JC1 Service Learning Day - Lumos

JC1 Service Learning Day is a day where the entire college of students is mobilized to be involved in community engagement programs outside of the campus. Held on teacher's day every year, Saints gain a better insight of society's needs through various activities such as the "Big Sweep" - an event initiated by the Metropolitan Youth Men's Christian Association.  

"Big Sweep" is a meaningful program which aims to improve the living conditions of the destitute, elderly and needy families by cleaning and refurbishing their homes, making their homes a much better place to live in. 

   
                                                          Batch photo with the elderly 

JC 1 SL Day was a really good experience for me, from the planning to the event itself. One very important lesson I learnt was the need to communicate with clarity when working as a team as miscommunication can happen easily and this would lead to many other complications. It was heartwarming to see the JC ones participating in the activity and taking care of the elderly during the event itself. Some of them felt reluctant to come but many of them felt blessed by the event after, which made me feel really happy.

Rachael Ng
5th Saints Advocate

                                         
                                                                    The 5th Advocates

Service Learning Day was successful despite some crisis that we faced on the day itself.

The performance was one of the things that turned out pretty well despite majority of the performers being from Advocates itself. However, the preparation for the performance was a bit rushing due to time constraints. We could have attracted more external performers so as to minimize our workload in preparation for both SL day and the performance at the same time. Better publicity for performance should be expected for next year’s SL day in order to attract more participants.

Unfortunately, during the sing-along session with the elderly - our main target audience, it turned out that they were not responding well to this program that was specially tailored for them. As a result, they were not entirely engaged and were "left out" when the Saints were singing together, linking their arms. The Advocates reacted quickly to this situation and tried to interact with the elderly and encouraged them to join in the singing of National Day songs. Upon reflecting on this matter, i felt that  more could have been done to prevent this from happening. One possibility is to include Chinese songs in the sing-along. This problem should be raised next year so that this project can be of a greater success. 

Vincent Setiawan

5th Saints Advocate