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Mandy Zheng

At an entrepreneurship competition hosted by Google in 2014, fresh graduate Nelson Chan Ho-hin got a thrill out of listening to the contestants’ pitches.
“Some ideas in the field of recycling and environment protection really impressed me, and I thought they had the potential of creating a social impact,” the 27-year-old recalls. “So I wondered: is there a way of letting more people see these ideas?”
As a young aspiring programmer, Chan did not take long to find the answer: build a crowdsourcing website that caters for the needs of “those with dreams for society”.
Developed by Chan and seven other IT professionals, Collaction lists some 600 projects posted by social innovators seeking all kinds of resources, such as funds, volunteers, space, goods and materials.

The platform is managed by a team of five, who provide participants with guidelines and keep track of how the programmes develop.
The free website, which takes its name from “collect resources and take action”, has a membership of 7,000 people, who receive email updates of their interested projects.
The founders of the programmes range from 11 and 12-year-olds designing a picture book about the pressures of school life, to groups looking for translators to help the city’s foreign domestic helpers.
“Since the very first stage of Collaction, our goal has been simple: to help people realise dreams,” says Chan. “Some people come to us basically just having an idea, and together we build something from scratch.”
Lee Hang-shuen, a university graduate now working in Germany, was one of them. Back in 2016, she was inspired by the trend of food sharing in the West, and hoped to introduce it to Hong Kong by setting up a “community fridge” where everyone can contribute food.
“Collaction helped me to actually get a fridge [for the project], and we brainstormed how to promote it online and design fliers,” Lee recalls.
“It’s very nice to have a bunch of people who support small ideas in Hong Kong.”

Lee, whose project has expanded to five venues including a vegan restaurant and a bookstore, feels she and the Collaction team share similar motives – to do a bit more for society.
Finding people on the same page, however, was hard when the team started to promote the platform, according to co-founder Himphen Hui Hau-him, who met Chan in college.
Hui remembers feeling frustrated and confused when internet visitors to the website left messages like: “I want a bag or a PlayStation”.
Hong Kong social innovation fund should invest in projects to secure its future, former chief says
“Back then, crowdfunding and social innovation were unfamiliar concepts for the public.
“We had to spend so much time simply explaining what we do,” the 28-year-old says. “Even my parents used to ask me: can you earn any money from this? How is it possibly helping people?”
For programmers Hui and Chan, setting up the website was the easiest part, taking just two months.
But the obstacles soon followed – paying to rent an office, seeing other team members quit after graduating from university, facing distrust from the online community.
“Chan just had his first job, and I was still a senior year student. When everyone else left the team, we took turns to clean the office bathroom,” Hui says of the situation in 2014.
“I just wanted to do something good together with friends, and I felt a huge gap between expectation and reality,” he says.
Trump supporters start work on private border wall using crowdsourced funds
The turn in fortunes came a year later, when the two joined an incubation programme and learned to define who Collaction should be serving, as well as how to build partnerships with the local community to create more down-to-earth and relevant programmes.
With the help of community centres, the Collaction team itself has launched 12 social welfare projects, some targeting new immigrant children and elderly people who live alone. These helped them to gain popularity with the public, even attracting a young sociology graduate to join the team.
“Hongkongers are generally afraid of failure, as they think practically and value every minute of life. So for people to accept something new like crowdfunding and social innovation, there have to be some successful examples first,” Hui says.
 “It takes time and effort, but we are willing to wait and see these new ways blossom everywhere.”


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Crowdsourcing with a conscience: Hong Kong programmers help society dream big by connecting good causes with supporters

The Collaction team want to bring those running good causes together with others willing to provide help, financial or otherwise. Photo: May Tse

Illustration of collaction.hk's project. Photo: SCMP

(L to R）Camelia Ma Ka-yee, Catherine Lu Hoi-ching, Amy Chung On-tung, Himphen Hui Hau-him, and Nelson Chan Ho-hin, the team behind Collaction.hk, a crowd sourcing platform for anyone from the public with ideas of social innovations to post their projects and look for help in different forms, pictured at GoodLab in Cheung Sha Wan. 19MAY19 SCMP / May Tse

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Collaction lists 600 projects, such as translation services for immigrants, that need extra help from the community


Founded by young programmers, Collaction lists 600 projects, such as food sharing, that need the community’s help.


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