A Gift of GENUS

A Gift of GENUS

A Social Initiative enabling kids to read and write.

Location

Mong Kok, HK

Staff Size

1-4

Founded In

2018

Causes

Education, Gender Equality, Innovation, Social Equality, Youth

Problem

Education is key to helping children realize their talents and build better futures for themselves. Learning a foreign language helps kids to broaden their horizons, gain confidence and communicate with a wider range of people.

However, for the 18% of Hong Kong children who live in poverty, high quality extra curricular educational activities are hard to come by. Families living on 15,500 HKD dollars per month may find it impossible to afford the after school activities that cost even a few thousand dollars.

The question that keeps us up at night is: “How can we bridge the gap in English education so underprivileged kids in Hong Kong and across Asia, have access to the same standard of high quality resources as their wealthier peers?”

Our Mission

We want to level the playing field and provide high quality educational materials to underprivileged children in Asia.

Currently, we offer:
1) the Reading Kingdom online English Education programme designed by Dr Marion Blank, and distributed by Genus at no cost to underprivileged children throughout Asia.

2) Genus Play, a board game where children learn English prepositions by helping DinoSeaCat find ramen.

Our journey so far

Genus is an initiative by Ivan Young and Sam Lee. We have first hand experience of the power of education.

We are both engineers turned human resources professionals. We are obsessed with solving problems, measuring effectiveness and understanding what makes young learners tick so that we can make what we offer interesting to students.

Since 2017 we have:
1) offered the Reading Kingdom online course to more than 300 underprivileged students in 9 countries. We have fundraised to buy licenses to this popular programme and distributed it to underprivileged children for free.
2) partnered with the creator of DinoSeaCat character made popular in Malaysia to create Genus Play game. We launched this game in conjunction with ISS in collaboration with HKU. We are currently collaborating with City University to measure the effectiveness of Genus Play.

Our biggest achievement

Our biggest achievement is probably the simplest one. When we started giving access to the Reading Kingdom to underprivileged children, we saw kids faces light up with delight as they started on their journey to learning English. Providing them with high quality materials made all the difference!

Why you should donate your skills to us

We are an early stage initiative. Our plan for Genus Play is to create a buy-1-give-1 programme. For every game that we sell, we want to provide another game for free to a family that needs it. The contribution of your skills will directly impact how we market and reach out to companies, families and students.

Our Recent Projects

Marketing professional to create a general marketing strategy for Dino Sea Cat board game

A marketing professional to complete a general marketing strategy to market a Buy 1- Give 1 initiative for the Dino...

Time

30 hours

Start Date

01 Dec 2019

Completed