Community Development in Hong Kong

On 30 July 2000, I interview Ms Chan about Community Development in Hong Kong. In general, she thinks that community development in Hong Kong fades out, as the Department of Home Affairs does not support it.

Community development is referred to any activities which involve organizing residents to address their own problems and comment the current policies.

In Hong Kong, community centers run by N.G.O. have a team of community development. The team is responsible for providing services for residents and organizing them to form concern groups. An example given by Ms Chan is a New Immigrants concern group run by the Caritas. However as Ms Chan said that these organizations are too conservative, they are unwilling to publicly represent residents to voice out their concern. Since this, N.G.O. run community centers contribute a little to building collective power.

Nowadays,as temporary housing areas, squatters and resettlement public housing are gradually cleared, the publicly recognized mechanism for community development, NLCDP, is coming to a halt soon. A new mechanism, Integrated Neighborhood Project, gradually replaces NLCDP as services provider. Nevertheless, Ms Chan said that the new mechanism only plays a role of finding cases and providing referral services for them. Definitely, it lacks community organizing to strengthen community capacity in tackling problems.

This change may reflect what Ms Chan said that instead of community organizing, counseling and case therapy are the only professional work in the field of social work. Furthermore, it may reveal that the government only recognizes the provision of community services and the formation of mutual help group as the works of community development.  Thus community organizing is downplayed.

According to the history of Hong Kong community development, community development teams are officially set to run in the deprived areas. They are supposed to help the poor residents in addressing housing needs and tackling environmental problems. In the residential areas of middle and upper classes, there is no team to promote community building. Only threatening issues force residents form a concern group. Without concerned issues, they are not willing to participate voluntarily into collective jobs. Since this, community development which is originally aimed at strengthening communities of all class backgrounds is skewing toward the poor areas.

In public housing area, mutual aid committee which is responsible for giving advice on estate management fails to facilitate community development too. As Ms Chan said, mutual aid committee mainly campaigns for recreational and entertainment activities for residents and fail to organize residents in response to the government policy. Besides, its responsibility is restricted into dealing with building management in an estate, with the result that the committee lacks power to deal with other public issues.

Since 1992, an indentured direct election was introduced into Legislative council. In attaining more public support at election, politicians start to increase their influence in public housing estates. On the other hand, public housing residents, through building up relationship with legislative councilors, expect them to voice out their opinions to the Government. However, this type of political relationship not only does not lead to politician-led community building, but also hinders community works initiated by Non Government supported N.G.O. Ms Chan said that political influence represented by District Councilors makes community work more complicated and exacerbated  “turf-ism”

Owing to the above reasons, N.G.O.s focus on community building in the old dilapidated private housing. Still they face a lot of difficulties. First of all, residents living in the old private housing have different class backgrounds and lacks common concern. This makes organizers difficult to gather their power. Secondly, scarce finance hinders a large-scale and long-term community work. As Ms Chan said, renting a flat in an old private residential building cost 10000 per month. Besides, without sufficient financial and human resources, the organization only opts to work for the poor.

Ms Chan said that although successful community organizing can break up the constraint from the shortage of spatial base, more small clubs or centers which are located near residents are needed especially at an initial stage of community organizing. Because community building needs time and constant contacts to build up relationship and provide training.

From the discussion with Ms Chan, I believe that a successful community building needs a democratic government which is willing to devolve their power of policy making to residents. If the administrate led government continues to dominate, community building would be strangled. No official support for community development in itself seriously offset the positive counter forces from  strong communities.