How Working Together Matters

Adversity, Aspiration, Action

David Chan

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9789813278424
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Foreword by Lee Hsien Loong (Prime Minister, Republic of Singapore)

This book is about the art and science of finding solutions to helping families in crisis, and making a real and lasting positive difference in their lives. It is about helping people in need, as well as lessons on adversity, aspiration and action when multiple different stakeholders work together in the helping process. The book is organised into two parts. Part 1 discusses the issues in an unprecedented real-life interim housing project in Singapore that helped families in crisis over several years. Part 2 contains chapters critically reflecting on the experiences and lessons learned from the helping process in this project. Collectively, the chapters in this book address salient questions on helping people in need and implications for building a strong Singapore society.

Contents:

• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Foreword by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
• Preface by Professor David Chan
• The Art and Science of Finding Solutions to Families in Crisis: A Journey of Project 4650:
  • Project 4650 and Strengthening Support for Rental Communities (Desmond Lee)
  • Housing & Development Board (HDB) and the Interim Rental Housing (John Lim)
  • Multi-Stress Families in a 'Homeless' Context: Journey towards Empowerment (Sudha Nair)
  • Lessons from Project 4650: Practice and Policy (John Lim, Sudha Nair & Stanley Fong)
  • Helping Matters: Getting the Science and Practice Right (Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman, David Chan & Moliah Hashim)
• Critical Reflections on the Helping Process:
  • Societal Progress and Social Assistance: The Singapore Context (Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman)
  • From Differences to Determination: The Dynamics of Working Together in the Helping Process (Sudha Nair)
  • Working Together Matters (David Chan)

Readership: General public, civil servants, NGOs, academics, school teachers; researchers and students in social and behavioural sciences.
Key Features:

• This is the first book that examines the various policy, political, social, and behavioural issues concerning practical issues of multiple stakeholders working together to help families in crisis in Singapore, using a real-life multi-year project as an example to illustrate the urgent and complex issues. These issues have continuously received wide public and policy attention both in and outside Singapore
• The speakers and panelists are ministers, academics and practitioners who 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 well-known locally and internationally, not only to academics, practitioners and public intellectuals but also to the general public audience. 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, with Part 1 based on the presentations and panel discussions in the symposium held in July 2018, is written in an active style which will make it highly engaging for the reader

Part 1

The Art and Science of Finding Solutions to Families in Crisis: A Journey of Project 4650

Chapter 1

Project 4650 and Strengthening Support for Rental Communities

Desmond Lee

Dr Maliki Osman, Senior Minister of State for Defence and Foreign Affairs, Mayor for South East District, colleagues, friends, good morning.

Thank you for inviting me to join you for this Symposium on Project 4650. The MND (Ministry of National Development) introduced the Interim Rental Housing (IRH) scheme in 2009 to house needy families temporarily in HDB (Housing & Development Board) flats that were vacated for future development. This gave families some stability and time to work towards their long-term housing solution. In 2010, Blocks 46 and 50 at Bedok South became part of this IRH scheme.

Many of the families moving into the Bedok IRH not only faced housing challenges, but also had multiple stressors in their lives — unemployment, debt, family crises, illness, disability, addiction, and so on. Seeing the complex challenges that these families faced, South East Community Development Council (CDC), led by Mayor Maliki, stepped forward to coordinate support for them. This was how Project 4650 started.

What are some of the defining characteristics of Project 4650? First, it involved many community partners and government agencies, who stepped forward to provide support for these families, in various ways. These partners included HDB, PAVE, the Town Council, MSF’s (Ministry of Social and Family Development) Social Service Offices (SSOs), and many other agencies. Altogether, some fourteen organisations and community groups were involved. But instead of operating in silo, they coordinated their support. They met regularly at the table, with each other and with the families, to work through problems together and tailor solutions to address the specific needs of each family. They updated each other about the support measures and initiatives they put in place for the families. They presented a single interface which the families could engage, while ensuring that they shared information with each other at the back-end to understand the family’s situation holistically. PAVE’s social workers played a key role in aligning this support across various agencies and journeyed with the families. But instead of pushing the families into passive mode, this partnership approach sought to harness the strengths and abilities of these families, to work towards better outcomes for themselves and their children.

Volunteers and the local community were also an integral part of this collaboration. They actively engaged the children and their families and introduced programmes such as tuition and parenting workshops.

Over the past five years, more than 1,100 families have stayed at the two IRH Blocks. At the end of the project in April this year, I understand from South East CDC that almost half of these households have moved on to own their own HOB flats again.

Recognising the Need to Uplift Families in Rental Housing and the Need to Transform Social Service Delivery Across the Sector

Home ownership provides stability for families in Singapore. About 90% of Singapore households own their own homes. Even among the households in the bottom 10% or 20% in terms of income, the 84% and 87% are homeowners.

