SINGAPORE GOT POOR PEOPLE MEH?

UNDER THE HOOD is a civic experiment that calls for creative solutions to a really tough problem: urban poverty. We had a weekend of prototyping 22-24 November 2013, which brought together smart, switched-on young professionals from across disciplines.

Best part: what happened there doesn't stay there - it'll be open to scaling to other parts of Singapore and beyond.

Stay tuned for big updates on our mailing list, and get smaller-but-still-interesting community posts on our FB page!

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SINGAPORE GOT POOR PEOPLE MEH?

UNDER THE HOOD is a civic experiment that calls for creative solutions to a really tough problem: urban poverty. We had a weekend of prototyping 22-24 November 2013, which brought together smart, switched-on young professionals from across disciplines.

Best part: what happened there doesn't stay there - it'll be open to scaling to other parts of Singapore and beyond.

Stay tuned for big updates on our mailing list, and get smaller-but-still-interesting community posts on our FB page!

Let's crowdsource solutions to urban poverty.

Here's how.

The Challenge:
Urban poverty is complicated. State agencies don't always know the realities on the ground, think tanks don't get to directly tackle problems with research papers, and service organisations don't normally benefit from the wider community's participation and problem-solving.

The Solution:
UNDER THE HOOD brings together sociological research, data analytics, and (most importantly) stories from the residents themselves - and opens this up in the form of "design challenges" to developers, designers, and other clever people to work with residents to co-create solutions to the most critical challenges faced by the neighbourhood. In the neighbourhood itself.

The Bottom Line:
The community and local organisations get real solutions they can use, our participants get to apply their skills for real world impact, and we all get to live in a better place.

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Design Challenges

Our challenges put a frame around real-world social problems. We spoke to residents and social workers, did our research, and analysed existing community efforts and relationships. Then we distilled our findings into design challenges around 5 key themes: education, employment, financial empowerment, social connectedness, and personal empowerment.

Brainstorm solutions on our spiffy ideation platform. Click on each challenge to learn more.

We're still preparing additional research material for you including concept maps, detailed personas, and a stakeholder map of existing efforts. Don't let that stop you from brainstorming – join the mailing list, and you won't miss a thing.

EDUCATION

How might we help kids build a strong educational foundation despite unstable home environments?

EMPLOYMENT

How might we create more stable income streams or flexible jobs for people whose situations make it difficult for them to hold "regular full-time jobs"?

SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS

How might we revive the kampong spirit and build trust among residents in the neighbourhood?

FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT

How might we help people who have low and/or irregular income streams to gain greater control over their finances?

SELF-BELIEF

How might we enable those who feel helpless or disempowered to rebuild a sense of control over their lives?

Urban Poverty In Singapore?

Real stories, real lives. Bukit Ho Swee encompasses citizens of all stripes, welfare organisations that have seen its changes over time, and relationships within that form the fabric of its community. A struggling neighbourhood, rich with its own gifts and talents.

Urban Poverty In Singapore?

Real stories, real lives. Bukit Ho Swee encompasses citizens of all stripes, welfare organisations that have seen its changes over time, and relationships within that form the fabric of its community. A struggling neighbourhood, rich with its own gifts and talents.

Left Behind

Does urban poverty exist in Singapore? After all, we are home to 101,000 millionaires.

While their numbers are growing, the poor in Singapore remain relatively invisible. Like most people here, they live in HDB flats that - from the outside - look pretty similar from one block to the next.

It’s tough to tell which blocks contain government-subsidised rental flats. These small, one-room or two-room units are rented to families and pairs of elderly singles, only if their household income is no more than $1,500 a month. Some residents are not able to work at all.

Grounded in Reality

We started with intense on-the-ground research and listening. The aim? To help reshape the cycles and system dynamics in Bukit Ho Swee by supporting disadvantaged residents to overcome barriers to their well-being. To ensure that the outcomes of Under The Hood are grounded in existing community efforts and relationships, we spent weeks interviewing residents, social workers, neighbourhood leaders. We are currently putting our findings into a Community Brief to inform anyone who wants to participate.

For now, read more about the challenges and get brainstorming!

Project Partners

Advisors & Mentors

We assembled a multidisciplinary group of advisors and mentors.

Advisors & Mentors

We assembled a multidisciplinary group of advisors and mentors.

Advisors & Speakers

Donald Low

Advisor

Donald Low is Associate Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His research interests at the School include inequality and social spending, behavioural economics, economics and public policy, public finance, and governance and politics in Singapore.

