Speech by PA's Deputy Chairman Edwin Tong, at the People’s Association Community Seminar 2024

Speech by People’s Association Deputy Chairman and Minister of Culture, Community and Youth Edwin Tong, at the People’s Association Community Seminar 2024 at Our Tampines Hub on September 2024

             Good morning to all of you. I hope that you had a good breakfast this morning, enjoyed the snacks on the table.

2           This annual Community Seminar is a very important event for all of us, Grassroots Leaders, our partners, our friends and staff to come together. And I think as we did this morning, to reacquaint ourselves with one another, to see each other in person, make friends, make new ones.

3           And also, to take stock of what we have achieved so far, share best practices and chart the way forward.

4           This is also particularly significant because we welcome our new Chairman for the first time at Community Seminar. So, join me in welcoming Chairman. Our Chairman will join us for a dialogue later on after I finished speaking. But before that I thought this morning I'll take about 20 minutes or so to share three broad topics with you.

5           First, to give you an update on where we are. Last couple of years we have been talking about broadening our PA movement, encouraging more participation from people outside of PA, building stronger networks, looking at spaces that we have not previously occupied before. I'll give you an update on where we are and some of the best practices that we've seen.

6           Second, I will also tell you about some new tools that we will have, both for the community as well as for ourselves as Grassroots Leaders, as we look at leveraging on technology, using technology to help us connect better with residents.

7           And finally, in the last part of this speech, I will share a new vision that encapsulates what we've been doing for the past couple of years, and which sets out a path for us moving forward on how we look at ourselves at the People's Association.

8           PA, as you know, was formed in 1960. So next year is Singapore’s 60^th birthday, but actually for PA it will be 65 years. It has been at the heart of our country's efforts to build a strong, cohesive society, a resilient community right across Singapore.

9           For 64 years, we have fulfilled this mission. It is a very critical mission because we have adapted to changing environment, evolving with the times as our country developed from one phase to another, and one decade to another.

10           RSIS did a study in 2022 on social cohesion among Southeast Asian countries, and Singapore, as you can see from this, was perceived as the most socially cohesive. Now, this is one study, one survey, but by and large, if you pick up surveys, Pew Research, RSIS and so on, you will by and large see that we do stand high and do well on social cohesion. Not that we should take it for granted, but this is a measure of how far we have come.

11           And a good 61%, for those of you who can't see this diagram, felt that there was strong social cohesion in Singapore compared to sometimes significantly less than 50% for many other countries. But as I said, we can't take it for granted, and we must also know that this did not happen by chance.

12           It happened because in part, the Grassroots Leaders and partners of People's Association, all of you have played a very important role in building up this trust, going door-to-door, resident-by-resident, block-to-block, building up trust, serving our residents and building a strong community.

13           To address emerging community needs, many of our Grassroots Leaders have taken the initiatives of setting up taskforces. Taskforces to tackle local needs, taskforces to deal with local concerns, local considerations, and also to meet local aspirations. But the issues that we face today, despite all of this, and I thank all of you for taking this initiative, because as I visit the different constituencies, I know that each of you look at the programming differently.

14           It's very curated, and many of you look at the demographic, look at the aspirations of your local population, and you design programmes around it. And I think these taskforces reflect that, and I encourage you to continue doing so, and I thank you very much for paying a lot of attention to the needs of our residents.

15           But even as we do all of this within Singapore, outside of Singapore, we will face a far more troubled environment. I think all of you will know, you pick up the newspapers, at any time you'll see geopolitical tensions, strife, divisiveness around the world, and of course the impact of climate change, which we ourselves in Singapore have experienced.<

16           And from within Singapore, we also face challenges. An ageing population, a more diverse society with different aspirations, but also at the same time, potential divides that could pull us apart. Local born versus naturalised citizens, sometimes that tension flares up.

17           Tech-savvy or non-tech-savvy, socioeconomic status, even gender, all of these are lines of divide that we can't take for granted, and will be easily papered over.

18           At the same time, the People's Association, we also face challenges. Our society, compared to maybe the earlier days, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, have become more self-sufficient. There are commitments that our population faces that compete with the time that they might spend in volunteer work. Time and attention means that they might be less engaged with the usual People's Association activities.

19           It is also an increasingly more digital society, where more people-to-people interaction might have shifted online. And we see a greater interest and a desire for involvement in specific causes by our people, especially our younger population. And I think this is not a trend that is unique in Singapore, it's around the world as well.

