June 2015
In October 2014, Ms Cynthia Lau (BSocSc 1986) made a donation to HKU to set up the Shan Ji Scholarships for Social Sciences Students Worldwide Exchange. The scholarship aims to support students at the Faculty of Social Sciences to participate in overseas exchange during their undergraduate studies.
It was in memory of her late father that Ms Lau decided to name the Scholarships after Shan Ji (善基), the boarding school that her parents established in the 1960s and operated until the 1980s. The school, located in the New Territories, was once a shelter for children whose parents could not find the time to take care of them.
The name “Shan Ji” carries not only the meaning of “kindness as the fundamental virtue”, but also evokes fond memories of the Lau family as the school holds a lot of special meaning. It was where Ms Lau completed her primary education and it embodied the devotion of her parents to nurturing the next generation of Hong Kong throughout those three decades.
To pay kindness forward, Ms Lau founded Read-Cycling, a philanthropy project for the community to promote resource sharing and the joy of reading. It helps book lovers find new homes for their good used books. To date, the organisation has been entrusted with more than 35,000 quality used books and helped over 20,000 of them find new homes.
