Justice Centre Hong Kong

Mission: We challenge inequality to bring visibility to the communities we work with through direct assistance, research, policy, advocacy, strategic litigation and capacity building.

Beneficiaries: Migrant domestic workers, Other Marginalized (e.g. LGBTQ+, Former drug abusers, Ex-offenders, etc), Refugees and asylum seekers.

Top needs:

1 full-time staff on social welfare as we expected an increase in demand of social welfare assistance (e.g. housing, necessities) due to COVID-19. Annual Salary: HKD 163,800.
2 full-time staff on Research, Policy and Advocacy to work on issues directly affecting our clients, Annual Salary for 2 headcounts: HKD 524,160.
PPE including masks and hand sanitisers for all client meetings in the next 12 months. Approximate 1,200 meetings per year. Each meeting consists of 3 people.

Top 3 challenges:

Financial: We lost 6 corporate or institutional donors and had a significant drop in individual donation, now we rely on cash reserves on funding many salaries. Our Legal Clinic with international universities is also on hold due to COVID-19. This program is another key unrestricted funding source.
Capacity: When we lost the law firms donors, we also lost the pro-bono lawyers supporting our legal assistance work. As NGOs are not allowed by law to represent clients in courts, we rely on them to work with us in preparing the case and do the crucial job of court representation.
Client needs: Our clients are outside the public system thus they purely rely on goodwill. Food shortage and price spike on necessities and PPE mean they cannot purchase the items and COVID-19 made them anxious to go to attend meetings with their caseworkers.

Impact on beneficiaries:

We assisted over 1000 clients through legal and psychosocial services. We ran a psychosocial program for over 400 refugees including children from 2017 to 2019 in improving their mental wellbeing. Our social welfare program has supported 57 clients in different areas like housing, education, basic necessities, etc since Sep 2018.