Arts and Sports

Throughout history, arts and culture have promoted understanding and action on issues facing our communities and the world. For far too long, however, we have allowed arts and culture to remain a nicety, and it is time to recognise the important role of the arts in strengthening communities, as well as the potential it has as a resource and policy tool to our beloved city of Hong Kong. We launched our first research report in November 2016, entitled Unleashing our museums: Reforms toward a new governance model. In this report, we submit that the full potential of Hong Kong’s museums can only be unleashed under a publicly funded, autonomously managed governance model, and surveyed some of the most prominent and most visited public museums around the world, revealing an unmistakable trend toward the adoption of a publicly funded, autonomously managed mode of governance, often through legislation and reform. Arts inclusion is a topic gaining traction globally, and particularly pertinent to Hong Kong today because of a rapidly ageing population and the growing emphasis on developing preventative policy measures simultaneously to the remedial. This is why we have published our second paper in March 2018, on this topic of arts for inclusion in Hong Kong. In this research that is the first of its kind to Hong Kong, we acknowledge the inclusive power of arts as a form of social innovation, a viable option to render social and therapeutic benefits, and an avenue that empowers those susceptible to fall behind in our society. These research reports had involved the engagements of many from the local community, and we continue to strive to bring the manifold benefits that arise from innovations in the arts and culture to the masses.