20           And there are informal networks, such as ground-ups, where sometimes it is more of the cause that you want to serve than the committee or the organisation that you want to serve with that matters.

21           We have to be conscious of all these shifts and the evolution, and we have to strengthen our own approach, evolve our own approach to meet these new challenges.<

22           But at the same time, and I think all of you Grassroots Leaders very much on the ground would agree with me. Our people have very good ideas and they are passionate about a cause. They have good energy and very bold aspirations. And I think there is a strong desire and capacity to want to contribute, particularly when it revolves around a cause that they believe in. We saw this very much in our Forward Singapore exercise. Chairman spoke a lot about how everyone has a responsibility to one another, in the new social compact.

23           As we develop these responsibilities, helping one another and defining our success, less by what we can achieve at the top, but also by looking at how we can lift the bottom. How the last amongst us can be brought along in this new compact. And I think that is a really important way of looking at and defining our success in Singapore.

24           I think People's Association, all of us with our GROs, all of you Grassroots Leaders can play a part in wanting to adapt and evolve on how we engage a new generation in a new time like today. To have people working with one another, for one another, and also with the government in making solutions work. And this, I think is going to be central to our core mission of building a strong resilient community, and upholding our social cohesion.

25           I would say that this shift over the last couple of years can be encapsulated in three words, expanding community participation, across segments of society.

26           And I thought this morning I'll share with you a couple of examples from the different divisions around some best practices. Not that if you don't feature here, it is not good. We only have time to feature a few, but I want to encourage you by showing you what other divisions have been doing to expand and broaden community participation.

27           First, a couple of years ago, we launched the Community Volunteers scheme. 2022 to be precise, so it's about two years now, for people to be involved informally as volunteers in the community without being tied to a particular GRO or particular committee.

28           And it helps them to define the cause they want to serve, and then serve together with like-minded volunteers. We have made good progress on this front.

29           Today, two years down, we have more than 15,000 community volunteers, of which about 40% are youths. You can see the profile, and this is very different profile and different mix from the Grassroots Leadership. So reaching out to a very different profile of audience. We have also supported almost 250 projects with more than $300,000 in grants to spark off these projects, micro in nature, but can be impactful in its effect. And these projects span across a variety of different causes.

30           Let me give you three examples. At the Villa Verde RN in Limbang, Madam Noorita, she leads a group of Chinese and Malay Community Volunteers to promote cultural understanding and harmony by sharing about Malay heritage and culture.

31           She takes the view that the more people are aware, the more we can build up appreciation and understanding, and the more harmony there will be. A very simple, basic proposition, not easy to achieve all the time, but it is actually so true. So bit by bit, step by step, you can see these efforts.

32           At Marine Parade, Miss Sarah conducts sensory storytelling for children, using props and puppets to bring stories to life, engaging them, exposing them to different genres of storytelling, and also sparking that creativity in our children with hands-on activities.

33           At Kebun Baru Heights RN, Community Volunteers run a monthly DIY repair workshop, with mentorship from a volunteer at Teck Ghee's Repair Kopitiam. All of these might have been started by grassroots working with Community Volunteers, but eventually, the drive behind them, the power behind them, comes from our Community Volunteers. They come from people who are passionate and dedicated, and sometimes they feel that they have the skill sets to run these courses, and that's what they do, they step up.

34           All of this makes an impact on our society, bit by bit, and over time, collectively, this can change the complexion of the society we live in.

35           So our aim over the coming years is to grow the Community Volunteer scheme, follow our residents, support their causes, give them a base, and help them to make a broader impact on society.

36           Second, our youths, they're the leaders of tomorrow, and we must support them on their aspirations.

37           We must in fact bring them to the table to talk to us more, to engage with us, to share in constructive dialogue, and more importantly, to then figure out what actions we can take.

38           One example is the FutureYOUth Campaign, where the ambition is to have more than 100,000 youths nationwide, coming from a variety of different backgrounds, come together, share their aspirations. They wanted to do this as a ground-up project because they wanted to be heard on key issues which resonate with young people today.

39           Mental well-being, how we approach one another, with compassion in race and religion issues, as well as looking at the climate, sustainability, and environment issues. These topics were picked by them, and what they wanted to do was to engage in constructive dialogue, and come up with a consensus paper that defines how this mappings matter to young people, and what actions they can take, most importantly. I'm told that so far they've already surpassed their target.

