Enabling Positive Attitudes And Experiences In Singapore

David Chan

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9789814723732
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Positive experiences in daily lives enhance people's well-being and motivate them to do well and help others. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that create positive experiences. Research has shown that positive attitudes can lead to positive experiences, and vice versa. However, there is no public consensus on what the different attitudinal dimensions are and how to measure them. Clearly, understanding the nature of positive attitudes is critical to fostering positivity.

Positive attitudes and experiences can create conditions that help generate constructive solutions at the individual, group and societal levels. This will tackle negativity mindsets and solve problems. It will also enhance citizen well-being and create opportunities for them. This book, based on the proceedings at the Behavioural Sciences Institute Conference 2015, explores how these possibilities can be turned into reality in the Singapore context. Issues examined include policy and public actions, public communications, building communities, leadership and applications in specific areas such as health and education.

The book is organized into four parts. Part I provides an overview of positivity issues. Part II analyzes the relationships linking positivity to the sense of community in Singapore and leadership in the social services. Part III examines positivity from the perspectives of healthcare and education. Part IV addresses specific questions on positivity in terms of city planning, volunteerism, active citizenry, social media, well-being, values, purpose and meaning, and relationships between people and government.

This book will provide the reader valuable perspectives, an increased understanding of issues related to enabling positive attitudes and experiences in Singapore and many potential applications to reflect on.

Positive experiences in daily lives enhance people's well-being and motivate them to do well and help others. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that create positive experiences. Research has shown that positive attitudes can lead to positive experiences, and vice versa. However, there is no public consensus on what the different attitudinal dimensions are and how to measure them. Clearly, understanding the nature of positive attitudes is critical to fostering positivity.

Positive attitudes and experiences can create conditions that help generate constructive solutions at the individual, group and societal levels. This will tackle negativity mindsets and solve problems. It will also enhance citizen well-being and create opportunities for them. This book, based on the proceedings at the Behavioural Sciences Institute Conference 2015, explores how these possibilities can be turned into reality in the Singapore context. Issues examined include policy and public actions, public communications, building communities, leadership and applications in specific areas such as health and education.

The book is organized into four parts. Part I provides an overview of positivity issues. Part II analyzes the relationships linking positivity to the sense of community in Singapore and leadership in the social services. Part III examines positivity from the perspectives of healthcare and education. Part IV addresses specific questions on positivity in terms of city planning, volunteerism, active citizenry, social media, well-being, values, purpose and meaning, and relationships between people and government.

This book will provide the reader valuable perspectives, an increased understanding of issues related to enabling positive attitudes and experiences in Singapore and many potential applications to reflect on.

Readership: General public, civil servants, NGOs, students and academics interested in social issues, behavioural and life style issues in Singapore.
Key Features:

• This is the first comprehensive volume that examines the various social and behavioural issues on enabling positive attitudes and experiences in Singapore. These issues have continuously received wide public and policy attention both in and outside Singapore
• The speakers and panelists are leaders in their respective areas and they approach the topic by providing an informative review, presenting a state-of-the-art analysis, identifying critical unresolved issues and proposing innovative solutions to the problems identified
• The speakers and panelists are very well-known locally and internationally, including academics, practitioners and public intellectuals. The wealth and diversity of experience, reputation and influence of this set of authors will provide a very wide reach and multiplier effect in the readership market
• The book, based on the presentations and panel discussions in the BSI Conference held in February 2015, is written in an active style which will make it highly engaging for the reader

PART I:

OVERVIEW OF POSITIVITY

Chapter 1

Building Positivity in Communities: Expectations and Experiences

Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman

I want to share with you some grounded experiences of my work as a Member of Parliament for the last 14 years or so. I also want to share from the perspective of an academic because I still see myself as one.

My focus is on what it takes to bring out the positive in many of us — particularly in communities. When we discuss positivity and society, we tend to talk in broad macro terms and much less about communities. I want to share with you the essence of trying to build communities in Singapore and what it takes because these are the fundamental building blocks of our society. Often, we tend to take our communities for granted. We assume that our communities function well and that things are all fine. From my ground experience, I know that these are things that we cannot take for granted. There are things that we have to work towards and put in a lot of effort to bring people together. So, my talk will draw from my ground experiences as a Member of Parliament and advisor to various grassroots organisations, as well as my experience in community development, in particular developing geographical communities.

