Healthy Harold's World Travels

Australian kids and adults nationwide have heard of Healthy Harold, Life Education’s loveable mascot. For over 30 years, Healthy Harold along with Life Education has become an expert at teaching Australian children how to value themselves by living a healthy lifestyle and avoiding drug and alcohol abuse. But few are aware that Australia’s favourite giraffe is also an accomplished world traveller! For nearly as many years, Life Education has had affiliate organisations in Barbados, Cyprus, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Macau, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

Spotlight on Hong Kong

Harold and his Hong Kong friend, Holly the Horse, have been working with Hong Kong’s Life Education Activities Programme (LEAP) for 15 years. An extremely multicultural country, Hong Kong has its own set of needs and challenges that have contributed to some of LEAP’s unique program elements. The following interview with Ms. Vence Poon, LEAP’s Senior Education Officer, gives us some insight on how Life Education functions in Hong Kong.

Q: How does the Life Education program work in your country?

A: We are known as Life Education Activity Programme (LEAP) in Hong Kong and the structure of our service is pretty much the same as other Life Education counterparts.  We offer programmes to nursery up to Year 6 classes in the mobile classrooms; and we deliver Year 7 to 9 programmes in the school classrooms.  For more information of these programmes, please visit our website www.leap.org.hk.

Each student who participates in the LEAP session pays a nominal fee and each student receives a workbook and the teacher receives a CD-Rom for follow up work.  Since we live in a very multicultural and multilingual city, we offer our programmes in three different languages – English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Thus, the educational videos are slightly different for the three programmes, but the core content is very similar.

Q: What are the major problems Life Ed is focused on resolving in your community?

A: Recent statistics show that the drug abusers’ age is dropping, and NGOs such as ourselves have been requested to teach the children about illegal drugs at a younger age, as early as Year 1 to 3 age groups.  Youth drug abuse causes grave concerns in the community.  We believe that parent education is very important in successful drug prevention so starting in 2006, we offered a Parent Programme, entitled “Safe and Successful” to schools who are participants of the LEAP student programmes.  Again, please visit our website for details of the Parent Programme.

To keep our programmes up-to-date to meet the ever changing social issues, we also promoted two new programmes, titled “Cyberchoices” and “Positive Image” for upper primary and lower secondary students.  The “Cyberchoices” progamme helps students to develop skills to stay safe in the cyberworld and handle problems like cyberbullying and “Positive Image” helps students analyse how the media has influenced people’s perspective on their body image and build up skills to think positive about themselves.

Q: What are the unique aspects of your program as they apply to your country?

A: In the first year of our operation (1994), we offered only the English programme, using the Australian version. In the second year, we also offered Chinese programmes, having had the Australian version dubbed into Cantonese. However, that has been changed and improved.  Since Hong Kong has an unique culture, the programmes have to be specially designed to fit that, and we are proud to have our own locally produced teaching materials that are tailor made for the local culture; one set for the Chinese speaking students and one set for the English speaking students who may be children of expatriates or returnees of overseas immigrants. So far the programmes have been very well received and the teachers praised about the locally adapted materials.

We are also the first Life Education operator to offer a tailor made programme for students with special learning needs.  There are all together 18 units in the Special Needs Programme, which could be delivered in a special mobile classroom equipped with a hoist to enable wheelchair access, or in the school’s classrooms.  We work closely with the schools on the needs of the students with varying intellectual abilities, and offer the Programme free of charge.

Q: What are some exciting things that you’ve achieved recently?

A: We just had a series of events to celebrate LEAP’s 15th Anniversary, which included the launch of our new logo, a new website, and a new mobile classroom.  To further promote our organization, we also held a graphics design competition for the exterior of the new mobile classroom.  The winners were then interviewed on a television children programme and their entries exhibited in various locations.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

A: LEAP helped the Macau Government set up their static Life Education Centre there in 1999.  We provide them with the teaching materials, help train their educators, and enjoy a very good working relationship with them.  Like LEAP in Hong Kong, service to Primary, Secondary and special needs students, as well as to parents, are available in Macau.  We are very privileged to have the right to operate Life Education in all Chinese speaking territories, and hope eventually to be able to reach out to the students in China.  With 350 million smokers and at least one million dying every year in China, drug prevention education is the key and LEAP has a great role to play starting with this generation!