Mobilising Community: Beyond Social Services
Above: Students perform at the Healthy Start Child Development Centre (HSCDC), an early childhood education programme by Beyond Social Services. HSCDC provides quality education and care to children from less privileged backgrounds, through the building of a nurturing environment that involves caregivers, teachers, students, neighbours, and the wider society. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
An emphasis on giving back has always been core to the Boutiques identity, and stumbling upon various charities and social enterprises at our fairs is in no way rare. A pioneer in Singapore’s social service sector, Beyond Social Services is one such charity that focuses on helping children and families in Singapore from disadvantaged backgrounds, with the eventual aim of letting young people break away from the poverty cycle. They were a new face during our fair in November 2019, where they were represented by one of their initiatives, Beyond Bakers. The team of tenacious women behind this baking programmes stirred the hearts of many with the delicious cookies at their booth, and the inspiring stories they shared during Beyond Baker’s seminar at The Circle, a new space for talks and workshops that was debuted at the same fair. Since then, the programme has found another group of supporters in the Boutiques community for their bake sales and, above all, the determination of their women to overcome all odds.
Beyond Bakers stands as a striking example of the vision of community which drives Beyond Social Services and the work they do. We sat down with Gerard Ee, veteran social worker and executive director of Beyond Social Services, as well as fellow social worker and team leader at Beyond Social Services, Stella Jayanthi, to better understand what it means a to take a community-based approach in social services, and rethink the equation behind social issues and their resolution.
Established in 1969, the Bukit Ho Swee Community Service Project sought to tackle the concerns of residents by visiting their homes. A cooperative society to provide cheaper rice and other household items was also organised. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
After several setbacks and a brief closure in 1975, the project reopened with an official premise named Nazareth Centre. In 1987, they officially registered as Bukit Ho Swee Social Service Centre and became a one-stop social service centre for children, youth, parents, and the elderly. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
Drawn to serving more beyond Bukit Ho Swee, the organisation changed its name to Beyond Social Services in the 2000s, while streamlining its mission to focus on children and youths. Beyond has since reached out to over 10,000 rental units in areas like Whampoa and Ang Mo Kio. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
What happens when social services come to a standstill?
It might seem like any ironic question for a social service provider to ask, but as Gerard says, the answer might not be too far-off if we stopped thinking of “professionals” as sole providers of public services, and started turning our gazes inwards to utilise more resources we already have.
Community-led action has been entrenched in Beyond Social Services from the very beginning. Unlike many social service organisations who attribute their genesis to a single individual or group, Beyond Social Services grew from a diverse collective of organisations and individuals who united in 1969 after the Bukit Ho Swee fires. From a Buddhist monk to an Anglican pastor and Catholic missionaries, these unsung heroes put aside their differences to form a collaboration with the shared goal of improving living conditions for low-income Singaporeans in Bukit Ho Swee.
Today, while they may be a voluntary welfare organisation, Beyond Social Services prefers to think of themselves as a village focused on collectively raising children and youths into responsible adults no matter their socioeconomic backgrounds. Various volunteer-led initiatives such as educational programmes, as well as offering caregivers training and employment opportunities, are implemented to cultivate nurturing communities that can support their young towards striving for better futures. These have underscored the importance of mutual aid and addressing issues from the ground up, which Beyond Social Services has sought to inculcate in the neighbourhoods they serve.
COVID-19 became a revealing example of what a “sense of solidarity” could accomplish, Gerard says, as many of us came face-to-face with new realities, including the abrupt closure of social service centres in housing estates during Circuit Breaker. “We managed to keep four essential services going because people in the neighbourhood stepped up,” he tells us. In many ways, a neighbourhood coming together to help each other — and ultimately themselves through difficult times, flips on its head the notion of those in need as merely beneficiaries who receive help from charitable third parties. This community-based approach has found remarkable success in many of Beyond Social Services’s initiatives, one of which we are quite familiar with here at Boutiques.