My starting point is that there are positive attributes in all communities but we do not spend time and energy to unearth some of these positive attitudes and attributes. We tend to look at communities from a problem-oriented prospective. As Members of Parliament, we regularly meet people with all kinds of problem and some problems may appear very mundane. An example is the parking problem faced by people living in typical private estates. They cannot find places to park their cars and often simply because they have more than one car. So we end up handling complaints from people living who get summons for illegal parking. Another example is from people living in public housing estate. Recently a resident came to me with a bag of cigarette butts. He said they came from his neighbours living above his flat and he expressed concerns over the dangers of high-rise littering.

These are some of the typical issues in the community. They may appear as complaints about policies but in fact they are not policy issues when we examine them further. It is about people coming together and trying to find capabilities in people to address issues related to use of communal spaces and communal living. This provides the background to the work that I have been doing, which is looking at how best we can identify positive attitudes and capabilities in people that they do not realise they possess, to solve problems as a community.

Working together as a community to solve problems is a process. It is an effort that requires a lot of energy and they need to be positive energies. You need to transform the negative energies from complaints and problems into positive energies which includes networking and looking for solutions. Everyone, including individuals in the communities, the communities themselves, and government agencies, has a role to play. As Members of Parliament, we have to come in and work together with the various stakeholders to try to resolve some of these issues by building communities and harnessing positive energies in the community. This is both an art and a science. It is a science because we need to examine data to unearth some of the community issues and connect people together to address the issues. In practice, it is also an art because we need skills to be able to connect with people, empathise and understand the issues that they face on the ground.

I will begin with some historical perspective from where we were — from the perspective of community development — and then share our current experiences. In the past, community development was focused on meeting needs. In the early sixties and seventies, we were dealing with many macro-level community issues including unemployment, an unskilled labour force and urban slumps. At that time, infrastructures were weak and one key aspect of community development was trying to get people moving into more proper housing. We were also dealing ethnic tensions and other fundamental issues such as meeting basic healthcare needs and educating our people.

I think the positive thing that emerged in this history was the political will to make very difficult decisions. It was not easy to formulate and implement unpopular policies such as the “Stop at Two” population policy, the ethnic integration policy in public housing where we ensured that every block has a certain quota of ethnic groups mixing together, preventing development of ethnic enclaves. These were not easy policies. Whenever I shared this policy with people from other countries, they were amazed at the fact that we can get people to co-exist in a housing environment and maintain social cohesion. These were positive macro-level interventions. On the ground, people just followed and accepted the policies as things that need to be done.

In the past, the “kampongs’ or villages were the natural environment that people lived in. The doors for most houses were unlocked and kept open. It was borderless and people were able to move from one home to another. People knew one another well. They knew who the parents were for each child they saw in the neighbourhood. The nature of communities was very different at that time. Today, I am not sure whether our neighbours know each other’s children and who the parents are when we see children playing at the HDB void decks. The positivity in the past was natural given the living environment at that time. People were prepared to come forward readily and there was mutual self-help. When there was a wedding, the whole kampong would come together and help. Today, if there is a wedding at the HDB void deck, it is just the immediate family. The neighbours do not help and sometimes they do not even attend the wedding. It is a different environment today.

Given this historical context, I think we have successfully created many positive outcomes. We have seen phenomenal transformation and these were mostly at the macro level — more law and order, lower unemployment rates, full sanitation and eradication of urban slums. We have become a modern metropolis and everyone marvel at our achievements. But in terms of communities, what is our situation today? Do we have strong communities in highly livable HDB estates?

The HDB has done an excellent job housing our people. We now have highly livable HDB estates in terms of infrastructure and the physical environment. But what is the nature of the social environment? In the past, there were common corridors for most HDB flats. Those corridors played a very important role because it allowed people to get to know their neighbours as they walked past each other’s homes. But today, the lift upgrading programme has provided the convenience of lift access for every floor and even “private lifts” for some flats. This has in fact limited people’s access to these common corridors. So, as we meet one need such as providing easy access to lift for an ageing population, there is some impact on community living.

Do communities exist in private estates? I moved from being a Member of Parliament for 10 years in an almost 100% HDB estate to East Coast GRC (Group Representation Constituency) where 70% of my residents are living in private estates. The kind of community that exists in private estates is very different from that in the HDB estates. People are even more private and they keep to themselves most of the time. But it soon became clear to me that there are positive strengths in those private estate communities that we need to harness. If we do not do so, the children of these families will be raised in a certain environment where they just exist within their own confined spaces of their homes. If we are not careful, we will raise children in an environment where neighbourliness does not exist. There are strong implications on the kind of neighbourhoods and communities that we want to build and the kind of generations that we want to raise in the future.

