|
PSSA 2008 - Informal Group Award Winner
 NTU Welfare Services Club
Befriending and Empowering the beneficiaries, and Creating public awareness of their needs.
The above encapsulates what the Nanyang Technological University Welfare Services Club (NTUWSC), a non-profit student club, hopes to achieve through its six regular service projects and four special projects.
Two of NTUWSC’s regular service projects are targeted at befriending the elderly and the youth. Every week, some 60 NTU student volunteers will visit the 130 elderly residents at the Asian Women’s Welfare Association Community Home for Senior Citizens to talk and interact with them. Its volunteers also double up as big brothers and sisters to the youths at the Singapore Boys’ Home, Singapore Boys’ Hostel and the Singapore Girls’ Home. Besides engaging in activities, these brothers and sisters would readily lend a listening ear to the younger ones and be positive role models for them.
NTUWSC seeks to empower the beneficiaries through availing opportunities for them to contribute to society. For example, ‘Patchworks’, the social entrepreneurship venture of the club, was an intergenerational collaboration with the elderly to share their recipes with younger Singaporeans through the publishing of ‘Patchbook of Flavours’ last year. To help beneficiaries with intellectual disabilities integrate into the society and build up their confidence, NTUWSC conducts weekly basic life and social skills sessions at the Woodlands Gardens School. Some of the outcomes of their efforts include seeing their beneficiaries being able to handle tasks such as crossing the road safely and taking buses by themselves.
NTUWSC has been relentless in creating public awareness of their beneficiaries through public education. Annual projects such as ‘Project IDentity’ and ‘Challenge ur Limits (CurL)’ are organised to raise awareness of persons with intellectual disabilities, and to encourage their beneficiaries to look beyond their physical and mental disabilities to achieve their dreams respectively.
In addition to helping local beneficiaries, NTUWSC also conducts overseas voluntary expeditions to help the less privileged abroad. In 2007, its club members helped to build homes and teach English in a pre-school in the Philippines.
The NTUWSC started its services in 1985 and currently has over 700 student volunteers rolling out weekly and project-based programmes. For its extensive outreach efforts involving a wide spectrum of beneficiaries, NTUWSC is the winner of the President’s Social Service Award (Informal Group Category.)
Other
PSSA 2008 winners:
|
