When we established the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) 20 years ago, we adopted the advertising slogan “I’m a volunteer too”.
That was because then, the mistaken notion was that you had to sign on to a programme and commit to X number of hours regularly to be a volunteer.
And so we developed promotional material that featured, among other things, a volunteer hairstylist, volunteer football coach, volunteer singing artiste and a volunteer advertising agency boss, all to underline the point that one could be a volunteer with whatever skills and interests one had. Passion, not just compassion for the needy, was also a key starting point.
We suspected that many were already volunteering without even realizing it, like helping out in a church ministry, raising funds for a pet cause or looking out for a lonely neighbour. The same might be said of a good number of you readers today.
Today, many more opportunities abound for volunteering, especially on an informal basis. Informal volunteering is when you do so not through an agency but on your own accord. NVPC’s biannual survey on volunteering shows that informal volunteering is on the uptrend. Those who volunteered formally and informally had almost doubled from 20% to 39% respectively from 2010 to 2018.
A prime example of informal volunteering is this Mt Sinai Gardening Group started by my friend Peggy Chan in 2018. Today, this group consists of close to 100 gardening enthusiasts who regularly exchange plants and tips on maintaining their gardens. Peggy not only knitted this group together online through their shared love of plants but also opened up her house as a distribution point for the delivery and collection of donated plants, in addition to organizing trips to nurseries and exhibitions (pre-Covid) for members of her group.
I was the beneficiary of Peggy’s orchids even before I knew her through our respective helpers, but arising from that, we have become firm friends. That is truly one benefit of volunteering – you make friends along the way, and Peggy sure has many from this one initiative of hers.
Singapore’s volunteers also prefer to volunteer occasionally or on an ad hoc basis rather than weekly or monthly. Covid gave rise to many opportunities for ad hoc volunteering, such as collecting items for migrant workers. So too, with the Afghan situation.
Architect Rudy Taslin and his wife, Bao Yan, responded to a call for blankets and towels for Afghan refugees in Pakistan with winter fast approaching. They mobilized corporate contacts for donations and some 70 volunteers, the youngest of which was 5, from amongst friends for the packing and logistics. Such ad hoc donation exercises make for a great family bonding activity.
Informal and ad hoc volunteering have low thresholds for entry. We need to operate out of our interests/skills and keep our eyes and ears peeled for needs as they arise. And before we know it, we can assuredly declare, “I am a volunteer too”!
Yeoh Chee Koon
Chee Koon is a Political Science graduate (University of Singapore, 1973.) She was responsible for setting up the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre in 1999. She retired in 2008.