40           They've got about 108,000 voices signed on to the Youth Charter, and they come from a variety of different backgrounds, typical mainstream schools, IHLs, polytechnics, the ITEs, the madrasahs. But they've also taken care to reach out to those who are in the reformative training centres, to get their views as well, to look at people who don't typically come to focus group discussions, or dialogues, or any of our People's Association events.

41           People from the civic society, the uniformed groups, sometimes also the youth wings of the religious organisations, to capture a broad-based view from people who might not previously have been heard. This effort is ongoing, sometime next year, we will look at launching the Charter, and the youths will have a platform to articulate how they see this campaign.

42           Third, yesterday NACLI celebrated our 60th anniversary. NACLI started in 1964, and we made a couple of announcements there. The announcements are centred on the thinking that community leadership and youth leadership needs a programme to give it a strong boost. We need to develop strong leadership in all segments of our community.

43           This was a picture taken yesterday at our 60th anniversary, where we announced two programmes, one a Youth Leaders Collective. A programme that helps them appreciate Singapore, see the trade-offs, take part in ideas that make Singapore tick for the next generation, and also bring them overseas, because sometimes you can see Singapore better from the outside.

44           So we bring them overseas to a Southeast Asian country, understand the cultural dynamics there, but also see Singapore from outside in, and have a greater appreciation for what we do.

45           We also have one for slightly older people, but youth leaders now in civic society, in social service agencies, those who are serving the community in the private sector in a variety of different ways. We are also bringing them together, and likewise, we will have a six-month programme for them. Socialise them to how Singapore works, what are our trade-offs, what is special about Singapore, and what we must keep doing to keep Singapore special.

46           All of that has been announced yesterday, so look it up, and if you know anyone within your Grassroots Organisations who might benefit from these courses, please sign them up, please suggest that, and encourage them to come and take part in these programmes.

Nurturing Micro-communities

47           Now what underpins all of this shift that we're doing, these examples, is a change in approach as well. We are very used to organising an event for our residents, but what about if we switch this around and look at some of the examples, like what we did with the Community Volunteers. We organise an event with our residents, with our volunteers, and look at serving the broader population based on ideas and causes that they proposed to us, rather than the other way round.

48           To give you one more example, Grassroots Leaders at Bishan started, now they started it, a food rescue initiative, which today is now largely run by a very dedicated Community Volunteer. She has not, I'm told, had prior grassroots experience, but she now come together, runs the programme, and volunteers like Madam Wee Sun has become motivated to stay on and help to run this programme at Bishan.

49           So all of these efforts, including nurturing micro-communities, looking at how we can build up smaller groups, scale them up into bigger ones, and have a bigger impact. All of that should be the way we look at running our events at the Grassroots Organisations.

50           Last year, 19 RNs held 80 small group conversations to hear from more than 600 residents and community partners. They did this because they wanted to understand what were the specific gaps, what were the little spaces that could be filled better. What were some of the programmes that the local community would benefit from, and how could they work with residents, Community Volunteers, to make those programmes work. For example, fresh vegetables distributed to residents in need, and also those staying alone at Jurong Central Zone E RN, or a community fridge at Ghim Moh Gardens RC has been very successful. These are, again, some very local, maybe even micro examples.

51           But I encourage all of us to think about this, use these as examples to grow the space that we're in, to grow beyond just a grassroots network, and to look at engaging our residents organically, and working with Community Volunteers. This overall means that the impact that we can make will be expanded, and the influence therefore that we can have on society, how we shape society, can change.

52           Now my second point about growing micro-communities is to tell you that despite working at a very local level, I want you to know that you will not be working alone. All of your CDs, all of your GCDs, will be tapped into a network of about 10,000 partners that we have built up over the years. They include partners like this, who have joined us here today, whether it is FairPrice, or L'Oreal, or POSB, or even Touch Community Services, all of these together with IHLs, there are 10,000 of them that we can plug into. Civic society, uniformed group, social service, causes, private enterprises, corporate enterprises, big, small, and so on, in different sectors.

53           All of them provide us a network, and allows us to work with them to expand your reach. So if you are keen on programmes where you can benefit from this partnership, work with your CDs, work with your GCDs, and they will be able to link you up.

54           Sembawang Central, for example, has been working with 200 volunteers from various of these community network partners to help to identify and then help seniors at risk. This network is not easy to build up, but it is valuable because these are our friends, these are our partners, and they allow us to tap into the reach that they have. And this was particularly beneficial at Sembawang Central.

55           Other examples, in my own constituency at Joo Chiat, we have a big team that comes together organically from amongst our residents as we do estate upgrading. So we had volunteer architects, volunteer quantity surveyors, engineers, all step up from within the community to help give back to the community.

