Getting neighbours to fix spoilt bikes

Getting neighbours to fix spoilt bikes

In a Singapore where many cry out for more social services, a lone voice in the wilderness is crying out for a scale-down.

It belongs to Mr Gerard Ee, executive director of Beyond Social Services, a voluntary welfare organisation which helps curb delinquency among young people from low-income families.

The 52-year-old veteran social worker is publicity-shy and not well known outside social service circles. In his first lengthy profile interview, he says he believes that progress lies not in the proliferation of more social services but in getting families and communities to make social services redundant.

He is convinced that professional social workers have hijacked the problems of people and ended up weakening families and communities, instead of helping to build them up. After more than 30 illustrious years in the sector, where he helped the Government pilot the first Family Service Centre as a community-based social service facility in 1991, he's making a turnaround.

He only wishes he had done it sooner.

Over the last five years, he has overhauled the way his organisation operates. Each year, it helps about 5,000 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds by diverting them away from the juvenile justice system, giving them tuition and helping their parents parent better. Some of these are youth in crisis, saddled with unplanned pregnancies, under threat of being filed as Beyond Parental Control, caught by shopkeepers for theft and so forth.

Instead of taking yet more government funds to deliver yet more social services for them, he has retooled his 85-staff-strong organisation to mobilise the community to come up with its own solutions and largely raise its own funds to cover its yearly operating costs of about $5 million.

Be it youths loitering at the void deck till late at night or drug addiction, he sees all social issues as a "an opportunity to rally and build the community", not just "a problem to be fixed".

"In any case, social problems are complex and if they could be fixed, they would have been fixed long ago. It's an imperfect world we live in. It is not a perfect world that we should endeavour to create but to help people thrive in an imperfect world," he sums up.

Within his organisation, he's banished words like "clients" and "customers" and "beneficiaries".

"We're trying to create what we call a membership organisation. So, the staff, volunteers, service users, donors, members of public, we're all members.

"As staff, we're privileged members of the community because we get a salary. But we're not here as an expert doing things for people. We are all members with different gifts, cooperating with each other."

He writes a weekly e-mail - a practice he has kept up since 2004 - drumming into his colleagues and volunteers his watchword "WITH", which stands for "Where Is The Healing?"

He is constantly cautioning: "How much are we in partnership with the people? Are we with the people? And if we are, where is the healing?"

Obstacles to healing

He faces many obstacles.

One is the ingrained "saviour mentality" of social workers and the reflexive instinct of some to turn everything into programmes with measurable outcomes. Another is the view prevalent among many that it's the Government's job to provide social services, not the community's.

Nevertheless, he perseveres in "returning" problems to the community by inviting them to get involved in the lives of those among them needing support.

Earlier this month, Beyond sent out its usual weekly bulletin to its 500 volunteers, informing them of its first Community Response Conference to discuss the plight of two families (names kept confidential) facing serious challenges in Bukit Ho Swee. Eight people attended. They asked questions and came up with ideas to help the families.

Mr Ee plans to scale up these conferences to once a week and to include the other four neighbourhoods Beyond operates in - Ang Mo Kio, Lengkok Bahru, Henderson and Whampoa - by next year. He's also looking for more people willing to help solve endemic problems in poor neighbourhoods.

Two weekends ago, Beyond organised a Restorative Neighbourhood Project in an area where bicycle theft was a problem.

On a Saturday morning, some 30 neighbourhood kids, five of their parents, 22 residents, eight grassroots leaders and the area's Member of Parliament came together to refurbish donated and abandoned bikes. Eighteen corporate volunteers joined in, paying for the spare parts. The police also dropped by with bicycle locks, talked about the consequences of stealing and registered the restored bikes.

At the end of the session, a few bikes still couldn't be fixed and had to be sent to the neighbourhood bicycle shop.

"Will it change the crime situation? We don't know, but at least we had one good day of cooperation and helping each other. And to top it off, the bicycle shop owner refused to take any money for his work," he recounts, his craggy face crinkling into a rare smile.

Friend to runaways

But when the topic turns to his personal life, Mr Ee becomes cagey.

