Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with purpose in Hong Kong

This year, our Hong Kong team is celebrating the Festival with our people and clients by running a corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign to give back to the community and environment they are operating. Read on to find out more about their meaningful story.

What is the Mid-Autumn Festival?

Falling on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional Chinese festival, celebrating the closely connected concepts of gathering, thanksgiving & praying. Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of the Festival.

What is the issue?

In recent years the mooncakes tradition has become increasingly commercialised, with significant masses of mooncakes being manufactured by brands trying to gain a marketing edge and often using fancy packaging to do so. This has led to over-production with 2.2 million uneaten mooncakes ending up in landfills in 2018, not to mention the additional packaging waste from all the consumed mooncakes. The local Hong Kong community has increasingly been raising concerns about the environmental affect of this issue.

What are we doing?

Addressing these concerns, our Hong Kong team has decided this year to celebrate the Festival in a more meaningful way by running a CSR campaign to donate our mooncake budget (and other funds raised) to St. James’ Settlement Jockey Club Upcycling Centre. The Centre helps promote public awareness of environment protection and sustainability, as well as creating job opportunities for the disadvantaged in Hong Kong.

What is the outcome?

The funds we have raised are being used to employ disadvantaged people to create Mid-Autumn souvenirs from recycled goods. We are giving these hand-made souvenirs to our clients (instead of mooncakes) when we visit them to celebrate the Festival. In doing so we are celebrating with purpose and raising the awareness of the issue with our clients. The outcome we achieve is more job creation and a positive environmental impact.

What is next?

Our staff are passionate about this initiative and we want to amplify the effect by having our clients and partners join us next year to raise more funds, create more jobs, reduce packaging and have a positive impact on our community.

James Donnan, Managing Director of Hong Kong office says, “Our organisation’s purpose drives CSR program, and it is strongly supported by our people. We feel it is imperative to build a sustainable business by balancing relationship between our people, clients and the communities we operate in and society at large. We are looking for opportunities to collaborate with our business partners to make a bigger impact next year.”