A door to the future

But Yip has a clear strategy of his role. He isn’t there to advise Guan or help him make decisions. He aims to help the youngster explore future prospects, build up his confidence, and use his skills to survive in the future. “What I can do is to help him find what he thinks he’s good at or what he believes he’s good at. Then I can try to help him find other ways to enable him to grow in that field and, hopefully, create some value for himself or make something out of that in the future,” Yip says.

Yip gave three mentorship training sessions before the program began, helping selected mentors to understand what the project would involve and how to communicate with children in a neutral way.

He says what poverty can do to young minds is undermine confidence in life, especially when the youngster feels his or her family is financially worse off than other people around them.

Different voices

However, Jessie Yu Sau-chu, founder and chief executive of the Hong Kong Single Parents Association, isn’t optimistic about the program. She says there have been other government projects with mentors coaching children, but these programs have ended up as just “grandstanding”, providing material for social media posts.

She was referring to a similar program set up under the Child Development Fund, in which a volunteer mentor would act as a “life guide” for a child for three years to help widen his or her horizons, and offer career guidance and companionship in the child’s personality development.

Yu says mentors need more professional training in engaging and coaching youngsters, or the program will be meaningless. The one-year poverty relief program is also too short for it to be effective.

For an introvert like Guan, he’s always fixated on his cellphone when talking to others, avoiding eye contact. This obstructs the building of a close rapport with his mentor, and prevents them from having much interaction. “I do have things I would like to tell my mentor, especially things that I can’t share with my mom. However, I think we’re not that close,” he admits.

Yip agrees that one year isn’t adequate for the program to succeed. “But I think it’s enough for building rapport, so the relationship can continue” even after the program ends. He hopes to be Guan’s “big brother” in the future.

Nelson Chow Wing-sun, a professor emeritus at the University of Hong Kong, believes the effort is a move in the right direction as it’s aimed precisely at some of the poorest people in Hong Kong, and children living in subdivided flats are in dire need of more support. These families can’t afford to invest in their children financially, with the apartment rent alone taking up half of their household income.

Long way to go

Guan’s family relies entirely on the SAR government’s Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme — a safety net for the poor. Under the program, a single-parent mother gets a monthly subsidy of HK$3,100, while Guan himself receives HK$2,845. They can get an extra HK$405 a month as a single-parent family. In addition, Guan gets HK$6,012 each year under the School Textbook Assistance Scheme for the families of primary and secondary school students in dire straits. But their tiny flat’s monthly rent is HK$3,600 — more than half of their household income. “Despite these allowances, we still can’t support ourselves,” Ma laments.

According to the SAR government’s Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report 2020, the number of people living in poverty that year stood at 1.653 million (roughly 21 percent of the city’s current population). The poverty rate among children reached a 10-year high — with 27 percent of the city’s children, or 274,900, below the poverty line.

In 2021, there were more than 226,000 residents living in almost 101,000 subdivided units in the city, according to the Transport and Housing Bureau’s task force on tenancy control of subdivided flats.