Dear Friends, It was a training week for our colleagues as they deepened their understanding and sharpened their practice of Family Group Conferencing which includes Community Conferencing (AWB – 1836).Ā Ā This is a certification programme in partnership with the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences and supported by Daybreak Family Group Conferences and Eigen Kracht Centrale, the key conference coordinating agencies in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands respectively. As part of their training, participants had to organise a family event and reflect if elements of their experience could be transferred to the workplace. Ā One participant organised a dinner for his …
Another Week Beyond – 1907
Dear Friends, A planned conversation did not start on time. Many youths we invited did not show up and eventually the 8 that came were not familiar faces at our activities.Ā With the small number, the adults in the room outnumbered them and we were concerned that the youths would feel over-powered. Thankfully, the ice-breakers got people mingling and reduced initial perceptions people may have had of each other that would have been a barrier for active participation. Ā So, when asked to act out what life would look like in 5 years’ time, 3 visitors from Germany, 3 volunteers from …
Another Week Beyond – 1906
Dear Friends Since September last year, some of our colleagues have been corresponding with 15 undergraduates from the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences via email, WhatsApp and the occasional skype call. The communication provided the German students, a sense of the people and country they will be visiting on a study tour entitled, “Community-based child care and social work in Singapore: Exploration of Singapore as a city, as a culture, as a welfare system and as a community.” It was also an enriching experience for our colleagues to welcome questions that required a reflective response about our work, their professional …
Another Week Beyond – 1905
Dear Friends, We all know that when a decision must be made, it is best that everyone who has a stake in its outcome is part of the decision-making process.Ā Not that everyone has a right to decide but everyone has a right to inform the decision. What happens then if the one who will be most affected by the decision is unable to voice his or her views and requests? Last Saturday, 12 persons came together for a meeting to discuss the care arrangements for an infant we shall call Richie.Ā His mother has been struggling with his care …
Social workers need to work with neighbours too
I thank Mr. Kwan Jin Yao for his thoughtful comments with reference to his response āSocial services donāt necessarily replace support networks; Jan 12ā (A response Ā to a Straits Times opinion piece by Mr Gerard Ee – Link below) A community development approach by no means seeks to undermine the good work that is done by social workers. However, the expression of many core social work values gets buried under the deluge of organisational and structural constraints. Because the majority of endorsed practices in Singapore over the past 30 years have focussed on the professional solving problems for the individual, …
Stop seeing people as problems. They’re assets who build social capital
This article by Gerard Ee, first appeared in the latest volume of Commentary, a journal from the National University of Singapore Society. In the 1980s when I was a youth worker, young people who did not have the benefit of succeeding in school got on in life by taking up a trade. If they were willing, it would not have been difficult, by word of mouth, to find plumbers, carpenters, electricians or other craftsmen to take them on as apprentices. Most of the youth who came to my programmes started off as painters and along the way picked up other …