History
How has the Global Village grown?
The Global Village is not simply an idea for future implementation. Crossroads’ programmes have been growing from its inception in 1995. The range and demand for its services has, however, increased so fully over that time that we are now proposing to scale them up.
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Global DistributionIt began with humanitarian aid distribution, locally and internationally, and saw rapid growth from a single storage room of product to its current 200,000 square feet of warehousing with a broad range of goods, meeting need types throughout society. Crossroads currently partners with over 2000 Hong Kong companies and community groups. |
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Global HandWith the advent of Corporate Social Responsibility, many companies wished to engage in public/private & tri-partite partnerships. They struggled, however, to find a ‘match’. Crossroads set up an online ‘matching’ service to facilitate such partnerships, developed within Hong Kong. The United Nations asked Global Hand to build an application of this for its own corporate partnerships. |
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Global HandicraftsAlthough aid solutions benefit those living in poverty, income generation is needed for them to have a sustainable future. Crossroads has developed social enterprise and fair trade services that see revenue created for those needing a salary. The Global Handicrafts Marketplace and the Silk Road Café are examples. More are in the works. |
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Global X-perienceIn 2005, for its tenth anniversary celebration, Crossroads invited Hong Kong CEOs and other community leaders to spend 24 hours living in simulated poverty. From ‘lap sap’, the participants built slum dwellings, slept in them, ate food typical of slum environments, battled the challenges of manual labour, and, throughout the time, x-perienced something of the emotional, social and economic struggle for survival. Crossroads had no plans to repeat this but, following the event, was inundated with requests for more from corporate and educational organisations. In the years following, interest in these programmes has consistently increased as educators, companies, NGOs, tourists, families and individual visitors have increasingly requested these services. In particular, they are a close fit to the NSS curriculum in Secondary Schools. |
