The Handrich Fund 2020-21

"Do something that makes you happy and if you put your mind to it, you can achieve any dream."

We love food and creating food-related content. We also had huge dreams to work with our HK community and share the food content we love. Therefore, we put our minds to this zine idea, and thanks to the support we received through the Handrich Fund, we were able to create this amazing project.

The Community Kitchen Magazine is a collection of recipes and food stories contributed by food bloggers, friends, family members, and recipe developers. These contributors use their kitchens to create and use food to care for others. It's a zine that shares the stories of cooks who have a love for food and want to share it with others. It’s an opportunity to meet others and build connections with people across the city we love. Also with many people in quarantine, those who may not know how to cook and/or those not having good recipes. This zine provides recipes for people to prepare in their own homes and support for people in quarantine.

To help people during Covid-19, we donated all proceeds to Hope of the City for its Covid relief project. It donates food and goods and also provides tutoring services for low-income families in Sham Shui Po and other neighborhoods in Hong Kong. We provided free zines at the Hope of the City center so families can learn to cook and explore different recipes.

The Handrich Fund allowed us to significantly expand the audience we could reach with our zine. We were able to publish the zine online through Issuu, an online publishing platform, and made it available for twice as long as we had intended before receiving the funding. Additionally, it helped us print twice as many physical copies as we had intended which again helped us reach a larger audience.

Through our Kampot peppercorn online shop (selling kampot peppercorns from Cambodia), 100% of the profits go towards the For Girls Project–helping girls in Cambodia through Plan International. The goal is to educate girls on safely managing their periods through period educational booklets, provide girls with sanitary pads, and build a period-friendly school latrine in the Ratanakiri province of Cambodia. Our project keeps the discussion going about this issue because even in the modern world, period poverty can be seen as an uncomfortable topic. We worked and continue working toward one goal: To help break period poverty and shaming.

Funding support from the Handrich Fund not only helped the pepper shop become self-sustaining, but it also gave me encouragement to reach out to Hong Kong companies that want to purchase peppers for their 2022 Christmas hampers. We expanded our reach to other students globally. We received messages from other Hong Kong students and friends at US schools who wanted to help with fundraising by selling peppers to achieve our common goal.

This is the second round of funding we have received through the Handrich Fund. Both times, funding allowed us to expand the pepper shop and partially fund a school latrine with a handwashing and menstrual products disposal bin in Cambodia. We used the remaining funding to print and distribute over 500 booklets about menstrual health hygiene to girls there. Pepper sales raised HK$13,000 which will be used to fund additional booklets as well as reusable menstrual napkins in Cambodia.

When I first received the kampot peppers from Cambodia and I packed my first order for my customer, I never imagined that the For Girls project could grow big like this. This service project has and continues to have a huge impact on my personal growth. I found the confidence where I learned that with perseverance and effort you feel strongly about, it will lead to a meaningful result. One person’s dream and goal will soon spread out, and others will dream together with you to make it into reality.

See more on the For Girls website www.forgirls.org and on Instagram @forgirlschapters

The Seeds of Service (SOS) Pen Pal Program connected HKIS students with young students in need in Hong Kong. While SOS includes all High School service clubs, we piloted this program with the SOS Heep Hong Society Club, which serves special needs students at the Heep Hong Society’s center. The Pen Pal Program created a connection between HKIS students and Heep Hong students during the weeks in between our in-person sessions. This program allowed the kids to learn basic English writing skills and fine motor skills such as cutting and coloring within the lines, while we strengthened our relationships with our buddies to have deeper, more productive in-person Saturday sessions. We all made friends!

The Handrich Fund helped us understand what it takes to build a program. It took a lot of effort and planning to figure out the resources we would need that would allow this to be a success.

Because of this project, we created lasting friendships with our group of special needs kids despite Covid-19 restrictions. We hope the Pen Pal Program not only continues with Heep Hong but also allows other SOS clubs to connect with kids in a simple and artistic way.

We created and wrote an illustrated children’s storybook about the importance of education and how it can help you succeed later in life. It includes poetry with similar themes.

This book project started off as a way to fundraise and raise awareness for the Room to Read organization. However, it became so much more than that. The Room to Read and Art Club collaborative book (2021) Pick up the Pencil is a motivational anthology about 10 influential female educational advocates who have made great strides to support children's educational aspirations worldwide.

As a club, we were able to learn about the intrinsic lives of these women as well as the complicated steps it takes to publish a book (logistics & planning, time management & feedback). Additionally, through this project, our members have become closer as a team, which will allow us, as a club, to collaborate effectively and prepare more impactful service for our community and around the world.

With the support of the Handrich Fund, five of us participated in the Nature Works Program, led by the Nature Conservancy in collaboration with the English Schools Foundation. The project had many components to increase awareness about sustainability and to take action locally, including a week of workshops, a field trip, and lastly the final pitch–to win an inter-school sustainability project competition.

At the workshops, we learned about effective leadership and how to approach sustainability from different angles so that your intended message is best received by the community. We collaborated and built close relationships with students from other HK schools. We developed our initial project plan and geared it towards the reduction of food and plastic waste at HKIS, pitching our idea at the end of the week for initial feedback.

Though we didn’t ultimately win funding from the Nature Works competition, we realized that much of our proposal didn't depend on whether or not we received funds, and we decided to achieve as much of our proposed solution as possible. We've since had multiple meetings with Sodexo [HKIS’s food services provider] about numerous food waste policies, including offering a smaller portion size. Single use cups have also been replaced with reusable ones, and plastic cups are no longer being provided by Starbucks.

Overall, the Nature Works competition was an invaluable experience. Though we faced many challenges which hindered our ability to fully execute our initial plan, our involvement with the program created great momentum that carried on through the next school year.