words katherine yeh

Global thinking creates essential networks

Imagine being plunged into total darkness, only relying on an unfamiliar voice and a knobbly wooden stick to guide your footsteps. An overwhelming wash of sounds and smells surrounds you as, blindly grasping at thin air, you somehow manage to grope your way through a gravel hut, a school, and a bustling marketplace teeming with the pungent smells of spices, fruit and old shoes. Hungry, you reach for your purse – but wait – which notes are which? Disorientated, you turn around to seek the help of your guide – but where has he disappeared to? You follow the voice calling at you from a distance and it finally leads to the familiar, comforting feeling of a door. You let out a big sigh of relief, fling it open and light comes flooding back into your world.

For the many blind in the world, the option of merely opening a door to light doesn’t exist. But our journey through darkness was only a simulation – one of some 30 Life X-perience activities at the Crossroads Foundation out on the Gold Coast, Hong Kong. The activities grew out of the wacky idea that instead of Crossroads celebrating their 10th anniversary in 2005 with a traditional fundraising dinner, senior corporate leaders would be invited on site to live for 24 hours in the dilapidated conditions many people spend a lifetime in.

‘They lived in cardboard houses which they built, and broke rocks and made roads out of them with their bare hands – it was great,’ says David J Begbie, fondly referred to as DJ or Deej, son of Crossroad’s founders, Malcolm and Sally Begbie. The experience made such a powerful impact on the leaders that word spread and calls came in from managers who wanted to bring in their staff, principals who wanted to bring in their teachers and teachers who wanted to bring in their pupils. From that, Crossroads’ Life X-perience activities evolved and now there is a whole menu to choose from, ranging from the Blind X-perience to a refugee simulation actually experienced by the likes of Sir Richard Branson and other senior figures at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January.

‘Three “E”s are the heart of our experiential activities: Education, Empathy and Empowerment. We can connect people’s willing hearts to opportunities once they have learned about global issues and begun to care in a non-prescriptive way,’ says DJ.

Crossroads was founded in 1995, its initial idea to simply distribute Hong Kong’s quality superseded goods to the needy. DJ’s parents, Malcolm and Sally, a chartered accountant and a public relations consultant respectively, were engaged in humanitarian work through their jobs when they received a call following the ’95 floods in Northern China requesting blankets and clothing for two million people who had lost everything. ‘I mean, two million people!’ squeaks DJ. ‘We were not prepared for anything of the sort, but we told them we would try. We were visiting my godmother in hospital one day and while we were there, we overheard two women chatting. One said to the other (DJ mimics an American bimbo accent), “You know, I have all these things in Hong Kong I like, want to give to like, needy people but like, I don’t know any needy people. Do you know any needy people?” We couldn’t help but interject. “Sorry to bother you, but um, we know one or two... million?”’

The 19 boxes of clothing from the two women soon turned into 72, then 136 and then 248, all from the caring hearts of the Hong Kong community. ‘It was like there was a hole that just opened in the heavens where goods just wouldn’t stop pouring in,’ exclaims DJ. That alone unknowingly spawned something the Begbies had not foreseen: the process of helping to connect a disconnected world. ‘There is so much disconnectivity in the world, but then you see samples being thrown away from toy companies and you look at an orphanage where kids have never had toys before; or you see a university in Afghanistan without computers and then old ones being discarded in Hong Kong and witness the disconnected being connected. That for us is Global Distribution.’ Global Distribution was the development of the first of the four ‘Global’ core areas of concern that now define Crossroads.

The second grew out the deluge of surplus corporate resources Crossroads quickly learned about throughout the world – a warehouse of shoes in Korea, clothing in Malaysia – at one point they had 800 contacts in 100 countries. How were they to match this wealth of resources with the deprived people who could most make use of it? The Begbies turned to the internet, figuring a website would be the best tool to bring all the pieces together. Thus Global Hand was born – an online dating agency between the corporate and NGO sectors of the world that matchmakes charities needing resources with corporations possessing them. Global Hand has been so successful that the United Nations are collaborating with Crossroads to create a version of the website connecting the UN to the private sector.

Global Handicrafts was created because the Hong Kong government gave Crossroads their current location in Gold Coast, a former Ghurka barracks. The government hoped that the thousands of tourists that visit Hong Kong each year could see for themselves that a material metropolis like Hong Kong had a heart. But it occurred to Crossroads that the main pursuit of tourists is to shop. Here was a constant flood of people willing to buy while all over the world people were trying to make a meagre livelihood by manufacturing goods for markets that were, in their area at least, far too small. The buyers were in one place and producers in another – another disconnection. Two years later Crossroads opened Hong Kong’s largest fair trade shop as well as a fair trade café to connect financial resources to the people who needed them most – Global Handicrafts.

The fourth of Crossroads’ core activities is Global Village, the crossing hatching of experience in which simulations stimulate people to undergo what it must be like to live in situations vastly different from their own. As we saw at the beginning of this article.

But now that the four “Globals” have been established and the cogs have been turning for a while, Crossroads has constantly been aspiring to reach higher ground. Together with the Hong Kong government and the Education Bureau the Foundation has been running training programmes for teachers and offering resources such as the simulations and volunteer services to students to tie into the “334” New Senior Secondary Academic Structure (NSS), due to be installed in all government and special needs schools this September. It is a holistic approach to education designed to see Hong Kong’s students graduate with broader social awareness through compulsory core subjects like Liberal Studies and “Other Learning Experiences”. ‘Technically you’re not supposed to be able to teach empathy, but yet somehow through these activities, it happens,’ comments one of the teachers on the training programme.

Crossroads dreams that one day their site can be built into Hong Kong’s first comprehensive, experiential global village – somewhat like a theme park, where visitors can experience in one place all the four Globals at work. ‘Just imagine an entrance that leads to an experiential village, supported by warehouses for Global Distribution, fair trade handicraft shops and food outlets catered by former drug addicts trained as chefs, that addresses more complex methods of engaging with social enterprise by creating jobs rather than just the traditional philanthropy of giving. It’s a microcosmic village that displays the macrocosmic world’s needs,’ says DJ.

But it won’t be easy. There is a long road ahead of Crossroads yet. Although goods are packed for Global Distribution in 40 buildings dotted around the site, more warehouses are needed to both streamline processes and free up space to build the experiential village. The goal however is not to get bigger: ‘Physical size doesn’t matter to us, what does is the whole reason behind our operations – to spread awareness so that at the very least, people leave with a heart that cares and bring this into their future jobs and family life’.

Fact Box
Nearly three billion people – that’s half of the world’s population – lives on less than US$2 a day.
One billion people live in abject poverty on less than US$1 a day.
One child goes blind every minute.
Every day approximately 14,000 people contract HIV.
Nearly one billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or sign their name.
Eight hundred million people go to bed hungry every night.
Statistics can be found on the following websites:
www.makepovertyhistory.ca
www.global-campaign.org
www.who.int
www.unicef.org
www.newint.org
Take a look you may be surprised at how easy it is too help.