FORGING CLOSER PARTNERSHIPS
AND ENHANCING coordination TO Strengthen Social Service Delivery
1. Vulnerable individuals and families
often face complex and inter-locking challenges that require the support of multiple
government agencies and community organisations to help them to improve their
circumstances. MSF is growing cross-sectoral partnerships – through Community
Link (ComLink) and SG Cares Community Network sessions, and through the use of
technology and data – that bring together the public, people and private sectors to
deliver more Comprehensive, Convenient and Coordinated support for low-income
and vulnerable communities.
Supporting families in rental
housing through Community Link
2. The Community Link (ComLink) pilot
project announced at COS 2019 provides proactive and integrated support to an
estimated 1,000 families living in rental flats to help them achieve sustained
stability and social mobility. This includes supporting families with the
potential towards home ownership. Since January 2020, ComLink programmes started
running at dedicated programme spaces or shared community spaces in four
estates – Jalan Kukoh, Marsiling, Kembangan-Chai Chee and Boon Lay. The dedicated
programme spaces at Jalan Kukoh and Marsiling are now available for use by ComLink
agencies and partners as well as residents, while the other sites will be ready
by early 2021. These spaces are located at or near rental housing areas, so
that residents can conveniently access social services and community programmes
tailored to the needs of each local community.
Platform
for Closer Case Support and Programme Coordination
3. ComLink offers proactive case support
and coordination, geared towards helping these families regain stability and
self-reliance, and achieve social mobility in the longer run. This is done through regular case discussions within
the local workgroups, to track families’ progress and link them up to the right
agencies for the necessary case support.
4. ComLink workgroups also serve as a
common platform for the coordination of other national programmes and
initiatives, such as UPLIFT (Uplifting
Pupils in Life and Inspiring Families Taskforce),
spearheaded by the Ministry of Education (MOE), and the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA)’s KidSTART. Since
January 2020, an UPLIFT Town-Level
Coordinator (TLC) has joined the Social Service Offices (SSOs) at Woodlands,
Kreta Ayer and Boon Lay, and works with schools to support disadvantaged students who have
emerging attendance issues. These coordinators connect the students
and their families to suitable community support and programmes, by tapping on
the resources of the SSOs and ComLink workgroups, and supplementing that with
other volunteer resources.
Joint
Creation of Programmes with Residents and Partners
5. Since January 2019, the four local
implementation workgroups in each of these estates (comprising officers from
the respective SSOs and community partners) have proactively engaged more than
650 families through door-to-door surveys and focus group discussions. Besides
understanding each community’s strengths and needs better, the workgroups also
uncovered some unique attributes of each community. This enabled the workgroups
to purposefully bring together over 40 government agencies, social service
agencies (SSAs), corporates and grassroots organisations, as well as students,
volunteers and residents to co-create and co-deliver programmes tailored to
meet the needs of their respective communities.
6. For instance, the Marsiling and Jalan
Kukoh workgroups realised through the engagements with residents that there were
still unmet needs for children and youth programmes. They thus brought in
student volunteers and SSAs to organise reading and tuition for these two
communities. The Jalan Kukoh workgroup also noticed a sizeable number of
transnational families in their area, and brought in community partners to
provide language courses for foreign spouses, and reading and numeracy classes
for children. Beyond these programmes, there are also homework cafés and sports
activities for students, as well as parenting programmes and skills upgrading
and job matching services for the adults.
7. Corporate partners – including medical start-ups, law firms and
educational groups – have readily offered their expertise and time to provide free
health screening, legal advice and schooling materials. Saturday Kids – a
coding school for children – will provide free coding classes to students from
vulnerable backgrounds in Kembangan-Chai Chee. This is part of its Code
in the Community programme that is supported by Google and the Infocomm Media
Development Authority, to improve
digital literacy of young Singaporeans from vulnerable families.
Strengthening partnerships
through technology
8. To support frontline
officers in rendering Comprehensive, Convenient and Coordinated support to vulnerable
individuals and families, MSF is
developing two new systems that will significantly
improve collaboration across agencies:
(i)
The
first system is a platform that will enable frontline officers to provide
more comprehensive support to clients. Through digitalisation and data sharing,
it reduces the need for clients to submit multiple documents to various
agencies. Frontline officers are able to get a fuller picture of clients’
circumstances much quicker to make faster and more accurate assessments. Clients
benefit from greater convenience and more timely assistance.
(ii)
For families facing complex challenges,
frontline officers often need to make referrals to other agencies and coordinate
support closely across agencies. We will digitalise this process to make
referrals, shared assessments and coordination across agencies easier, so that
families can be helped more expediently and holistically.
9. An
estimated 5,000 frontline officers from both Government and community agencies
will progressively use the systems from the second half of 2020, to provide comprehensive
and coordinated support to vulnerable individuals and families.
Connecting
Clients to More Agencies through Video-Conferencing
10. To offer greater convenience to
low-income families, MSF has expanded video-conferencing
capabilities at the SSOs. Besides financial assistance, all SSOs now
offer access to employment and housing advice either in person through physical
co-location of services, or via video-conferencing. Clients can link up virtually
with career coaches from Workforce Singapore (WSG) and NTUC’s Employment and
Employability Institute (e2i) for employment assistance, or connect with Housing & Development Board (HDB) to check on the status of their
rental flat application directly at the SSOs. Selected SSOs also offer access
to family and legal advisory services.
11. By offering such services through video
conferencing, clients need not make multiple trips to agencies. This has helped
clients to save approximately 400 hours of travelling time last year. Officers
also found it convenient and operationally efficient to speak to clients who might
have difficulty travelling to their offices, often due to health issues or
caregiving responsibilities. We are looking to scale up our video-conferencing
network to include family, legal advisory and healthcare services over the next
few years.
Mobilising town-level
resources to address local issues
12. Beyond technology link-ups, MSF is fostering closer
partnerships at the town-level through the SG Cares Community Network sessions.
MSF completed the first wave of 19 SG Cares Community Network sessions through
its 24 SSOs in 2019. These sessions brought together 3,500 participants from
160 government and community help agencies across the social, health and
community sectors. Through these sessions, like-minded partners worked together
and jointly implemented 60 collaborative projects.
13. One of the spin-off projects is "Stories About Us” – a
ground-up initiative that stemmed from a SG Cares Community Network session for
Serangoon and Hougang partners. Community partners discovered a common desire
to provide better support for clients facing mental health issues. They were
keen to speak with recovering mental health patients to better understand their
challenges. “Stories About Us” – a focus group discussion was organised in 2019
to understand the obstacles that clients with mental illness faced, and find
out how agencies could be better organised to provide adequate support.
14. Going forward, to give partners and volunteers more say in
shaping town-level discussions and developments, the second wave of SG Cares
Community Network sessions, which started in November 2019, is being conducted in
a hackathon format. The sessions are collaboratively organised by SSOs, community
partners, and volunteers. Workgroups led by community champions will help to
translate ideas raised during SG Cares Community Network sessions into projects
that would meet local needs.
ANNEX A: Frequently asked questions