Today, our communities are often geographically defined but ethnically diverse. There is a lot of community work based on geographical locality of communities. So in the HDB estates, we see geographical communities — blocks, precincts and RCs (residents’ committees) are formed from a geographical perspective. But although they are geographical based, they are ethnically diverse as compared to the past where communities tended to be ethnically homogeneous. Ethnic diversity brings with it complex challenges and opportunities. We have the PA (People’s Association) that was formed to bring people together. The PA organizes many activities and you now see a lot of mass activities. We need to ask whether these mass activities are effective in connecting people. So when we have community events to build communities, I always ask my grassroots leaders what it is that we hope to achieve at the end of the event. If we really want people to connect, it is just not possible to connect five hundred people at the same time in a mass activity event. You need smaller and deeper engagement with people. It is not about the numbers or the mass that you can generate. It is about the innate desire to want people to connect and people to know one another. I think that is one of the key challenges that we face today. Sometimes we lose sight of the fundamentals of community development processes. If we just focus on organizing mass activities and getting the numbers to attend the mass events, the essence of connecting with the people who matters in the community gets lost. When I started working in the community, I insisted that all my grassroots leaders who organise such events are conscious of who attends these events, collect information on those who attended and we review it after every event. After every event, we analyse and present the data to the grassroots. We note the proportion of attendees who were in fact our own residents versus the proportion who were not, and what it means. So it is not just about bringing people together. It is also about the processes that take place during those activities that build relationship between people. We need to start reviewing what we do as we attempt to build stronger communities. There are many positive attributes in our grassroots leaders who are very dedicated people and they want to do the right thing. But they also need a lot of support and help. We need to frame the right principles within the work that they are doing.

What is the state of our current community today? I think we are faced with many challenging issues in meeting needs and building communities. First, the changing profiles and aspirations of people have an effect on their expectations and experiences. Second, there is increasing complexity in social needs at the macro level with issues such as income inequality, social tensions when different populations disagree, ageing population and a shrinking workforce. But what do these macro level issues mean in the community? When we talk about an ageing population, do the members of the community understand the context of ageing within their own community? Do they understand what needs to be done?

I will provide an example from my experience as Mayor of the South East District where we have many seniors in the community. We want them to promote active ageing, so the typical thing to do is to get them to participate in certain activities such as dancing or brisk walking. But what about those seniors who have different needs? Do we know the extent of the elderly in the community who have mobility issues or healthcare issues? So we began proactive engagement on the ground. We engaged the different stakeholders. We started looking at the challenges facing seniors in that community. Our data showed that in the South East District there is an emerging issue of elderly who are at risk of re-admission to hospitals. There are elderly who end up in hospitals at least four times a year and we started looking at what were the causes that led to this frequent re-admission. We found that many of them were either living alone or living with a fellow elderly spouse or siblings, and they had difficulties keeping up the medication regime which can be quite complicated for them due to the multiple conditions to be medicated. They are also at risk of falling down because they are more frail. They also lack social support in the community.

We decided to bring in a lot of support from the community. We developed a programme called “Neighbours for Active Living” where we brought neighbours together and train them on befriending an elderly and get them to visit these elderlies on a regular basis. We have collected data on vulnerable elderly who are at risk. In a block, we would know where are the elderly who have mobility issues including those who are wheelchair bound or may be bed bound. So if there is an emergency that happens in that block, we will be able to tell the first responders to go to those housing units with elderly who are very vulnerable. That is the positivity in the community. We can and should harness the strengths to bring out the best in the community. These are community issues that cannot be addressed by the government alone. The people on the ground need to respond. We need to create opportunities for people to be agents of change.

There are some basics tenets that are critical for building communities. We need to build the social infrastructure that builds the soul of the community which is about the sense of belonging among the people in the community. This is the sense that the community belongs to me as much as I belong to the community. People need to have an emotional resonance with the physical as well as social spaces around them. We also have to get communities themselves to respond to emerging needs in the community. This requires connecting people at the micro interpersonal level. A quote by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is relevant here. A few years ago, when asked at a public dialogue session about the Singaporean’s sense of civic consciousness, Prime Minister spoke of the importance of connecting with neighbours and the need to facilitate that. Indeed, much of the work we do in the community is building social capital, which is about building trust between people and bringing a sense of reciprocity between people. Social capital is fundamental to building positivity in the community.

