The HUB Hong Kong aims to tackle rising stress, anxiety among underprivileged youngsters in the wake of Covid pandemic

The HUB Hong Kong, a charity dedicated to giving educational support to young people from underprivileged families, is embarking on a new mission to address students’ mental health needs after many reported increased levels of stress and anxiety in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We want to raise awareness about mental health among underprivileged children because they have no resources,” said Josephine Leung Wai-lin, the charity’s executive director. “Sometimes they don’t know what they’re going through.”

Leung said her team came up with the idea for the project after noticing an increase in stress levels during the pandemic among teenagers and parents living in Sham Shui Po.

“Throughout the Covid years, within this community we serve, we noticed a lot of the families suffered from stress and anxiety,” she said.

“The children were stuck at home doing three years of online learning, with no interaction with their friends. Even now they still wear their masks. They don’t feel comfortable without them.”

Parents also felt stressed with children being at home most of the time, which created a lot of tension, especially among low-income families living in tiny subdivided flats, she said.

“For the parents, they don’t have time to take care of their mental health,” Leung said. “We taught them about ‘me time’ and a lot of parents told us that this was the first time they had heard about this.”

In July 2022, the charity surveyed 500 children aged 10 to 16. More than 80 per cent of respondents said they were worried and felt under constant pressure, while over 60 per cent reported feelings of unhappiness, a drop in self-confidence and issues with concentration which affected their academic performance.

The survey aligns with a study conducted by the Education Bureau, which found a 40 per cent jump in mental health issues among primary to tertiary level students from 2018 to 2022, with experts and educators attributing the uptick to the 2019 anti-government protests and the pandemic the following year.

The two-year project will offer three types of support for 1,826 youngsters aged 10 to 16 from low-income families living in Sham Shui Po.

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Youngsters will be offered mindfulness training, where they will learn breathing and meditation exercises and take part in drama and art therapy to relieve stress, according to Leung.

They will also be given psychosocial support, involving one-on-one meetings with social workers who will assess their needs and offer counselling.

Support groups and overnight camps will also be organised to teach them problem-solving skills and how to cope with adversity. There will also be family activities to build a support network.

The charity will also create a mobile app with meditation videos, self-help workshops for families and a chat forum for users to support each other.

“What we will offer through this project are techniques and skills that youngsters can take home and actually practise by themselves and with their parents,” Leung said.

She added the project would allow the charity to give more comprehensive support to families in need, such as the case of a single mother of three who suffered from depression and increased stress from the pandemic.

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“She lives in a public estate and her children don’t know how to do their homework so she felt very stressed,” Leung said. “So she had a session with a social worker and when they were in our centre, we noticed the children were fighting a lot.”

The charity does not receive any government funding and has to organise its own fundraising galas.

“Without OSC funding, we may not be able to run such a comprehensive programme,” Leung said.

Since 1988, OSC has raised HK$369 million (US$47.3 million) to support the Hong Kong community through 338 charitable projects. The Hub Hong Kong is among the 15 charitable projects being funded this year.