Currently, there are around 4,000 children and youth receiving Residential Child Care Services in Hong Kong. Most of them come from families with complicated backgrounds or issues, such as carers with substance abuse or child abuse history and mental health challenges. Generally speaking, service users of residential child care services ought to leave the care system when they reach the age of 18. Nonetheless, without adequate support from their original families, many of these residential service leavers face significant challenges in their transitional process from teenage to adulthood.
Due to their unfavourable background, these young service leavers often deprive of adequate educational and employment opportunities, making it more difficult to engage in stable and gainful employment. Their effort paid to secure stable employment and accommodation further expose their problems of financial and living instability. Meanwhile, it is sad to share that having experienced adverse childhood these residential service leavers are more likely to experience mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, than their peers.
In light of this, St. Christopher's Home launched the T-Lodge Youth Co-Living Program in 2020. The word “T” in the name “T-lodge” stands for Transition. The Program aims to facilitate the successful transition of young residential service leavers, aged 18-27, from teenage to independent adulthood together with personal development through the provision of an affordable, safe and stable accommodation.
I wish to take this opportunity to introduce more about the co-Living Program in detail. At each of the T-lodge, four to five young tenants live together. They all entered into an annual-basis tenancy agreement. Every one of them enjoys a single bedroom with common facilities, including a kitchen, bathroom and living room. The lodge takes both ‘privacy” and “co-living” into consideration and strives for a good balance between the two elements. As a result, the young tenant can enjoy their “me-time” in their room while being able to engage with each other in the common space.
The Program offers intensive support to young people, apart from twenty-four-seven support, the social worker also establishes individual plans to facilitate their personal development. Guidance on education, career planning, financial planning, as well as daily living is provided. Since the young tenants have different backgrounds and living habits, regular house meetings will be held with them to facilitate mutual understanding and support. The Program aims to build up young tenants with a sense of social commitment by engaging them in volunteer services as a means to give back to society.
With the support of Luen Fung Group, the Program provides ongoing support to these young tenants together with training sponsorship through a 'Training and Potential Development Fund' which is to facilitate them to participate in various continuous learnings in accordance with their personal interests or career aspiration. The Program also encourages young people to participate in career planning activities, such as industry visits, on-site placement and internships. Furthermore, clinical psychologists of the Home provide psychological assessments, counselling and referral service for those young tenants in need.
T-Lodge is a five-year pilot Program supported by a donor. The Program provides not only accommodation but also family-like caring support to the young tenants in which, social workers play a vital role. These supports are with the ultimate goal to strengthen young people’s independent living ability through their stay at our lodge.
It’s not easy to run the project. The primary challenge is to provide twenty-four-seven support for the young tenants with limited manpower collocation. Under the circumstance that no staff are on duty at the units, providing intensive support to tenants with insufficient life skills or mental health challenges is a demanding and stressful job. However, we believe that supporting vulnerable children and young residential service leavers with inadequate family support is a matter of social responsibility and social justice.
I hope our project is able to arise your concern about the needs of children and residential service leavers in Hong Kong. By working together, we can enhance young tenants’ level of resilience in overcoming life challenges and eventually facilitate their establishment as independent adults.
This Morning, I'd like to share with you the song "Lean on me" by Bill Withers. Please enjoy.