Last Thursday, a crowd of well-dressed women assembled in the atrium of a Central office building to launch a new charity, the Women's Foundation. Sipping wine, they bid for photographs of women from an exhibition - the most popular was a 1950s street scene of prostitutes from the archives of the South China Morning Post. The event was exceptional only in the sense that it underlined how eclectic Hong Kong's culture of giving has become.
It is a measure of Hong Kong's tolerance that it welcomes practically anybody who aims to do good by claiming charitable status. The city that raised more money on a per-capita basis than anywhere else in the world for the tsunami victims may also rank among the highest in charitable organisations per capita. The Women's Foundation became the 24th women's advocacy organisation in Hong Kong, according to its own statistics, and one of more than 3,400 registered charities. The generosity of its organisers, mostly American and Canadian women, builds on a successful culture of giving that goes back more than a century and which has often been based on mutual assistance, in this case, women for women.
Yet while so much is right about philanthropy in Hong Kong, it is increasingly out of sync. Despite their bounty and good intentions, Hong Kong charities are tilted in favour of donors, and who they know, to the disadvantage of potential beneficiaries outside their circles. They provide little opening for strategic philanthropy. Pity the educator, health practitioner or social worker investigating sources of funds and the criteria they use to select among competing projects. They will find little hard information, and even such major charities as the Jockey Club, Community Chest, the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals and Po Leung Kuk fail to spell out procedures or guidelines for their gifts.
Compare the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Hong Kong's equivalent, the Li Ka Shing Foundation, and the difference is striking. Both serve an image-burnishing purpose - Bill Gates is a man many Americans love to hate - but the Gates' foundation assumes a meritocratic basis for giving, in which donor and beneficiary enter into a contract to make an impact in a chosen area. This approach to philanthropy has become the norm around the world and is taught in business schools, under the rubric, 'high-impact philanthropy'. The approach makes it possible to extend charity's reach and ensure that it does more than merely meet the financial goals of non-profit organisations.
The underlying models for Hong Kong philanthropy are based on mutual assistance within clearly demarcated social groups. Both Tung Wah and Po Leung Kuk, the city's oldest charities, began as societies to assist single Chinese male immigrants with needs that their clans could not supply in the British colony, so far from home, especially burial. Today, both mirror contemporary Hong Kong society in that they operate as businesses as well as charities, with substantial property portfolios and annual reports. Many of the wealthy private donors in Hong Kong provide no information about their philanthropy, for fear of being overwhelmed. The Li Ka Shing Foundation is among the few that advertises its presence, although it, too, fails to present any sort of criteria for giving. For civil society to flourish, non-profit organisations need to be able to make their case based on mutually understood rules.
There is no single model for philanthropy. But Hong Kong charities need to evolve beyond the galas and the good intentions, and establish strategies that are common to public, as opposed to private, companies - transparency, accountability and a mutual agreement among stakeholders for good governance.
