Mr Christian Chao, Chief Executive, Care Corner Singapore
Mr Fareez Fahmy, Chief Executive, Allkin Singapore
Mr Arthur Ling, Chief Executive, Fei Yue Community Services
Ms Luo Ren, Programme Director, Lien Foundation
Distinguished guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
Friends and partners from the social service sector,
- Good afternoon. It gives me great pleasure to join you this afternoon to witness the signing of the MOU and launch of the Innovation Collective. My hearty congratulations to all three partners for signing this landmark partnership with Lien Foundation’s generous support.
- The Collective is a sector-led collaboration to help our agencies build innovation capability in a systemic and sustained way. This is a significant step towards addressing complex social challenges which no agency can tackle alone. I’m especially encouraged to see Care Corner, Allkin and Fei Yue – who are amongst the more established social service agencies in Singapore and serving a wide spectrum of our society – recognising the need to come together and collaborate.
- By innovating together rather than separately, the Collective can identify common service gaps, co-develop practical solutions, and more importantly, scale them across the agencies’ combined networks of care. This will empower the sector and send a very strong signal to everyone else that this is the way that we’re able to do things better, to serve more people more effectively, and create system-level impact across our entire society.
- I am especially heartened by the meaningful difference that the Collective’s two flagship projects will have on the ground. The integrated case intake and triage solution will eliminate fragmented, repeated client assessments and minimise delay in care. The project to strengthen data analytics capabilities will help social workers make holistic, evidence-informed decisions when supporting clients with complex needs who often require multi-agency solutions and coordination.
- The Collective builds on Care Corner’s innovation journey over 45 years and the support of Lien Foundation for more than a decade. Their experience shows that with the right investments in people, processes and capabilities, agencies can innovate and create sustained impact.
- In the last three years, Care Corner’s in-house innovation unit, supported by grants from Lien Foundation, has been developing tools to empower our practitioners and deliver real impact to social work. Weave, for instance, synthesises case notes and client assessments to surface key considerations that will help with case planning.
- DeScribe, a conversational AI data analytics solution, was piloted to help Care Corner’s leaders uncover insights from its first-party data. The experiment provided important lessons on the guardrails needed for responsible AI-powered decision-making.
- The Collective marks the next phase of collaborative innovation, going beyond innovating within one’s organisation to cross-sharing knowledge, information and technical know-how to better serve Singaporeans. This aligns with the direction of Singapore’s broader social service transformation, one where we are willing to seize new ideas, forge new partnerships and stay ahead to anticipate evolving social needs.
- This pace of technological acceleration may bring some reservations about innovation, and about AI. Some of our social workers may fear that AI may replace them. These concerns may be valid somewhat. However, I want to reassure you that AI is not a silver bullet. AI can provide solutions very quickly at our fingertips, but AI can never bring about assurance – the human quality that our social workers bring along is irreplaceable. What AI can do is help us respond faster and better serve our people – more directly, more targeted – freeing up the care professional to focus on providing care and direct interpersonal support, rather than the administrative and coordination work that they often spend a lot of time doing. In this way, AI can help our social workers be even more effective in delivering real impact.
- As the Collective takes off, I encourage all partners to continue sharing your learnings with the wider sector – beyond the three partners – to build what our communities need for the years ahead. Because as social needs become even more complex, our ability to deliver care, to deliver support, must be seen as being even more connected.
- On this note, I am pleased to witness the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding for the Innovation Collective. I wish all of you every success in the years ahead.
- Thank you very much.