Being born with a silver spoon didn't leave them spoilt rotten

You can't always have it all and do it all. "I'm a terrible multitasker," claims Alan Lo, as he returns from another phone conversation during our interview in the backseat of his ride rushing to his next appointment.

In fact, Lo is actually quite the expert multitasker. He juggles several jobs as the owner of food and beverage empire Press Room Group and co-founder of Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design - an NGO responsible for the city's much anticipated cultural events, including Detour and Pecha Kucha.

Sharing Lo's multitasking lifestyle is a young crop of entrepreneur-cum-philanthropists, who grew up attending glamorous fundraisers, thanks to their prominent family backgrounds. But they are dedicated to promoting their causes in a new manner.

Being born with a silver spoon didn't leave them spoilt rotten. Their Western upbringing and Cambridge or Ivy League education equipped them with the morals and methods to be aware, to care and make a change. Rather than simply getting a seat on the board of their family's charity organisations, their good deeds all stemmed from something close to their heart.

Architect by training, Lo embraces the cause of arts and culture. Buddhist and vegetarian David Yeung encourages the city to adopt green eating and living. Having witnessed countless confused teenagers in court, barrister Brandon Chau reaches out to the underprivileged. Sisters Charlotte and Robin Hwang were inspired to feed the poor with surplus food from their family's hospitality business. And, as her family's textile business brought her to the rural corners on the mainland, Dee Poon decided to dedicate herself to helping education-deprived children.

The starting point of their charities, however, was more or less related to family influence.

Robin Hwang reckons that charity runs in the family. "The idea of charity work has always been with us as we were growing up," she says. Her grandfather, Hwang Chou-shiuan, founder of the Hong Kong Parkview Group, was an exceptional role model for her.

"He was very charitable," she recalls. "I remember strangers showing up at his funeral to pay their respect, saying he had paid for their education. But he never told us about these things - he did charity work for charity's sake."

Also not far from where his family stands is Green Monday's founder Yeung, who followed the footsteps of his Buddhist father and his uncle, founders of Glorious Sun Enterprises. He became a vegetarian about 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, Poon was also introduced to charity work because her family - which owns Harvey Nichols and Esquel, one of the world's biggest manufacturers - established the Y.L. Yang-Esquel Education Foundation. "We have operations in remote areas on the mainland. We started helping because we saw a need," says Poon, who is actively involved in several charities, including Teach for China and the Y.L. Yang-Esquel Education Foundation, which offers education programmes to ethnic minority children in Xinjiang.