Impact overview

Project Flare

BIWEEKLY, SINCE JANUARY 2025

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Who it is for
Students aged 7 to 18 at Grace Orchard School, which serves students with mild intellectual disability
Where
Singapore
Run by
A founding team of three, an executive committee of six and a volunteer base above fifty
How it works
Workshops and biweekly lessons in public speaking and formal communication, on a curriculum written in-house rather than adapted from an existing format
Who it is for
Residents of the Telok Blangah ward who bring a problem to their Member of Parliament
Where
Tanjong Pagar GRC, Singapore
Run by
The constituency office of Ms Rachel Ong, staffed by volunteers
How it works
Volunteer case writers turn a spoken problem into a letter to the government agency that can act on it
Who it is for
Rohingya refugee students aged 14 to 18
Where
Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Run by
A student executive committee in Singapore, with Cahaya Surya Bakti, which operates schools for refugee students in Kempas, Pekan Nanas, Kota Tinggi, Kluang and Muar
How it works
Two tracks on Zoom: mathematics and English, and practical skills in drawing, sewing and video editing
Who it is for
A rural Khmer village and its primary school
Where
Cambodia
Run by
A school-organised service trip, funded by three months of student fundraising
How it works
Pathways to newly built wells, solar street lighting, home visits and English, hygiene and environment lessons

Meet-the-People Sessions

WEEKLY, SINCE NOVEMBER 2024

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Project Reperio

WEEKLY, SINCE JANUARY 2025

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Overseas service, Cambodia

NOVEMBER 2024

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Building sustainable models

Building sustainable models →

Delivery is the part I know how to do. The harder questions concern what allows this work to endure: how it is funded and staffed, what standing it has in law and what survives being handed on. These are the questions I have not yet resolved.

The writing arrives at the same question from the other side. A paper that ends on structural incentives and an essay that ends on who funds a curriculum are both asking who is made responsible, and neither can answer it either.

Research & Writing →

Meet-the-People Sessions

The session runs whether I turn up or not, which is what an institution means and it is also the problem: it runs on volunteers, and nobody is paid to be there. Half the cases need Mandarin and there is no reason the next volunteer will speak it. I do not know how you keep a pool of people reliable when nothing obliges them to be, or how you keep a service in a language when nobody is responsible for supplying it.

Project Flare

There is never a shortage of volunteers. A new cohort arrives every year. The problem is that everyone leaves within two years, so the supply is constant and the experience is not. What I do not know is whether the curriculum, the training and the school relationship can be written down well enough that the next team inherits a programme rather than starting one.

Project Reperio

Students finish with no exam, no certificate and no legal right to work. That is the situation, not a gap in the programme. We teach a second track of practical skills because informal work is the only kind available, which is either realistic or a way of accepting the situation, and I cannot tell which. What I keep asking is what completing something is worth when nothing recognises it, and whether the answer changes what we should be teaching.

Overseas service

Clean water and reliable lighting are not problems a school fundraiser can solve. They are governance problems that go back decades. We raised three times what we were asked to, and it bought what it was meant to buy: four pathways and six solar street lights that were working when we left. What it did not change is why the village needed us to raise it. Some problems a project can relieve. Others are produced by something a project cannot reach, and I did not know which I was in until I got home.

I have started wondering whether social enterprise or market-based models could sit alongside charitable work rather than replace it, though I do not yet know enough to judge whether that is realistic. Working out which of these problems is a policy question, which is a business one and which is neither, is what I want to spend the next few years on.