Honouring our Social Workers

Singapore’s first phone-in TV charity programme, “The Heartstrings Show” was televised by the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation in 1985, two years after the founding of the Community Chest.

We’ve been working behind the scenes with the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) since April for irememberSocialService, a public campaign to call out for memories on the social services industry in Singapore. The irememberSocialService initiative will tie in with NCSS’s 20th Anniversary this year. We’ve already received a slew of memories from the social services industry in Singapore, and I’ve chosen some of these vignettes that exemplify the struggles social workers face in their mission of rendering care-giving.

• Jayne Chiara Leong, a medical social worker and counsellor at the Assisi Hospice, dedicates a memory entry to a dearly missed patient, who was a living testimony and inspiration of love, friendship, and perseverance;
• Mohd Ali Mahmood on his personal condition and how that compelled him to help others in need;
• June Seet recounts her volunteering days through a social work attachment in her undergraduate days, and how that experience had changed her perspective which eventually helped her decide her career as a social worker; and
• Leslie Teo of Bizlink (an employment centre for the disabled) tracks the growth of the programme over the past 27 years.

This campaign will go public soon, calling for more  stories and memories from photos to even artefacts that were used by past social workers. With the collected memories, we’ll curate a modular exhibition on the History of Social Services in Singapore that will travel to various locations. At the moment, you can access some of the preliminary collections with the irememberSocialService tag at the bottom of the home page and start adding to our pool of submissions.

Yeong Chong
Editor, irememberSG
Singapore Memory Project