56           Our Community Sport Network have also been working with various partners since 2004 to work at strengthening family bonding. So we use sports, we use ActiveSG, we use the Football Association, we use the various ActiveSG academies to reach out through football to touch families and bring families together.

57           This event was particularly touching for me because we saw for the first time in this event, the father and son, and father and daughter on the pitch playing together, and I think that when I ask many of the kids, was oftentimes the first time they had an occasion with the parents.

58           So these are different ways in which we could tap into the networks, our partners' networks, and broaden our reach, and make the impact of our events a lot more broad scale and a lot more impactful.

59           Moving on to my second point, three broad initiatives to tell you about, one of which will be launched today.

60           The first is, we've been using technology to look at how we can equip our RNs better. Some of you in the different divisions would already have been using this. We call this the Smart Networked RN Centres. This allows residents to access the facilities without having to wait for a PA staff or to rely on the presence of a PA staff.

61           For example, at Punggol Damai RN, the residents using this made the RN Centre their own, created board games, created a system where they can bring residents down together, and gradually neighbours joined up and allowed them to build a different community using digital means. So digitally connected, you don't need to have physical presence of officers on the ground, and you can still access the premises to build your programmes.

62           Second, we will be developing a community portal to amplify our presence online. We want to reach our residents with more personalised communications, interactions through the portal effectively, efficiently, and at scale. We are currently building it and prototyping it and testing it out with several divisions.

63           The idea is to create amongst residents a greater sense of connection online to their community, to encourage, to empower residents to take action in their own community, and to allow us to really reach out across the analogue as well as the non-analogue digital space to complement our physical outreach.

64           Some of the features that you can look forward to on this portal will be a live community news feed that keeps residents informed of what's going on around the neighbourhood, and we are trying to see whether we can make it geo-located so that it can be part of where you are as well. Second, a platform to sign up for these activities. Very often I get questions, how come we know all these things on the flyer, but where do I go online? Where do we sign up? So we thought we put it all in one space, you can navigate it, and then you can sign up at the same space. We wanted to also give information on local community resources.

65           There will be a lot of information that we broadcast on national programmes, but as I said just now, many of our local divisions have set up highly customised, very curated, targeted programmes for their own residents, and this can reside on this portal. And finally, we have personalised broadcasting functions, push notifications, bulletin boards, essentially to create an e-community.

66           We are working with GovTech to develop this portal. We have started to pilot this, as I said, we have now got 35 RNs on board across 10 different divisions, trying out especially with the seniors and young seniors, because we want them to be accustomed to using this on a digital scale, to be familiar with technology, and we thought we'll try out with the seniors and young seniors first. So far the feedback has been good, we're going to take on board their suggestions and their comments, scale it up, and then we'll launch it at the appropriate time.

67           Third, for all of you, our grassroots leaders, today we'll be launching a new app, the GRL@PA mobile app. I know that you've already been using the GRL@PA Internet Portal, and this has been around for a few months now. But the plan is to make it mobile so that it can be with you at any time in your phone and it can be accessible conveniently. It is designed to be a one-stop mobile app to make volunteering easier and also better for you, enhancing the entire volunteer experience.

68           Some of these features would include a personal dashboard to keep track of upcoming events and the latest updates. So it will be again customised to each Grassroots Leader based on what you sign up, based on the events that you're in, based on the GRO that you are involved in. There will also be a knowledge library that will have all of the latest government policies, key points, how you can communicate the programmes better to our residents, what are some of the new announcements at Budget or at Rally, or some of the new programmes that affect your residents. They will reside in a customised knowledge library that will be on this app.

69           There will also be best practices, we thought it would be a good idea to share ideas because every time I come across different divisions, there are so many good ideas which I thought we can scale up to other divisions as well. We thought we'll put some of the best practices on this mobile app and have them shared across all of you in different divisions.

70           Eventually over time, we are also going to be developing a G-FAST system that will sit in this mobile app. I think some of you use the G-FAST system for accounting purposes. And also the GEMS system will also sit on this app. But these two needs a little bit more time because of the security implications and they'll be launched at a different date.

71           But today, after I finish this speech, we'll put up a short little video for you on how you can sign up and a little QR code for you to sign up. It will go live today. Give us feedback, this is something that we are launching based on a lot of feedback already, but there is, I mean, it's not entirely a perfect system yet. So give us your feedback on how this can be improved.

