For 30 years, ORBIS Hong Kong has fought preventable blindness worldwide. But it’s not an urgent attention-grabbing life-or-death issue, and has only attracted 1.9% of total global donations. We had to show Hong Kong’s 7m people how important and impactful their contribution could be.Like the East Germans who lived under the shadow of the Berlin Wall, 39m blind people are held hostage by a wall of darkness. To galvanise our target, we gave them their own historical moment, their own wall to bring down.So we decided to create an installation that was to be destroyed by the people. A renowned artist, Prodip, was invited to design a wall of darkness. The wall is covered by graffiti depicting stories of blindness, pain and sorrow from the poorest regions of the world. Then we asked people to tear it down.

Like the Berlin Wall, we decided to create an installation that was to be destroyed by the people. A renowned artist, Prodip, was invited to design a wall of darkness. The Wall is covered by graffiti depicting stories of pain and sorrow from the poorest regions of the world.At TheDarkWall.com, each visitor could take part in tearing down part of this wall. And just like Berlin, they could take away the actual piece of the wall that they broke. Each piece was individually recreated and delivered to the donor, containing a unique part of the illustration as concrete proof of an act that took place in cyberspace, but made a tangible impact in the real world.

The results so far:- Thousands broke the wall on the first day.- Number of monthly donors increased significantly compared to last year- Free media worth approximately US$100,000 earned- Celebrities took the initiative to become ORBIS Ambassadors- Hong Kong’s largest fashion retail brand, I.T., designed a special cross-over collection with ORBIS to help raise funds- Contributions from the first month were enough to aid 3,066 blind people