The best decision I made in my freshman year was joining CTPCLC. Having had 6 years of prior exposure to community work in the grassroots and eldercare sector, my CTPCLP participation drastically challenged my pre-conceived notions of community work and expanded possibilities to how community engagement and empowerment can be done better. 

CTPCLC gifted me the opportunity to take the modules on “Hidden Communities” and “Community Leadership” and learn from the inspiringly unconventional barefoot doctor Dr. Tan Lai Yong, despite not being a student from the College of Alice and Peter Tan. These modules empower me with life skills like root-cause-analysis, negotiations and mentorship, which serves me even as I navigate in the community today. Learning ABCD and SROI models from Associate Professor Albert Teo, Jason Ng and Ng Yong Hao impressed upon me the importance to take a strengths-based approach when working with communities and prioritise impact evaluation (not as an after-thought but with outright intention).

Translating learning into action, the support of CTPCLC enabled me to found the NUS Mental Health Wing in 2015 with the vision of bringing about ‘mental wellness for all (undergraduates),’ through connecting partners (community-building), raising awareness (through authentic conversations) and doing advocacy through ground-up research (by partnering social service organisations). In 2016, together with my Co-Heads Charmaine and QiuLuan, we ran a year-long mental health campaign titled, “Better Understanding for Better Wellness” reaching out to more than 200 undergraduates through six dialogues with advocates, persons in recovery and social service leaders; volunteering opportunities and skills-based workshops (self-care, signs and symptoms, emotional CPR). This help to catalyse a ‘mental health movement’ in NUS. The process of leading this interest group taught me the importance of teamwork and strengthened my belief in an assets-based, research-informed, action-oriented collaborative community-building approach.

My entire experience as a fellow with CTPCLC not only piqued my curiosity about community leadership but also empowered me with skills to engage critically with social issues and convict me in taking action to make changes. This led me to embark on a career with CHAT, a national youth mental health outreach and assessment programme focused on empowering young people aged 16 to 30 years old to take charge of their mental health. In engaging young persons presenting with mental health distress and raising mental health literacy, I continue to put strengths-based, collaborative, research informed practice in action.

Believing in paying it forward (with the gifts gained from CTPCLC), I volunteer as a Curator with the National Youth Council’s Young ChangeMakers team to empower other budding community leaders with resources like seed funds and networks. Guided by lessons I drew from CTPCLC, I advocate a greater appreciation and mobilisation of assets in the community as well as build in evaluation-oriented research-informed practices.

Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “Go to the People, Live with them, Learn from them,

Love them. Start with what they know, Build with what they have… But with the best leaders, When the work is done, the task is accomplished, The people will say, ‘We have done this ourselves.’” How have you been living with, learning from and loving the people in the communities you choose to serve?