My name is Trie Chan. I'm from Bowers International Education Institute. Basically, we are an
education centre serving kids with special needs, especially kids with dyslexia.
Basically, because I'm also dyslexic myself, I was diagnosed as having dyslexia when I was 16,
and throughout my whole childhood, I was so unhappy because I cried since the first day I
go to school until I was in grade three every single day until I was sick. Because of that,
I purely just wanted to start up to do something for this group of kids.
One day, my classmate in Hong Kong U actually called me up and said,
hey, Twiggy, we have a chance here where there's a scholarship you can apply,
and it's actually run by Baptist University, where you and 10 other students, well, when I talk
about students, it's like basically we are working already. And so you get a chance to travel to
America to see how others are using, starting up their own enterprise to help kids who are in need
of help. And so I thought, hey, that's a very good idea. And I really wanted to give it a try. So then
I put in my application and then I got the chance. So because when we went to America,
basically we get a chance to see different social enterprise of how they run. And I apparently
attached to a special education center where they use horse riding to help the kids. And it
actually amazed me how they run with limited resources. So I thought, hey, when I come back,
since I got the seed money, I should try. And so therefore I come back and I try. Well, basically,
first of all, I cannot take the horse riding back to help kids with special needs. But then at that
time, I get a chance also to visit other social enterprises as well. So I thought, hey, using
sports is actually something that I really, really wanted to try and do because I thought
it can really help them to build up their self-confidence. So when I came back, I thought,
okay, sports is something that I really wanted to do. Then second thing, I realized that when I
started to talk with parents, then I realized that, hey, kids with special needs actually have a very
difficult problem or challenge is where during weekend, they try to find leisure activities or
recreation activities. However, not a lot of club will actually accept them because they don't know
how to actually control them. So basically for them to try recreation assistance, recreation
activities basically is very limited chance. So what we thought is, okay, what about if I combined
sport activities with SEN kit and also kids with just studied in the mainstream and so get a chance
for them to mix together. At the same time, how about in order for us to stand out compared
like to outside, we will implement parental skills as well so that parents can join in to do
sport activities with the kids. At the same time, they learn how to manage their behavior, etc.
So that's how we first started and put in the proposal.