There are some core concepts that I use in building communities on the ground. First, I believe in the concept of micro communities. In order to build communities, we need to build at the most micro level. The HDB block is a micro community. I told my grassroots leaders that the mark of a good grassroots leader is not the number of events that you can organise or the number of people you can bring to those events. The mark of a grassroots leader is knowing the people and families living in the block that you live in too. This is where you begin to know the needs as well as the resources within the community. Positivity in that community is when you harness the resources to connect people together and meet the needs of the community. Grassroots leaders and the volunteers who work on the ground need to have a service orientation. They must believe that they are doing their work in service of the people and that they are doing it for the people and not for themselves. They must also want to build relationship with people and harness resources within people. This means being grounded and data-driven, which involves collecting a lot of data and knowing the profiles of individuals in households to help understand the needs in the community through aggregation of the data and how to harness potentials in the community to meet those needs.

I will conclude with two case examples of community building efforts. The first is a project called Project 4650. It is so called because it came from two HDB blocks — Block 46 and Block 50. These two blocks provide interim rental housing to Singaporean families with many complex social issues and challenging backgrounds such as single parent families and families with multiple problems. We started a community initiative involving many agencies and community partners to coordinate support for the families in these two blocks. There were strong community engagement and support. For example, we organized a homework café programme where about thirty to forty children would attend nightly sessions at the community centre to do their school homework supervised by volunteers. This means we needed many volunteers every night. It was not easy but we managed to get residents from the neighbourhood, including those from the private estates, to come forward on a regular basis to help these children do their homework. We now have a regular pool of volunteers. We also have volunteers who befriend the parents and run parenting workshops for these families. In short, the community, led by community leaders, recognised it has resources from within and connected itself to various partners in and outside the community to provide support to these families. We also brought in professional social workers and stationed them within the community, close to these families to provide much needed support to help stabilise their family situation and work for longer term housing options.

Another case example of community problem solving is negotiating public spaces in private estates. This is about parking problem which is the most typical issue in private estates. At dialogue sessions, I highlighted the reality that, over the years, some families began to own more than one car. Parking becomes an issue since the road cannot be expanded accordingly to accommodate the increase in number of cars. Together, we reframed the problem from one that belongs to the Government to one that belongs to the community. We then brought people together to form taskforces comprising residents in the estate to solve the problem. The taskforces conducted surveys and found different ways to address the parking issues including cocreating solutions with government agencies. This facilitated community ownership of the problem and the solutions. I think that is really the essence of positivity in building communities. We need to believe that every community has the potential to find their own solutions. We need to spend time and energy to engage, build trust, build social capital and empower the community to find those solutions. To be able to engage at this micro level, government ministries and civil servants will need to have a different kind of skills set. We have also been engaging our government agencies and civil servants and working with them on the ground to facilitate co-creation of solutions.

In summary, here are some key learning points that I have experienced in the last 14 years building positivity in communities. First, we need to strengthen community through facilitating self-help and enhancing government-citizen engagement as well as effective collaboration with different stakeholders. This involves collective problemsolving effort through effective community engagement. It requires empowering residents to take ownership and responsibility. The process strengthens the community as well as identifies potential community leaders. Community leaders are first responders. The effectiveness of community building is highly dependent on the attitudes and actions of community leaders and volunteers. It is important to develop a systematic volunteer system to allow community leaders and volunteers to work effectively and sustain motivation through positive experiences. Over time, volunteers will inspire other residents to become volunteers. Therefore, community leaders and volunteers will need to appreciate their roles as both change agents and catalysts.

There is no short cut to engaging citizens and interpersonal connections but I strongly believe that communities have positive attributes that we can and should harness. Thank you very much.

Chapter 2

Positivity Matters

David Chan

I am sure Maliki’s talk resonated with many of us. I was particularly struck by two things he said about community building. The first was the caution on mass activities. In many of my previous talks, I have highlighted the problems of relying on mass activities to engage people and build social capital. Mass activities are not unimportant, and you do need a critical mass of people...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• PART I: OVERVIEW OF POSITIVITY
• PART II: SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICE LEADERS
• PART III: HEALTHCARE AND EDUCATION
• PART IV: ENABLING POSITIVE ATTITUDES AND EXPERIENCES IN SINGAPORE