The Chief Secretary for Administration, Chan Kwok-ki, visits a support service centre for ethnic minorities in Kwai Chung. Photo: Handout Hong Kong has rolled out its first community care teams dedicated to ethnic minority groups, with an operating budget of HK$110 million (US$14.1 million) a year.
The city’s No 2 official, Eric Chan Kwok-ki, said on Sunday the government was focused on introducing measures to help such residents better integrate into the community.
“They need to integrate into society to realise their full potential,” he said at a launch ceremony.
“Most of the members of the team are also from the ethnic minority community, so they speak the same language as those they serve and can understand and respond to their needs more easily.”
Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu introduced the targeted initiative in his policy address last year to enhance support for the city’s 300,000 residents from ethnic minority groups.
The measure builds on the wider introduction of volunteer-led community care teams in the city’s 18 districts last year.
Mentorship programme helps ethnically diverse Hongkongers launch their businesses
The eight new teams for ethnic minority groups operate under service centres and are tasked with reaching out to households, delivering information from the government and connecting residents with appropriate public services.
Two more teams will be set up, as two new service centres in central Kowloon and eastern New Territories are set to open by the end of the year. Their introduction will take the number of care teams for ethnic minority residents to 10.
Each centre has an operating cost of HK$11 million once the community teams are added, with a requirement to serve at least 8,000 people a year.
Chief Secretary Chan said an example of an area where the care teams could help was in relaying education information to parents, such as the school choices in the district.
He said the 10 care teams would be able to visit at least 5,000 households every year, while the 10 service centres would serve at least 110,000 people.
The government would assess whether to set up centres in other districts depending on demand, he added.
Ullah Rizwan, general secretary of the Hong Kong Federation of Ethnic Communities, said the move would strengthen the relationship between care teams and service centres.
“A care centre needs to develop its stakeholder engagement strategy to figure out who can reach the community,” Rizwan, who is also Kowloon City district councillor, said. “The centre will be difficult to run if it is not able to find its target users. The care team is an important part to this.”
He said care teams needed to ramp up home visits to find hidden cases, such as women or elderly individuals who rarely left their homes or were not well connected in the community.
“The capability of the non-profit organisation running a service centre is also crucial as it needs to handle big data and manage it. For instance, [if] there are many women in a particular district, your services will need to be more targeted towards this specific group,” he said.
Only “patriots” are allowed to join the original citywide community care teams introduced earlier. The volunteer-led groups are tasked with a wide range of duties, including visiting and delivering supplies to the needy, providing emergency support in times of crisis and delivering information from the government.