The Council has received support from five family foundations to partner with ExCEL3 of The University of Hong Kong as well as Governance and Management Excellence (GAME) for Public Benefit, to develop a self-assessment tool for measuring NGO governance health and collect data for landscape analysis.
At the end of January 2019, the research team has held three debriefing sessions to introduce the governance health check tool, shared the aggregate survey findings and explained how participating agencies should interpret the contents of their individual report. Below are highlights of the debriefings.
The Summary of Key Findings for the Survey is available: Click here to view
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Group photo of the three parties of the Hong Kong NGO Governance Health Survey Project team and representatives of the sponsoring organizations. |
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Mr Cliff Choi, Business Director, HKCSS, welcomed all agencies’ representatives. He also thanked the NGOs participated in the survey and the support from the Project team and sponsoring organizations. He explained that the key objectives of this survey were to develop a local self-assessment tool for NGOs to examine their current board practices and to collect data for a landscape analysis of the sector for NGOs’ reference. |
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Ms Christine Fang, Founder and Principal Consultant, GAME, briefly introduced the Conceptual Framework of the Governance Health Check Tool, which includes three dimensions: board design and processes, board role execution, and board dynamics and behavior. She said that the tool took references from similar studies overseas, and localized to Hong Kong’s context. |
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Dr Ruby Lo, ExCEL3, presented the landscape analysis of the survey findings. She highlighted that 77 NGOs participated in the survey. In the boards and agency heads’ self-assessment of board good practices, the aspects that were most often adopted were constructive partnership with management and board’s motivation and commitment. The aspects that were less adopted were succession planning and capacity building. A summary of the key findings can be viewed here. |
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Dr Rikkie Yeung, Consultant, GAME, explained to participating agencies on the interpretation of the Individual Health Check Report. Each report captured the summary analysis of the self-assessed responses on the NGOs’ current board practices and provided comparison of the data with other participated NGOs of similar size. Based on the self-assessed data, the individual report also listed out specific areas of board practices for agency’s review. |
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Q&A Session
Professor Wai-Fung Lam, Project Director, ExCEL3, mentioned that the survey only provides a snapshot of the agency’s current governance health and that the data is for reference only. Boards may take this as an opportunity to discuss and reflect on the organization’s governance. |
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Various agency representatives attended the three debriefing sessions. Participants actively raised questions on the survey findings, landscape analysis, and the future development of the project. |
