I thank Mr. Kwan Jin Yao for his thoughtful comments with reference to his response “Social services don’t necessarily replace support networks; Jan 12” (A response 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 …