To be Hong Kong’s pioneering platform for professional counselling and coaching.
To create accessible, transparent professional counselling and coaching to individuals and corporate.
To promote mental health, destigmatise mental illness and maximise human potential through community and collective social innovation.
Our founder Vincent Li has been living with general anxiety disorder. He has gone through the process of taking medications, seeing a clinical psychologist and later on a coach. From his personal experience, he realised the severe limitations of the current mental healthcare, counselling and coaching system in Hong Kong as follow and overall, Vincent observed huge misalignment of resources and allocative inefficiency.
Lack of accessible and transparent information about counsellors and coaches themselves and their services, thus preventing people in need from getting the most suitable help from the most suitable professional at the most suitable time.
He used to pay HKD2,000 per hour for counselling sessions, which is not sustainable.
During anxiety attacks, when he needed counselling the most, he could not find his counsellor for on-time help and was forced to deal with it alone; and when he attended the counselling sessions, those were not the times when he needed counselling the most.
Counsellors and coaches know the need is there, but new clients are hard to be reached. Likewise, individuals and corporations in need know there are tons of counsellors and coaches, yet it takes excessive time and effort for them to find the right professional for the right help.
Unfortunately, up until now, there still lacks a channel to meet such a huge demand by connecting and matching the right professionals with the right clients. Right now, one gets help through:
In other words, there remains an “information gap” to be filled in. In recent years, there has been a surge of tech-savvy mental health start-ups in Hong Kong capable of making the actual counselling and coaching process much easier. Yet, they remain as service providers, i.e. their scope is still confined to only providing counselling and coaching service. By the “OpenRice” analogy, these start-ups are like new generation restaurants. They create ground-breaking food experience, but they are still only providing food service.
To tackle this problem and enable easy finding of the best-fitted counsellor/coach, we decided to build an online directory that allows browsers to browse and compare the detailed and transparent profiles of counsellors and coaches in the market and get matched with one most suitable for him/her. This is how HeartChat was created.
Then, all of a sudden, Hong Kong entered into an unprecedented social movement and (just like the rest of the world) lockdown due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) and every industry is forced to accelerate the digitalisation process. As for the counselling and coaching industry in Hong Kong, all of a sudden, everyone is talking about delivering consultations and trainings online, which is much needed as Hong Kong, arguably, is going through the biggest collective mental breakdown right now – 61% Hong Kong adults are experiencing mental issues recently [Limited, Digital Candy Hong Kong, “Press Release: World Mental Health Day #HowOkayAreYouCampaign,” Mind HK, 10 Oct 2019], and 1 in 6 Hong Konger is mentally unwell [Moon, Louise, “How Can We Change the Way We Think about Mental Health?” SCMP 20 July 2018.]. In other words, there is a huge unmet demand for accessible counselling and coaching.
HeartChat does not want to compete with existing online and offline counselling and coaching service providers. Quite the contrary, we help them increase their accessibility, transparency and hence reachability. In short, HeartChat is not yet another restaurant (service provider), but the “Open Rice” for individual and organisational counselling and coaching service providers (connecting platform).
Large Pool of Trust-worthy, Leading Professionals:
All of these can be achieved by creating a hassle-free counsellor/coach-finding journey for individuals and corporations in need. This is what HeartChat does – making lives easy for both “finders” and “findees”.
HeartChat is completely not-for-profit (How is it possible? Click here ). It is a social movement, not a business. We are doing this only because we experienced first-person how hopeless mental illness can feel like and how it can destroy one’s life if not dealt with properly. We only hope to promote mental health and destigmatise mental illness in Hong Kong. It is a community and collective social innovation, a bottom-up movement joined by all individual counsellors, coaches and trainers to revolutionise the existing counselling and coaching industry. To make that happen, we need your participation (click here to support) for Hong Kong.
