Caring For The Society

Run To Your Home (RTYH) ( 跑去你屋企), a recognised charitable platform, was established in 2011 by a group of CUHK EMBA fellows to unleash people’s potential, strengthen social cohesion, spread positive energy and bring love and care to the community. Its key service pillars are the aging population, poverty community, underprivileged youth, empowerment of the disabled persons and implementation of remedial action against emergency in local community. RTYH aims to provide an experiential platform for volunteers to understand the social needs in person, to relay the abundance of resources (capitals, manpower, networks, experience) readily in the corporate sectors to meet the social need in our community for the sake of social inclusion and cohesion.

The RTYH has been conducting a series of programmes to contribute to the Hong Kong society. The Repetitive Matched Home Visits to Elderly Living Alone Programme ( 重複配對獨居長者探訪) has been in operation since 2013. Currently, RTYH covers the areas of Sham Shui Po, Kowloon City, Sai Wan, Wong Tai Sin and Shatin. Its event slogan “3-3-3” emphases the operating format – each team of 3 volunteers to spend 3 hours every 3 months to visit the same matched elderly person. The programme aims to build bonds of mutual trust and long-lasting friendship between the elderly and the volunteers. The volunteers also enrich their life wisdom and experience during the visits, which leads to win-win outcomes and social impact.

During the early stage of 5th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the RTYH received an in-kind donation of 6,000 packs of rapid antigen tests (RAT) kits from corporate donors. RTYH then distributed to the local community of elderly, schools, NGOs and underprivileged families in divided flats (劏房戶). Although RTYH’s routine Home Visit teams could not conduct visit to the matched elderly in person during pandemic, RTYH prepared online briefings and educational video clips to the volunteers, such that they called the elderly over the phone to explain how to use the test kits and conduct basic greeting with them. RTYH realised the even worse situation of social exclusion during pandemic and this contingency arrangement helped alleviating the psychological pressure of the elderly who had been stuck at home during pandemic. Welcoming and positive feedbacks were well received from the volunteers and the elderly for the measures.

“跑動Teen 賦” has been a service-learning and character-building programme for teens since 2017. This social enterprise programme consists of a series of professional distance-run training activities conducted by experienced coaches to unleash the teen’s personal competence and resilience. The teens also team up to participate in the various community services under the mentorship of business leaders from the CUHK EMBA community and the commercial sector. The ultimate goal is to build up social capital in youth segment and inherit core value of persistence to learn, compassion in life, social inclusion to our next generation. During the pandemic, RTYH kept producing online and filmed physical exercise workshops for teens to keep their physical health and healthy mentality at home.

The “Home Salon” (屋企理髮店) service programme was launched in July 2019. Teams of voluntary hair stylists provide regular haircut services to elderly in nursing houses. The programme aims to restore the elderly’s forgotten experience of being cared and respected, and to resume their confidence, dignity and internal beauty. In addition, the programme builds up mutual trust and friendship between the elderly and the voluntary hair stylists. As the pandemic situation has been alleviating since April 2022, RTYH has resumed its haircut services since then. To prevent further social exclusion of elderly in nursing houses if the pandemic continues, RTYH is organising more haircut training workshops for new comers in order to expand the base of voluntary hair stylists to serve more elderly.