Singapore - It takes a village to raise a chil
Beyond Social Services (Singapore) believes that it takes a village to raise a child.
Context: It is the belief that every member in the community, young and old, man and women, children and adult can contribute in nurturing a positive environment for youth, children and families to strive. The communities that we work with hand in hand are from low income families. In Singapore, even though the government provides a lot of assistance especially financial to our families in need, this has created a detrimental disempowered lifestyle for these families. They are stuck between relying on maintenance from the government that ensures shelter and food on the table and taking the risk of losing their rental house, food and hygiene when they get an average paying job for their big family.
Due to this, many families are unable to break away from their own personal poverty cycle. Even so, we do see families who have worked hard to break their poverty cycle, resulting them to have a good paying job and buying a house for themselves, but there was no platform for these stories to be shared for others to learn and be inspired. With this, Beyond’s role is to facilitate these stories and experiences for others to discuss, share, learn while building a supportive community that looks out for each other. Thus, creating a community of enablers for each other.
To achieve this, we organized activities with the communities that:
1. Enables them through their strength: Baker’s Beyond
As we share delicious cookies and pineapple tarts to you, let me describe a taste that you might also discover, the taste of love, synergy and passion. Baker’s Beyond is an initiative that aims to engage the strength of mothers living in poverty: COOKING AND BAKING WITH LOVE. Many of these mothers have different personal struggles that they face back home but all have a common dream, to provide the best for their children. This common dream slowly unites them together, as they generate that extra income that not only improves their finances at home, but also their self- esteem, and skill set that expands their own personal dream for themselves. This is true especially for one mother’s journey who did not expect to see herself opening up her own food shop and being a spokesperson of the group after being part of Baker’s Beyond.
2. Gives them a space to be heard safely on issues that concerns the community: The CommunityTheatre
Many of us would think that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. But that’s not the takeaway we took from The Community Theatre: Being Vulnerable Gives Strength to Others. To further explain, it is when one gives permission to share their stories that allow others to share their own vulnerable stories that we can learn from each other. Through the Community Theatre, youths from both rental and purchase flats devise a forum theatre piece for their own community with their personal stories.
To perform their stories in front of the audience, which creates a platform for them to be heard and appreciated. But changes begin when they realise how their stories encourage a member of the community or audience to raise their hand, come on stage and respond to the performance with their own personal experiences. This shows how a space that allows people to be heard safely
connects people together.
3. Creating opportunities for them to give back to their own community: Youth Volunteerism
“How can we volunteer when we are in need?”
Is a common saying that many of our members share. They feel that they are unable to volunteer because they feel inadequate or do not have the monetary resources to volunteer. As an organization that believes in the strength of the community, our role was to disrupt this mindset by identifying their strength and sharing the message: Everyone Has a Gift/ Strength that is useful for their community. And we begin to mold this mindset with our young members in the community: THE YOUTHS!
We begin with what we have and in this activity, it is our old t-shirts. Our goal is to appreciate the people who have given so much to the community but we only have our old t-shirts! But with a bit of creativity and love, we got the youths to create beautiful tote bags with their own personal touch. We hope that modeling creativity to give back to their own community allows them to feel confident of their own abilities to give back. Thus, we arebuilding a community of giving, compassionate and empathetic members.