He will only say that he is the eldest son of a driving instructor and nurse, and grew up in a terraced house in Upper Thomson. He attended St Michael's School, St Joseph's Institution and Catholic Junior College, dropping out after a year to "bum around", before doing his A levels privately.

Mr Ee is married to a sales executive and they have two children. They live in a three-room HDB flat in Yishun.

He says he stumbled into social work when he landed a job running fitness classes at the YMCA for six months. When he was 21, he became a youth worker with the Bukit Ho Swee Community Service Project, set up in 1969 by a group of concerned religious people - including Buddhists, Anglicans and Catholics - and some service clubs, to offer welfare relief to the residents after a series of fires in the area.

His brief was to work with the "rough and tough" male youths outside and keep them out of the community project's Beo Crescent premises. One day he brought 10 of them in for a meeting. Within minutes, all the furniture was overturned. "It was a nice introduction for me," he relates cryptically, adding that he learnt that people live down to your expectations of them.

He spent nights hunting down runaways and rescuing kids from being thrown back into the courts. Dr Tan Poh Kiang, 47, a family physician and long-time volunteer in Bukit Ho Swee, says of Mr Ee: "I can't recount how many times he would go in the late night or early morning to the police station to negotiate with the police to prevent them from making a formal charge."

Mr Ee soon realised he was good at youth work and "became someone I liked better than before", so he stuck with it.

What inspired him was the more than 100 tireless volunteers who helped out in the Bukit Ho Swee project, alongside just three social workers, who came cheerfully every night to run tuition programmes and camps, cook and care for the kids.

A few years after he joined in 1982, the centre began chasing organisational excellence and hiring more professional social workers, who soon grew to overtake the volunteers in numbers. The professional track "took on a life of its own", he observes, and in time "unintentionally destroyed" the volunteer ethos of the community service project.

Losing his ponytail

But those were hectic days, with scant time for introspection.

In the 1990s, Mr Ee, still wearing his signature ponytail, was approached by the Singapore Prison Service to help teach anger management skills to prisoners sentenced for domestic violence.

Mr Sazali Wahid, 53, then a prison officer and now director of community development at Yayasan Mendaki, recounts how Mr Ee agreed at once to cut off his ponytail when told the prisons would not allow him in otherwise.

He says: "My respect for him went up a few notches. I thought, now here is a guy who is willing to do whatever it takes to help others. And through the years that I've known him, this was affirmed over and over."

By 2001, Mr Ee had expanded his services beyond Bukit Ho Swee and changed the organisation's name to Beyond Social Services. In the mid-2000s, Beyond grew rapidly, from 30 staff to almost 120. It began working in schools, prisons, running a pregnancy crisis helpline, even running two residential facilities - one for children and one for youth separated from their families.

But it slowly dawned on him, as his perspective grew broader, that "we were doing more harm than good".

"It used to be just a few of us in the helping profession, and hundreds of volunteers. But over the years, it had became 120 of us and only a few of them. We caught ourselves and said: 'This is crazy. Even if you double our numbers to 240, we can't save the world.' It has to be the community that integrates people, not the social service agency," says the man who is trained in counselling and has a post-graduate diploma in family therapy.

He recalls a particular boy he used to help for years, to no avail. Mr Ee picked him up from home and took him to primary school but by secondary level, the boy was playing truant and running away from home.

One day, a professional footballer, who was a volunteer, told the boy: "I don't care what your problems are, just follow me." The boy thrived in the football club, and under the care of the footballer. He turned his life around.

Mr Ee reflects: "We had offered him football and sent him to a professional club too. But the difference is a professional player from the community came and took him in. People don't need to be cared for by professional helpers like us but when the care comes from somebody else who's a real member of the community, it makes a difference.

"When you are cared for by us, you are labelled. Walk into any room full of people and ask: 'Who has a teacher in your life?' Everyone will put up their hands. Then ask: 'Who has had a social worker in your life?' Probably no one will put up their hands.

"It's not a normal thing to have a social worker in your life. Why are we trying to make it normal by growing social services?"


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