Rebuilding Confidence and Having Fun in Vocational Training

Hung, now 32 years old, was employed as a messenger straight out of secondary school. After losing his job two years later, he worked as a decorator. But unfortunately, his employer delayed his salary payment and Hong did not get to receive his due. Facing the double devastating blows of being unemployed and having a bumpy love affair, Hung’s self-confidence hit the rock bottom. He started to hear voices insulting himself and was later admitted to hospital. Hung was diagnosed as suffering from “Schizophrenia”.

Since 2003, Hung has been receiving vocational training at Sheltered Workshop and gradually, his tenacity for work and confidence has been enhanced. With the encouragement of vocational rehabilitation staff, he participated in the retail training at New Life @ Lantau Link (one of our social enterprises). Hung, in the past, would finch when he had to make contacts with strangers and go out alone at night. Now, he is dealing with customers from every corner around the globe at New Life @ Lantau Link by overcoming language barrier and taking on challenges in using simple English and hand gestures to promote various products to overseas customers. It is of little surprise that Hung could now claim with quite a sense of self-assurance that “I am learning how to tackle challenges and I do hope that I could do better.”

It is not uncommon for people with mental illness to experience adjustment issues in meeting work related demands. They are in need of rebuilding their working habits before they could make a jump in the open employment market.

We have developed both agricultural and industrial Sheltered Workshop services since 1968. Back then, we rented a farmland next to Castle Peak Hospital and established New Life Farm, which was the first and only agricultural Sheltered Workshop in Hong Kong. The Farm provides people with mental illness with agricultural work training under a refreshing and open environment, and assists them in fitting-in the society again and achieve the goal of self-reliance.

In early years, apart from farming plants and corps, the work trades of the Farm included piggery, pigeons breeding, brick production and construction work. Later, the Association identified the market demand of organic food and converted the Farm into an organic farm in 2000, to provide training including but not limited to organic farming, vegetable processing and horticulture for people with mental illness. The Farm was successfully accredited with Organic Certification from the Hong Kong Organic Resource Centre Certification Limited in 2005 and had also obtained Organic Certification from the Hong Kong Organic Certification Centre in 2006. On top of the above, the Farm had also acquired the adjacent farmland with an area of 4.1 acres from the Government; which was then developed into Eco-tourism and provided different types of work training for people with mental illness, like training in farm tour guidance, tea-house serving, shop keeping, handiwork art and activities guidance etc. At the same time, the Farm also became the very first Social Enterprise in Hong Kong to provide Eco-Tourism service which promotes environmental conservation and healthy life style to the public.

The aim of establishing the Sheltered Workshop was to provide people with mental illness with work training that incorporated the elements of productivity, work remuneration and social rehabilitation in the hope of nurturing their working habits and realizing their working potential whereas the ultimate goal rests on enabling them to join the Supported Employment Service or open employment. Our first industrial Sheltered Workshop was set up at a male halfway house in 1968. In light of the development in Hong Kong economy, the Sheltered Workshop has also transformed from material processing and packaging to a production mode that is more diversified, more adaptive to the economic development and more attuned to the different needs of service users. Nowadays, we have 3 industrial sheltered workshops providing training such as handicraft production, sewing, wood work, letter processing, packaging, organic soybean product production, organic product processing, cleaning, catering and retailing training etc. Each sheltered workshop has a capacity to serve 140 to 190 service users.