Dedicated Hong Kong volunteer wants to build a better society for people with disabilities and mental health conditions
- For her efforts, social work graduate Kellie Yuen has been nominated for this year’s Spirit of Hong Kong Awards
- ‘We may not always need to think big,’ she says, encouraging others to get involved. ‘Bit by bit we can achieve more’
In a little over three years, Kellie Yuen Ka-lam has transformed from a plucky university student eager to help her community into a seasoned organiser and advocate for people with disabilities and mental health conditions.
Now a 21-year-old social work graduate, Yuen started volunteering at the age of 18, and aspires to help build a society that no longer feels the need to draw distinctions between the able-bodied and the people she advocates for.
“We are ‘us’,” she said.
Yuen has been volunteering for the Justone 24-Hour Community Mental Health Support Project for three years, providing support, counselling and mental health education for people in emotional distress.
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She has also worked to help people with hearing impairments, learning sign language on her own initiative to better communicate with her clients.
After finding that hearing-impaired people could have difficulty helping their children with their studies, she volunteered to tutor the youngsters, who can hear but are being brought up in a household without speech.
Yuen said she believed young people, especially university students, should contribute to society.
“I hope there are more new faces among volunteers,” she said.
She made her first foray into volunteering in 2017, forming a team with her university peers and organising an array of events that aimed to connect tertiary students with various groups and sectors of the community.
In 2019, Yuen was named a Hong Kong Outstanding Youth Volunteer, and represented Hong Kong on a trip to Singapore, where she exchanged ideas for the implementation of mental health services with her counterparts.
She was also a winner at the Outstanding Service Awards for Tertiary Students the same year.
The annual event, co-organised by the South China Morning Post and property developer Sino Group, honours the achievements of remarkable people whose endeavours may otherwise go unnoticed.
Derek Tam Kai-yip, of the Richmond Justone 24-Hour Community Mental Health Support Project, recommended her for this year’s Spirit of Youth award, which recognises young people who have demonstrated a commitment to the community.
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To take her cause a step further, Yuen has considered bringing together different groups, such as people recovering from mental health issues and hearing-impaired people, in hopes that learning sign language could help the former express themselves and integrate with the community.
“I want to connect these two groups of people and help them communicate with each other,” she said.
She said she also wanted to do more to raise public awareness of different groups’ needs, and urged Hongkongers to pay attention to their surroundings and find out what they could do to make their city a better place to live
“We may not always need to think big,” she said. “Bit by bit we can achieve more.”