Above: From left, Yashmin, Azizah, and Rina of Bakers Beyond at the team’s baking facility in Whampoa Drive, which is fully furnished with commercial equipment like convection ovens and stainless steel work counters. It was only in 2019 that the women had a space to call their own. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
Cookies of Change
If you visited one of our in-person fairs recently, it would have been hard to miss the beaming ladies of Bakers Beyond. They are part of a Beyond Social Services initiative that aims to help women from underprivileged neighbourhoods earn an extra income through bake sales. Stella Jayanthi, a fervent advocate for low-income women and single mother of three herself, was the one who piloted the programme six years ago.
“We were borne out of the fact that many of our women could not work full-time,” Stella says. “So, we thought: What could they do collectively by bringing their strengths and know-how together to generate income? The initial team consisted of just five mothers and each of them were already baking from home for family and friends. Coming together gave them an opportunity to do something bigger and cater to a larger audience.”
Behind the delicious cookies also lies a microcosm of Beyond Social Services’s vision of community. No doubt there were challenges of bringing together individuals with different backgrounds and experiences, but through combining their abilities and learning from each other, the women have created new possibilities for success in their common dream for a better life. This is observed even in the simple exchange of family recipes, which Stella tells us has led to the formulation of a wildly successful pineapple tart recipe that is now kept under lock and key.
More importantly, Stella ensures the women of Bakers Beyond are also the ones steering the ship and keeping everything, including each other, up to speed in their kitchen of hope. “We help these women learn not only how to bake, but how to embrace their strengths and their ability to be leaders,” Stella says. For instance, Rusnah, the oldest member of Bakers Beyond, had taken the initiative to procure ingredients and brainstorm with senior bakers on cookies the team could bake. After suffering a mild stroke in 2018, she passed the baton on to younger members, who fulfilled their new roles quickly thanks to the continuous guidance of older members. “The grooming of leadership among the bakers is an ongoing thing,” Stella adds. “Right now, the person leading Bakers Beyond was someone who stepped in here about five years ago not even knowing how to bake!”
As they benefit from the programme, the women of Bakers Beyond are also simultaneously looking out for their neighbours. “A lot of women who are part of the team are also leaders and volunteers in the community,” Stella says. “They help with things like food ration distribution, and they take it upon themselves to support others as well.”
Every Hari Raya, for instance, the women would organise themselves to give back to those around them. One year, it was distributing green porridge they had made to their neighbours; another time, it was a trip to Batam where they cooked for a village of 200 people and connected with the women there. More recently, the women had voluntarily distributed extra bags of flour they received from the food bank to families staying in their blocks. These acts of reciprocal kindness and generosity are a stark reminder that everyone can make valuable contributions to the community regardless of social background. They are also testament to the many more gaps that can be filled when a culture of giving is imbibed into people.
Stella (second from left) is joined by Azizah, Yashmin, and Rina at Bakers Beyond’s panel discussion during The Gifting Edition 2019. Entitled Being Strong When Everything Goes Wrong’, the session gave the women a platform to share their stories of grit, courage, and camaraderie with a larger audience. Photograph courtesy of Beyond Social Services.
The women of Bakers Beyond earn a bulk of their income from festive bake sales during occasions like Christmas, Hari Raya, and Deepavali. Photograph courtesy of Bakers Beyond.
The Bakers Beyond team have themselves been supported in their baking endeavours by the many “friendships” the team has established over the years, which provided them access to important resources. This included people opening their kitchens to the women at a time when the programme had no proper baking space. Meanwhile, selling at a place like Boutiques has been a “real big boost”, especially because of the opportunities it presented for the women to reach out to even more in the community — whether through conversations with shoppers at their stall or during their very own panel discussion at our fair in November 2019. These “real life exchanges” matter the most to Stella, who believes they are a chance for the women to connect meaningfully with shoppers.
“They might not have realised it, but a community has come around these women,” Gerard tells us. “At Boutiques, many people stopped by and were very interested to hear the story — what are all these women doing here? What are these old-school cookies doing in such a place? And in a very roundabout way, people get attracted to the reason and their ears open a little bit. It starts them thinking and asking questions, and eventually, it's a road in into a deepening of social issues.” However, engaging with the larger community has never been about encouraging one-way donations; its purpose is to motivate the co-creation of lasting solutions by pooling strengths and social capital that everyone can benefit from. Gerard stresses that while the community has a responsibility to its people, it goes hand-in-hand with personal responsibility. Just like how the women of Bakers Beyond have taken ownership of their circumstances and action to carve out prospects of a better future, the ball starts rolling when those in need help themselves first. This was illustrated by Bakers Beyond’s first baking project, which was clinched after a corporation decided to purchase hampers from the programme instead of buying from retail shops.
