Community Partner: Sian Taylor, Director of Box of Hope
Skilled Volunteer: Harrison Tsoi, banking lawyer at Clifford Chance
Location: Hong Kong
Problem Statement
Box of Hope is a Hong Kong-registered charity, founded in 2008 with the aim of teaching Hong Kong school children the joy and importance of giving, while giving a child in poverty the chance to experience the joy of receiving a gift.
Every year, Box of Hope collects over 30,000 boxes of practical items, educational gifts and toys, packed by Hong Kong’s school children. The boxes are sorted by volunteers and distributed via its charity partners to children in need in Hong Kong and other places across Asia.
Entirely run by volunteers, Box of Hope has been going through big changes and growth since 2020. To professionalise its services, it needed a board of directors. While there was some success in recruiting directors from its own network, Box of Hope also wanted to explore a wider catchment to find younger people and people of different interests and skills to join its board, to cover the many aspects of running a charity.
FSI’s Shared Impact Solution: Community Connections
The Box of Hope Partnership
Sian Taylor, Director of Box of Hope, a Community Partner, and Harrison Tsoi, a Skilled Volunteer from Clifford Chance, met at a Connection Session. With the combination of Community Connections’s library of resources and training session, Sian was able to identify her organization’s needs and the roles it needed to fill. “I went through the Notions page created by Community Connections. There is a lot of useful information about the types of roles that each of the board of directors will play. Because I have never done this before, I find this information very useful and interesting,” said Sian.
At the Connection Session, Sian was able to meet a pool of subject matter experts from multinational corporates, who had a basic understanding of its history and operations, and were interested in empowering social impact organizations with their skills and expertise.
This is especially true for Harrison Tsoi. As Clifford Chance was one of Box of Hope’s corporate partners in its annual box collection, Harrison was familiar with the social impact organization before joining Community Connections. And the information provided by Community Connections on the Community Partners was helpful, too. “I went through the Community Connections website. There are lots of resources and useful information, such as the expected responsibilities of a director in a charity. I also read the websites of different charities to try to know how I can help,” said Harrison.
Soon after the Connection Session, Harrison contacted Sian via email to discuss the possibilities of a partnership, and a coffee meeting later, Harrison became a member of Box of Hope’s newly created board of directors. “I am sort of taking the legal aspect of Harrison for granted, as he is a lawyer,” said Sian. “But I was also very impressed with his enthusiasm, and his youth, bringing a younger look to everything. I think there is a lot more to running a charity than just the legal aspect or the accounting aspect; it’s communicating with the community.”
Although not all Connection Sessions would result in successful partnerships, Community Connections has enabled almost 200 Skilled Volunteers to be paired up with around 100 Community Partners since its founding in 2015. And some partnerships are fruitful and long-term. “I’m still new to the charity space and I’m happy to assist in any aspects that Box of Hope, or Sian, would like me to assist in,” said Harrison. “Hopefully, with my legal background, I will be able to provide legal advice wherever needed.”
