By CP Joseph Leung, Rotary Club of Central Harbourfront
Rotary has a long history of working with youth, from providing scholarships, encouraging youth leadership and student exchange programs, to sponsoring youth-based service clubs. Youth Service is one of Rotary’s five official Avenues of Service. By nurturing youth, Rotarians can provide the skills young people need to succeed as future community leaders. Youth Programs provide Rotarians the opportunity to develop their own leadership and communication skills and also provides for many incredible moments !
This year we have achieved many imaginative achievements in youth services.
ROTARACT
Our service partner Rotaract has initiated the District Service Project on “Hearing Impaired” matters, we have great support from our Rotaractors, and the final stage will be held on 22nd June. Apart from this meaningful project, a large face-to-face spring lunch was successfully organsied among our university-based Rotary clubs in February. The District Conference cum District Leadership Training Meeting will also be held in June.
INTERACT
Regarding the progress of District Interact, we have 18 new Interact Clubs established which covered Rotary clubs from Hong Kong, Macau and Mongolia, with a total of 121 clubs. This year, our Interactors have experienced virtual exchanges with Sri Lanka, and we also held a competition for best Interact service projects, and a 1-minute video competition.
JUNIORACT
In terms of District Junioract, we are pleased to share that 7 new clubs have been established and we now have 17 clubs in total. This is the 1st year where we start providing citations to our Junioractors and a successful awards ceremony was held on 29th April. We have had the great honour to invite Legislative Councillor Hon. TANG Fei MH as Guest of Honour at the ceremony.
Rotary Youth Leadership Awared (RYLA)
A very successful RYLA was organized this year with close to 30 participants. This was the 1st time for us to have the opening and closing ceremony held at The XiQu Centre for Chinese Opera at the West Kowloon Cultural District. Each RYLA team conducted awesome presentations after 4-days 3-nights’ training and have learned a lot about local community issues and provided imaginative solutions.
In summary, this was a very productive and fruitful year in District Youth service developments, we look forward to have another successful year in 2023-24.
