Background of co-organiser
Founded in 1936, The Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association of Hong Kong (BGCA) has been established to serve children and youth throughout different eras with its need-specific and community-based service in its comprehensive service network.
BGCA has been continuously evolving to meet the changing needs of our society and to offer all-round support to our young generation through a balanced development approach. BGCA continues to expand its innovative service, such as providing an online support platform for emotionally distressed youth, creating Makerspaces that focus on innovative thinking, and establishing the Youth ImpACT Award, which encourages youth to apply and practice human-centered design on social service innovation.
Project details
The Youth ImpACT Award (YIAA 1.0), jointly presented by The D.H. Chen Foundation and BGCA, supported by Education Bureau, the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, SIE Fund, Hong Kong Island School Heads Association, Kowloon Region School Heads Association and New Territories School Heads Association, is a unique service learning and social innovation award. It aims to arouse students’ empathy and motivate them to examine as well as act on the social problems seen. The award offers a series of experiential learning and human-centered design workshops, with focus on selected social problems. Participants are facilitated to turn their inspiration into a concrete service idea. Ten finalists from 250-300 teams of Secondary 1 to 6 students are selected every year after online voting and internal screening, who would then put their service ideas to prototyping and testing. The teams are given an opportunity to see the impact they can make on others’ lives. Youth ImpACT Award (YIAA 1.0) has been successfully inspired 900 innovative ideas from 3000+ students since it was launched in September 2016.
For more information, please visit YIAA’s website: https://yiaa.hk/en
In this project, students will learn about design thinking and facilitation skills in design thinking. Students will be assigned to a small group of secondary students (3-6) and provide assistance in prototyping their idea out. For example, if the project is about app making, we will invite an app developer to teach the students how to set up an app while the student will help facilitate the process together with YIAA project staff.
Students in this project will:
- Attend the brief introduction, design thinking workshop and education symposium;
- Attend the training for individual facilitation; and
- Lead and facilitate individual teams in developing their ideas until pitching. (The sessions required for prototyping the ideas vary across projects; the average number of sessions is 4. Meeting location and time are flexible and negotiated amongst the team.)