The 2022-23 academic year will be our fifth in Hong Kong, and what an adventure it’s been. We’ve partnered with 12 schools so far, reaching over 760 students. Last academic year we launched our Chinese language workshops and this year, we’re introducing an enhanced sustainability curriculum and a 3D feature to our app.

The 3D feature was a development driven by Covid. We firmly believe that navigating the in-person workshop experience is a vital life skill, especially for a generation of students who have been denied gathering opportunities for much of the past two years. Still, it was becoming increasingly apparent that we need to be able to deploy a fully virtual workshop experience, if only to help colleagues launch UrbanPlan in other Asian markets, given the prevailing travel restrictions.

The terms ‘adaptability’ and ‘resilience’ are bandied around a lot; inspiringly, UrbanPlan’s target age bracket of 15-18-year-olds, is proving to us that they do embody just these qualities:

In the summer of 2021, three ISF students who had experienced UrbanPlan in 2019, interned with UrbanPlan for eight weeks. During this time, they researched ways to enhance the sustainability criteria of UrbanPlan and ultimately devised a bespoke carbon emissions calculator, which we are launching this academic year as an upgrade to the UrbanPlan curriculum.

While the narrative of how to ‘give back’ with UrbanPlan often highlights the undeniable truth that we would not be able to run the programme without the generous support of our funders and volunteers, empowering our youth to make iterative contributions to the programme through their own insights and experiences, is, in a word: impactful.

We’d like to thank Ola Kim, Sabrina Wong and Scarlett Wright for their contributions to the UrbanPlan programme in Hong Kong. We wish them much success as they start their university careers this autumn. Thank you, ladies!