CYEP has become active in enhancing both the staff and volunteers’ exposure to international exchanges through participating in international conferences. Volunteer groups participated in the International Association of Volunteer Effort (IAVE) conferences and other international service learning conferences at least six times since 2010. The project convener participated in 11 international conferences in the last eight years.

Since 2013, CYEP has issued its own newsletter and publicizes its work with the assistance from VAs in the publicity team. CYEP had its own dedicated internet link attached to the SS department, and has its own Facebook link to facilitate volunteer recruitment, publicity of new one-off services, and to publicize all the service requests from different NGOs (recruitment of individual volunteers on behalf of the community’s NGOs). All social media work, research activities, academic conferences participation, and publications in books and journals is important on-going work for us to maintain our ongoing community linkages and networks so as to make sure that we do not just offer a volunteer project, but also maintain a conceptual flow to and from our project. The goal of this knowledge-based work is important for us to both examine and measure our work, and to monitor our impact on volunteers and service recipients. This volunteer project within the university arena is rather distinct from other community-based volunteer projects.

Our experts

Dr. AU LIU Suk Ching Elaine

Elaine.Au@cityu.edu.hk
+852 34428768
CityU Scholar
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