Our Stories

While many high school students whom are busy with their studies for the public exam, they also start making the career planning for their further life.

Monet (pseudonym) is a F.5 student who grows up in a grassroots family. She’s been loving drawing since childhood, especially good at oil painting. Therefore, she chooses to study visual arts as one of the high school elective subjects, hoping to turn her interest into a professional.

However, when it comes to learning art either for leisure or professional, it’s never been easy given the art materials and supplies are usually expensive. Also, with the advancement of technology, digitalization is also the trend for art creation, and people are used to using tablets for sketching and interacting with each other. Thence, all these additional expenses are definitely a financial burden to Monet’s family.

Unfortunately, Monet’s family financial situation has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and sadly her parents are difficult to support Monet on her artistic development under this situation. Monet feels deeply anxious and self-blame, even doubts whether her artistic skills can keep abreast of the times. As a result, she starts her part-time job in order to eke out the expenses of art materials to ease the family financial burden.

Our social worker learned of this situation and helped Monet apply for the support from “Treasure Trove” to purchase the tablet and other art materials, which allowed her to reduce the need for part-time jobs and focus on her studies again. Finally, Monet is now happy and assuredly to develop her artistic potential, and build up a solid foundation for her future artistic development..

To many of us, volleyball is a sport that is good for health. Yet to KK (pseudonym), volleyball is more than that, it is also a medicine for healing her depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

KK is an optimistic and cheerful girl who is studying F.6. She has been playing an important role in the school volleyball team and contributing to good results for the team in many competitions since F.1. Tragically, in 2019, KK found herself has a mental illness and was gloomy and not interested in the things around her. To improve her mental condition, her doctor suggested that besides medication and psychotherapy treatment, a suitable amount of physical exercise can also help.

However, with the outbreak of COVID-19, all the school volleyball team practices and competitions were completely suspended. To allow KK maintain limited training thereby improving her mental and physical health, her teammates introduced her to the community volleyball club.

It is delighted to see KK joining volleyball club that’s good to her mental health, but joining the club requires to pay the membership fees and the uniforms, that increase the financial burdens to KK’s family. As a result, our social work assisted KK to apply for the subsidy from “Treasure Trove” so that she is able to join the volleyball club to regain joy and satisfaction, also relieve her symptoms. Now, in addition to her regular practice with the club, KK has also joined different voluntary services to give back to the community.

Children are gifted with creativity and imagination, they can always make their daily routines full of fun and beyond anyone’s imagination. Siu Sze (pseudonym) is a kindergarten K1 student. She’s been loving drawing since childhood, she feels happy whenever she picks up a brush to paint or draw. Siu Sze’s mother takes care of her alone, and they rely on the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) scheme to maintain their daily livings.

Nonetheless, all kindergartens are suspended due to the outbreak of COVID-19. As Siu Sze’s mother is not affordable to pay for her extracurricular activities like painting classes or art classes, Siu Sze can only stay home to paint whatever she wants.

Children’s learning ability develops the fastest during their early ages. Our social worker didn’t want Siu Sze’s development would be constrained by the family financial status, so she helped Siu Sze to apply Treasure Trove for joining the art classes. This allows Siu Sze to have a chance in learning different types of artistic creation techniques in order to develop her artistic sense and creativity during the class suspension period.

Siu Sze tried different art craft styles and themes, such as clay crafts and watercolor painting in this semester. Throughout the creations, it helped Siu Sze to build up her confidence, made her willingness to share more with her classmates and improved her concentration. It even broadened her future development path in her ‘Little Artist’ experiences.