So maybe you’ll get a bonus next month.  You might even get a pay-rise.  Perhaps you have savings left over now that the markets have managed to survive 2009.  So what are you going to spend it on?  Turns out, it’s really not that hard to do something worthwhile.  In fact it’s even pretty easy to save lives.  And not just if you’re a fireman or a rescue helicopter pilot.  Bankers, accountants, and just about everybody else, even lawyers, have something to contribute.

About six months ago I devoted my weekly Roadwarrior column to the subject of poverty.  I wanted to point out that massive disparities between the wealthy and the desperate cause massive social problems.  And I wanted to suggest to my readers that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Not that either of these things really needed to be pointed out.  Anyone who has done any traveling in Asia has looked out the window of the taxi to see families living on the streets, shanty towns under gleaming office buildings, or tiny children roaming the traffic begging for small change at the windows of Mercedes.

It might seem surprising for a banker to be writing about this issue.  Bankers are all selfish bonus-grabbing monsters, I’m sure I’ve read somewhere.  But actually bankers, like most other readers of the Sunday Post, are part of the group who are at the other end of the spectrum, the people who are in a position to help out.  And to be honest, there’s not that many bankers, or many other people, who don’t want to contribute.  No-one’s driving their BMW past the slum thinking “Oh, I really wish I could ignore those people living on the side of the road, they really annoy me.”

I work in a bank and I can afford to give a bit of what I earn to the folks who really need it.  And so can anyone reading this newspaper.  But the problems of this world are enormous, what am I actually supposed to do?

In Hong Kong, around the dinner table in 2007, a small group of people came up with one answer to this question.  Of course there are many other answers, but theirs was simple:  just go ahead and do something.  They each contributed a bit of money, they went where they were needed and they started helping out.  

Their first thing they did was provide funding to a Women and Children’s Shelter in Laos for victims of human trafficking and domestic violence.  Later that year, they funded a Vocational Training Centre in Vietnam.  In June 2008 among other things they provided funding to a Girls Home in Qinghai Province, China.  In March 2009 they funded a program run by the Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity and then in October began construction on a facility at Kampong Cham in Cambodia for victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation.  They have undertaken 11 projects so far and are working on many more.

They are not members of the United Nations, they’re not UNICEF or the Red Cross; they’re just a bunch of Hong Kong professionals who felt like doing something worthwhile.  Some are bankers, some are lawyers, and all are people who just want to help out.  Each member makes a financial contribution and this money is put 100% towards developing projects like vocational programs, drop-in center or night shelters that immediately help people in need.

The group is called New Day.  It’s not political or religious and it’s not affiliated with any umbrella organization, government or anything else.  It’s just a group of people who recognize that they are in a position to help.  And it’s really simple.

The focus of New Day is women and girls in Asia.  The members meet regularly to go over projects and proposals.  Most members simply contribute a small amount of money each month.  Some other members have the time and the interest do more, and they examine proposals, manage projects or contribute whatever skills they have.  

There were eight people around the table in March 2007 when New Day got started and this has grown to 64 members today.  Through their efforts it’s not hard to imagine that New Day has helped hundreds of girls and women.  But if they had only helped one person it would still have been a worthwhile endeavor.

Just one of the people New Day has helped is Serala, a 16 year old who lives in Pondicherry, Southern India.  Her mother was a sex worker who gave birth to Serala after being raped.  During her early childhood Serala lived on the streets with her mother.  After working as a house maid, a job she started when she was 6, her mother sent her to Bangalore to work as a maid for a wealthy family.  Suffering sexual abuse from another of the family’s employees and her new employer she escaped to Pondicherry, where she lived alone on the streets.  

Like so many children who live on the streets of India, her chances of one day breaking her family’s cycle of poverty were pretty slim.  Sleeping on the pavement every night, apart from the obvious hazards it presents, is particularly dangerous for a teen-age girl.

For Serala however, there is a glimmer of hope.  Last year New Day funded a night shelter in Pondicherry.  They also funded an educational and a vocational program to help the girls regain their confidence and learn valuable skills.  The vocational training includes hospitality classes that are now run at the nearby Kailash resort, where girls who complete the hospitality program will be employed.

The night shelter and training program is run in conjunction with a day centre set up with assistance from Hong Kong based ADM Capital Foundation.  For Serala, the centers were an opportunity to escape her life on the streets.  Although frightened and withdrawn when she arrived Serala has, over the last year, been able to regain her confidence to the point where today she is an active participant in the running of the centers.  Serala helps to look after the younger girls and has committed enthusiastically to her own education program.

The cost of the night shelter for one year was HK$150,000 funded by New Day with a donation from law firm Linklaters.  New Day has also co-operated with law firm Norton Rose who made a significant contribution to the Cambodian centre for victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation that New Day assisted last year.

Because of the relatively small size of New Day, its members Day have the opportunity to visit the projects that they have contributed to and see the value of their donations first hand.  Lisa and Chris Green are the founding members of New Day, Chris is a banker at HSBC and Lisa works full time looking after her own children and New Day. They recently visited the Pondicherry day and night centers to meet the staff and the girls that stay there.  

“Seeing the impact that we have been able to have on the lives of some of these girls is one of the great benefits of being part of this organization,” Liza told me.  “We are very lucky to be able to meet them and in some cases their mothers too.  And for their mothers this is so valuable.  Knowing that their daughters don’t have to have to live through the same difficulties that they have and have hope for a better future is one of the few positive things they have in their lives.”

Close involvement in the projects also enables members to see directly the need for organizations like New Day.  During a recent visit to a women’s shelter in Cambodia, Lisa met “a lovely girl with a pink clip in her hair”.  Two days previously, this teenage girl’s uncle had turned up at the gates of the shelter demanding that she been given back to him.  He had come looking for her, not so he could take her home, but rather so that he could return her to the brothel that she had been rescued from.  The police had to be called to the shelter to restore order.

There are of course many organizations like New Day.  While some of them are run by aid or charity workers, plenty of them are run by readers of Sunday Money; just ordinary bankers, lawyers and people with something to offer.

When I first wrote about this topic I said that standing around a burning building and lamenting the fact that you can only save one person is not as helpful a response as actually saving that one person.  Much less a crowd of people standing around a burning building each lamenting the fact that they can each only save one person.  There are organizations like New Day out there who are running into the building and doing what they can. Anyone standing around watching can see how easy it is.