“We told [the corporation] why we were organising the women,” Gerard recounts. “The social issue here is women who have very heavy caregiving responsibilities that are not recognised economically, so they cannot go to work. In that sense, apart from looking after their families, our women were taking the initiative to try and bring home some money. That resonated strongly with the corporation, and over the past six years they have been very staunch supporters of the way we go about things.”
Bridging the Community
What we arrive at is a perspective of social services that begins and ends with the community in a full circle. Although Gerard tells us this focus on community is a conservative one, it also elicits a more nuanced way of thinking about social issues as complex, interconnected problems that are often extend beyond the individual and unsurmountable alone, even as most of its consequences are manifested at an individual level. This belief was one of the factors that prompted Beyond Social Services to return to their community-based approach after a period of moving away from it.
“[In the 2000s], we used to work in the prison, trying to create programmes to rehabilitate people,” Gerard tells us. “But then we were thinking, perhaps we should go upstream a bit. Where did all these people come from? Probably areas like public rental blocks. So, eventually, we decided to come down to the community again and try to change it — to make neighbourhoods protective factors and not factories for criminals. Over the last 10 years or so, we've started reorganising our work this way.”
The crew and cast of ‘The Block Party’, a docu-performance devised, written, and performed by members of The Community Theatre. (TCT). A programme by Beyond Social Services for low income children and youth. TCT aims to engage wider society on the challenges faced by those who are less advantaged through the staging of public shows. Photograph by The Community Theatre.
The Block Party premiered at the M1 Peer Pleasure Festival in 2019, and related personal, thought-provoking stories of its performers surrounding issues such as poverty in public rental flats, discrimination, and injustice faced by Malay communities over the last 50 years. Photograph courtesy of Zinkie Aw.
Taking social issues back to the community and encouraging people to work through them collectively is also about narrowing divides, which builds bridging social capital for those on the margins. Gerard shares the effects of this through one of his favourite anecdotes, which involves a young boy who, on a trip to study with a volunteer at the Bloomberg office, found himself being invited to eat freely in a pantry that he believed resembled a 7-Eleven. After returning in marvel, the boy — who had previously expressed his desire to be a cleaner — was told by volunteers that if he was really determined, he could start by cleaning in the Bloomberg office where the amazing pantry was.
“And that's aspiration you know, even it’s just up a notch,” Gerard says. “I think for the child, he just couldn't reconcile the fact that he stood in the middle of what, in his mind, was a convenience store where he could eat everything for free. That broadened his perspective on what the world actually is like. It’s not just my neighbourhood where everybody works as a mover and cleaner, and that's more or less going to be my ticket in life.”
It is a story that sums everything up. We are presented with the balance between personal responsibility and community responsibility, in which others dare to dream bigger and aim higher because we open up our spaces and resources to one another. There is acknowledgement that, while we may not have the same finish lines in mind, supporting others does not mean bringing them over to the ‘right’ lane. Instead, whether someone desires to be a cleaner or a supervisor in an office, there are no wrong lanes and everyone can be uplifted no matter their circumstances.
The power of community building and its implications on social issues might sound like a lofty idea, and some would be tempted to say it is a feat that can only be accomplished by a social service organisation. Except we already know that Beyond Social Services began from a coalition of individuals and groups, and as Gerard reminds us, looking to each often taps on the natural networks we already have around us.
“When family and community are working, we may not actually need professionals [to provide social services] anymore,” says Gerard. “So perhaps we need to re-examine the way we are describing the world we live in, and that is what Beyond is trying to do: to highlight the fact that professionals have emerged not because life has improved. Rather, the proliferation of social services is actually bad news — it means community and family are not working, and you have to pay somebody to substitute that.”
Read more about Beyond Social Services and Bakers Beyond on our #BoutiquesSupports page, or visit Beyond Social Service’s official website for detailed information about their programmes, as well as how you can volunteer or donate.
By SERENE GOH of Public Culture, an editorial experience studio that believes in connection over communication.