Journalist Sanday Chongo Kabange is the winner of AmCham’s 2023 Ira Dan Kaye Community Service Award, presented by the AmCham Charitable Foundation.

The AmCham Charitable Foundation is a separate, non-profit entity founded by AmCham in 1985 to contribute to the communities of Hong Kong and in the surrounding region. Most members become aware of it through the fund-raising auction at the annual gala, which is its main source of funding (none of the auction funds accrue to the chamber itself). Last year, the “Future is Now” gala raised HK$464,000.

Over the years, the AmCham Charitable Foundation has benefitted close to 1,000 students through scholarship programs, and it has supported close to 100 non-profit and other organizations to develop meaningful projects – helping minority communities with work skills; empowering disadvantaged youths with special needs; and creating a next generation of workforce and business leaders for the future economy.

Among the AmCham Charitable Foundation’s more important awards is the Ira Dan Kaye Community Service Award, named after Kaye, a founding member of the American Chamber of Commerce in 1969, chairman in 1986, and winner of its community service award in 1993, as well as a trustee of the AmCham Charitable Foundation.

In 1986, AmCham in Hong Kong introduced an annual award to recognize individuals who have performed outstanding service to the Hong Kong Community on a voluntary basis and named it after Kaye. Recipients receive a check for HK$30,000 to give to a charity of their choice and a silver plate.

If you’ve been on one of ImpactHK’s “Kindness Walks” to deliver care packages to Hong Kong’s homeless people, you might have met a tall, genial 32-year-old from the Republic of Zambia, Sanday Chongo Kabange. Kabange  leads the walks on weekday evenings in Tin Hau, Central, Wanchai, Happy Valley and North Point.

During the day he is a senior reporter with Regulation Asia, a business publication that looks at regulatory and compliance developments across the region. He will introduce you to the individuals and share their history. Kabange has been walking this beat for nearly seven years, along with community service for a wide range of other organizations, from Feeding Hong Kong to World Wildlife Fund Hong Kong, Habit for Humanity Hong Kong, Plastic Free Seas, Sunshine Action and Hong Kong Cleanup.

According to HandsOn Hong Kong’s calculation, in 2022 he spent 386 hours leading kindness walks, played a key role in serving 2,000 meals a week, delivered daily necessities to 300 people living on the street, and removed over 100 kg of plastic waste and debris from Hong Kong’s beaches every month.

So who is Kabange and how did he come about his passion for community service? The answer is in part curiosity, the same curiosity that led him to degrees in journalism and public policy. A 2010 graduate of the University of Zambia, he began his international reporting career with Voice of America in Zambia. In 2011, he won a fellowship in Berlin with Taz, short for die Tageszeitung, a German daily newspaper and then set his sights on China.

Both the journalism program at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Hong Kong offered him scholarships. The catch was that Tsinghua told him he would need to study Chinese for a year before taking up the scholarship. Instead, he took up the University of Hong Kong’s offer, with a South China Morning Post – Wah Kiu Yat Po scholarship to the Journalism and Media Studies Center (JMSC).

One of the connecting threads of Kabange’s career is a skill at multi-tasking. While at JMSC, he continued writing for African media and won an award for best reporting on malaria from the Zambian Ministry of Health. In 2012, while still working towards his master’s degree at JMSC, he was an editorial intern at CNN, writing for CNN’s travel and lifestyle website.

After graduation, he took a corporate job that built on his interest in business but after five years asked for leave to take a second master’s degree from the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, a joint degree program with the University of Hong Kong.  He rejoined the company when he returned to Hong Kong in 2018, and the same year signed up for a temporary program under the Department of Social Welfare called the Volunteer Movement.

Kabange saw an ad for the Volunteer Movement on TV and decided to register. Most of the organizations that took volunteers needed Cantonese, but one, HandsOn Hong Kong, was multilingual. HandsOn Hong Kong serves as a clearing center for some 200 NGOs, and he jumped on board, both as an administrator to recruit the volunteers they need and as a volunteer himself with the gamut of NGOs it represents.

When Covid-19 hit, the company he was working for restructured and Kabange became ever more deeply involved in community service, while returning to freelance journalism to make a living. “I learned most of Hong Kong from my work with HandsOn Hong Kong,” he says. He recruited for different NGOs under the HandsOn Hong Kong umbrella as part of his volunteer work, for the volunteers they needed to run their programs as well as leading activities like the “Kindness Walks” and Feeding Hong Kong’s “Bread Runs.”

Wing Yi Lee, a senior program officer with HandsOn Hong Kong says that Kabange “has been one of the most dedicated, humble and professional volunteers I have met during my time with the organization. Sanday supports our small team with a range of vital behind-the-scene tasks, including managing volunteers on-site, delivering volunteer briefings, recording attendance, troubleshooting, and leading post-activity debriefings.”

In 2020, Kabange took up Chinese nationality. By that time, through his volunteer work, he had seen most parts of Hong Kong as well as communities at the bottom, from asylum seekers and the homeless to old people’s homes and rural communities on outlying islands, where he briefly lived after he left HKU housing. “It opened my eyes to the issues in Hong Kong, where the rich are super-rich and the poor are super-poor,” he says. “I’ve been to most parts of Hong Kong through my volunteering with HandsOn.”

If you want to join one of Kabange’s ImpactHK “Kindness Walks,” Monday nights he is in Tin Hau, Tuesdays in Central, Wednesdays in Wanchai, Thursdays in Happy Valley, and Fridays in North Point. On weekends, he goes off island and leads “Kindness Walks” in Yaumatei, does beach clean-ups with Plastic Free Seas, or visits old people’s homes with Habitat Hong Kong to help them renovate and clean their homes.

Kabange is also a recipient of the 2022 Hong Kong Volunteer Award (HKV-Award) in the category of Outstanding Volunteer co-organized by the Home Affairs Bureau and Agency for Volunteer Service 義務工作發展局 (AVS).  He was awarded the 2023 Spirit of Community Award at the 11th Spirit of Hong Kong Awards 2023 co-organized by South China Morning Post (SCMP) and Sino Group. He was the top volunteer for HandsOn Hong Kong in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, dedicating the highest number of service hours to the community.