The “Fitness x Mentorship” Scheme of this Centre associates “exercising” with “volunteering” to foster a serving heart of students and strengthen their understanding of the community.  Participants are trained with basic skills of a designated sports item and given chances to partner various members of the community in pursuing sports.  This will allow students to develop regular exercise habit and build up healthy lifestyle.  Above all, mutual understanding between students and the circle of their counterparts will be facilitated.

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In the first term of 2021-22, the “Fitness x Mentorship” Scheme rolls out four sports items cum services.  Two items of them, namely dodgebee and floor curling, successfully held altogether four activities in October.  On the former, students had received elementary training of basic sign language before acquiring skill in dodgebee and playing friendly match with their hearing-impaired partners from The Hong Kong Society for the Deaf.  As for floor curling, students visited Yan Oi Tang Hong Kong Toi Shan Association Neighbourhood Elderly Centre to learn playing it with the elderly, and then to be divided into small teams to play games and exchange experience with others.

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This Centre would like to express its gratitude to the University’s Diversity and Inclusion Office for their monetary support to the abovementioned four sessions of activities which were conducted during the Diversity and Inclusion Week of CUHK (i.e. from 21 to 30 October). 

The I·CARE Community Research Scheme of this Centre coordinates CUHK students from different disciplines to work together on rigorous studies of various public issues under the guidance of professional tutors.  Participants are required to collect and analyse data, carry out research and present findings that become blueprints for the community and social reforms.  This month, the scheme’s project teams of 2019-20 and 2020-21 released their respective research results.

Taking “Grassroots Housing” as the research topic, the team of 2019-20 had conducted numerous home visits to understand the general living condition of the subdivided apartment’s residents, and composed four pieces of housing-oriented oral history of the grassroots residents of different backgrounds.  To introduce the condition of the grassroots residents to the public, the team has constructed an online exhibition titled “Hopefully Only for Now”.  Other than publicising the aforementioned oral history and throwing light on some “keywords” of the issue, the exhibition presents two interactive items: (1) a video simulating the life of a subdivided-apartment’s resident, and (2) a virtual reality tour to a subdivided apartment which exhibits the lives of the grassroots residents with their voice recorded.

Concerning the team of 2020-21, they focused their research on “The Relocation Policy of Shek Lei Interim Housing and the Long-term Development of Interim Housing” in view that the redevelopment of Hong Kong’s last urban interim housing has been scheduled for end-2022.  Through literature review, site inspection, focus group and interviews, the team has studied since January of this year (1) how a reasonable plan of relocation would look like for residents of the Shek Lei Interim Housing, and (2) how Interim Housing should develop in the long run.