Previously, Donald served fifteen years in the Singapore government, during which he established the Centre for Public Economics to advance economics literacy in the Singapore government. Donald also held various senior positions, including Director of Fiscal Policy at Ministry of Finance, and Director of the Strategic Policy Office in Public Service Division. He is currently a Vice President at the Economics Society of Singapore.

Gerard Ee

Advisor

Gerard Ee spearheads Beyond Social Services, an organisation that rallies and activates service-users, their
support networks and the community to support disadvantaged young people move beyond their poverty-related problems.

Gerard started out as a youth worker mentoring youths-at-risk on the streets of Bukit Bo Swee and later trained as
a family therapist. After more than 30 years of service, Gerard has become a firm believer that social work is not simply
problem-solving but a peace-building process that engages people to live the values of compassion, social justice and community.

Kenneth Paul Tan

Advisor

Kenneth Paul Tan is Vice Dean and Associate Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Previously, he taught at NUS’s University Scholars Programme and Political Science Department, where he received Outstanding Educator Award, the University’s most prestigious teaching honour, among more than 10 awards. He chairs the NUS Teaching Academy and serves on the University Teaching Excellence Committee.

He has written widely on principles of public policy and administration (focusing on meritocracy, pragmatism, and public engagement); democracy and civil society; spatial justice in Asian cities; politics, society, and culture in Singapore; among many other research areas.

He sits on the Arts Advisory Panel of National Arts Council, committee of Our Singapore Conversation, and boards of Asian Film Archive and The Necessary Stage.

Loh Kah Seng

Advisor

Dr Loh is a historian and assistant professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies, Sogang University, in South Korea. He investigates little-studied subjects in the history of modern Southeast Asia, including fires in Singapore, student activists and leprosy in Singapore and Malaysia, oral history and international experts in Southeast Asia, and the teaching of controversial histories in Asia. He was previously a school teacher and continues to speak to students and teachers about the joys and challenges of studying the past.

He is also the author of Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore.

Scott Bales

Advisor

Scott Bales is a founding member of Moven, a founder at Next Bank, and a mentor to Entrepreneurs throughout world with Lean Startup Machine. He sits on the Board of Care Pakistan and holds advisory positions at Fastacash, Our Better World, HUB Singapore and CDI Apps 4 Good. Scott is a globally recognised speaker on Digital Consumers, Mobility and Innovation.

Scott has advised governments in Asia Pacific and Africa on countrywide infrastructure and mobile commerce projects, and also been instrumental in developing the mobile commerce space in Malaysia, Singapore Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. He is on a mission to transform mainstream thought processing around conventional business practices.

Sam Han

Advisor

Sam Han is a Seoul-born, New York City-raised interdisciplinary social scientist, working in the areas of social and cultural theory, new media, religion, globalization, and race/ethnicity. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and Adjunct Research Fellow in the Hawke Research Institute of the University of South Australia.

He is author of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2011), Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor (with Daniel Chaffee) of The Race of Time:The Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm Publishers, 2009).

Mentors

Why Are We Doing This

The Aim of it All

There are 3 levels of our objectives for this project:

Impact. The most obvious - it's generating the solutions that create impact for the residents, to bring our neighbourhood closer to a state of thriving.
Participation. Crowdsourcing good things. Bringing together the smarts + skills + energy of young professionals from the wider community for something constructive. But the other half of the participation piece is the residents: we're marrying all the energies from outside the neighbourhood with the stories, local knowledge and experiences of the residents - to make something that is truly co-created. (Psst, we're inviting residents who're keen to participate in prototyping as well!)
Method. Developing a methodology around complex societal challenges - in this case, on urban innovation and neighbourhood transformation. This relates most closely to the idea of scale: we believe that if you can create a method to tackle complex issues that is effective, the impact of that method when it scales beyond your pilot site is... possibly quite huge.

This whole shebang/project is part of a larger initiative to re-imagine public assistance and neighbourhood transformation in Singapore. What might those structures, policies and programmes look like? What might a future approach to community strength-building look like? Over the next 2-3 years, Syinc is committing to work with our local community partners Bukit Ho Swee Family Service Centre, Beyond Social Services and others to facilitate piloting, testing, and implementation of solutions. (See our FAQ for what happens short-term vs long-term post-weekend.)

Why Are We Doing This?

We’re doing this:

Because it’s unsexy (it’s not building schools for children in Cambodia)
Because it’s complicated (how do you begin to tackle something like “urban poverty”?)
We think it's pretty awesome to do something tangible in our own backyard.