72           Finally, my last point, let me move on to what else we're going to be doing to look at ourselves from the outside in and to refresh our vision and mission as we move towards Community 2030. We have spoken extensively about what we want to do to broaden our reach, to expand our horizons, do better programmes, partner with third parties, build up the Community Volunteer scheme, tap onto our networks and so on.

73           Our core mission remains that of building strong social cohesion. This remains unchanged. People-to-people relations, people-to-government relations, but we asked ourselves if today's current vision and mission statements accurately reflects PA's ambition in the next bound of trying to attract more partners to join us and try to work with different networks.

74           About a year and a half ago, we started an exercise to look at whether we should redefine our mission and vision. It sounded easy because it's just a string of words, but my colleagues on the Board will know that this was a very difficult exercise. We also engaged more than 10,000 stakeholders of all backgrounds, Grassroots Leaders, non-Grassroot Leaders, members of public, volunteers, partners, our staff, our external networks and so on to get views.

75           And the results by and large showed that people were appreciative of PA's contributions to the country and they wanted to play a part in this community building process. They wanted also to be contributors themselves, not just passive recipients of the programmes that we come up with.

76           They hope that PA would facilitate more opportunities for ground-up action and also enable residents to be empowered to help one another. So we wanted to capture this shift of expanding participation simply and clearly in our vision.

77           Many words were considered, I must say. We debated this many times. We changed. We used this word. And then someone said no. We had the Board come up with a variety of different words. We opened up the thesaurus many times to look at what new words we could use.

78           We had many rigorous discussions in our PA board. We had ex-chairman weigh in with his wealth of knowledge and experience on how exactly to frame this. Eventually, we had various iterations, but after about a year and a half, we settled on something that could help us achieve our vision and mission.

79           Our refreshed mission reads like this, to "Spark and Nurture Community Participation for a Caring and United Singapore." Let me explain this a little bit more.

80           Moving forward, as I said, the People's Association, what we want to do is not just serve our residents and organise events to bring people together.

81           We want to create opportunities to spark that desire that is already present in the community for them to step forward, empower them, take charge and galvanise them into action. We want to nurture our population's talents and aspirations to be involved in wanting to shape our community together so that residents are no longer just consumers of our programmes, but are effectively contributors and over time can also be changemakers in our community themselves.

82           Our goal is to build a community that cares. As I said just now, defining ourselves as where we are with the last person in our community, rather than just looking always at how we can achieve at the top. Where people will feel connected to and also responsible for the well-being of one another.

83           And that sense of unity will help us navigate the next 60 years and beyond as we approach Singapore’s 60 birthday next year. This leads us into our refreshed vision and we want this to be “A Nation that Cares for our Community”, reflecting what I said earlier.

84           As I said, People's Association started 65 years ago, almost 65 years ago now. Our vision, our mission and everything that you see here will just be words if we don't put action behind them, we don't make them come to life, we don't take substantive and real action to make it come to life. It is still a critical mission for us to build the Singapore society.

85           Much as we have succeeded in the last 60 years, or almost 65 years now, the next 60 years and beyond will not be as easy, will not be without challenges, will not be without obstacles.

86           So it is important that we remain true to strengthening social cohesion, building resilience and overall forging a community that you and I will be proud of to leave behind for the next generation. This will be a lot of work, but the work that we do collectively as People's Association and our partners, our stakeholders and our networks, they will make a lasting impact on our society. Just as the work of the previous generation have made a lasting impact on us. Just think back to how we responded collectively as a society during COVID.

87           Think back to those days, just a few years ago, how we rallied together, came together, sometimes at risk to ourselves, many of our Grassroot Leaders, visiting blocks and residents where there were many COVID-plus cases without knowing what the implications were. That is the strength and hallmark of building resilience in Singapore. That work didn't come over night, that outcome didn't come overnight. It was built up over many, many decades of hard work on the ground, bit by bit, door-to-door, person-by-person.

88           This work that we do, a lot to do, a lot to maintain Singapore, where we are, but if you want to keep Singapore special, this is the work that we have to do collectively.

89           This is the vision that we have to collectively tune ourselves towards. And it takes all of us, it takes for all of us to come together to define what kind of Singapore we want to see, and how, very importantly we want to keep Singapore special.

90           These are some of the things that, I hope you can think about as you break into your ACWP in the coming months. Think about what are the different bits we can do, how we can energise, how we can activate, and how we can partner with a broader group of people beyond just the Grassroots Organisations to make a stronger, exponentially larger impact on society.

91           Thank you very much.