However, there are families who are beset by serious challenges such as debt, health problems, disability, unemployment, financial difficulty, addiction, family conflict, and so on. As a result, they may lose their home and have to move from place to place seeking shelter from family and friends. Those who have no other housing option may seek shelter under HDB’s Public Rental scheme or Interim Rental Housing scheme. They may also receive financial assistance, and other forms of support from social workers and other community partners.

To better help families who are in rental housing to own their own homes again, MND had launched the Fresh Start Housing Scheme in 2016. To date, 67 families have been placed onto the scheme, with HDB working closely with MSF to support these families. This requires coordination and commitment.

In spite of this, some families in rental housing continue to face complex, interlocking challenges that weigh them down. They have to approach different touch points and navigate the social service system. Help is rendered by different organisations, and with varying information about the client, there is no one having a complete picture of the client and his family. Without proper coordination and synchronisation to tackle upstream causes and relieve downstream symptoms, it will not be easy to uplift these families.

To achieve better outcomes for these families, we need to place clients, not organisations, at the centre of our intervention and support. This is where integration and coordination of social services is key. When government and community agencies come together to provide a more coordinated network of care for our clients and their families, we can more holistically tackle the challenges that the low-income and vulnerable face, and identify the gaps, kinks and inconsistencies in our schemes, programmes and policies that we need to resolve.

At the Social Service Summit yesterday and during the Committee of Supply in Parliament in March, I spoke about the need to transform the way social services is currently delivered, towards a more integrated approach. Since May, we have been organising annual SG Cares Community Networks in each of our HDB towns. We bring together the SSOs, FSCs (Family Service Centres), VWOs (Voluntary Welfare Organisations), grassroots, schools, healthcare institutions, and so on, at the local level. By doing this, we want to facilitate conversations among the people from organisations who provide social services, informal community support and potential volunteers who can close that last mile gap and build personal relationships that can be harnessed to better coordinate the support for the vulnerable in our midst.

Another example of this coordinated approach is the Community Networks for Seniors (CNS) by MOH (Ministry of Health). Through the partnership of a huge network of Government agencies, community partners and grassroots and other community groups, CNS supports seniors living alone, and connect them to a range of social and healthcare resources. This partnership allows more effective problem-solving on the ground, when volunteer befrienders can refer seniors to one single agency if they notice that the senior needs additional help, and that single agency will then work behind the scenes to coordinate assistance for the elderly person from other organisations.

Strengthening Support for Rental Communities

Likewise, we can do more to uplift families living in rental housing. Public rental housing goes beyond shelter and can serve as a gateway to more integrated social support. There will be a group who require rental housing as a long-term solution, especially low-income seniors with no family support. This group will continue to receive support from our services. For many other families, addressing their social issues and eventually owning their own home can help secure a more stable future for themselves and for their children. While long-term housing stability and homeownership is key, it is equally important to work with the families closely to help them resolve their issues, and overcome their difficulties, to improve their circumstances and achieve their potential. In this way, families’ needs will be addressed more holistically and they receive the support so that their children attend school or childcare regularly, enjoy stable family relationships, and secure stable employment. The journey may not be easy, as the Project 4650 experience suggests. Families need to work with the social workers to sustain the changes needed to meet their goals.

But we must certainly give this a push. MND and MSF are therefore working together to bring social services in and around rental housing precincts, for a more targeted approach to engage and support families living in rental flats. What does this entail?

First, we will pull in and anchor these key services more closely together for these families, to increase their access to these support services. The support can start right from their point of entry into a rental flat, until they move to their own purchased flat. This would require redesigning today’s public rental journey, so that we can enable families to improve their circumstances and achieve greater stability.

Second, these services will be more tightly coordinated and integrated, putting the families and their needs at the heart of their work. Back-end, agencies and VWOs will work together to get a better understanding of the families’ needs and strengths, and work with some of the families on a joint action plan.

Third, this effort will not be limited to government agencies and VWOs. We welcome the support and active participation of foundations, corporate enterprises, institutions and philanthropists who would like to anchor their giving in some of these rental housing precincts. They can provide complementary services that can address the needs of the families living in the rental flats. We will provide community space, which can host these services to be provided or supported by these corporates and volunteers, as well as our partner agencies. The SSOs will curate this space based on the needs of the rental households.

Fourth, we want to co-create this community space with families in the neighbourhood, who can also play a part in serving their own community. We want to hear from them on what they would find useful so that agencies can ensure optimal use of this space to bring their services closer to the families. I saw some of this when I visited a rental housing precinct in Henderson-Dawson estate in March this year. Their WeLL programme, driven by volunteers and grassroots leaders, have been in operation for over 13 years. Their WeLL centre now houses many community-based and agency-led programmes that support parents and children in rental housing families. But the programme coordinators recognised the strengths of members of these families to help themselves and others. Some volunteer at the centre. The children who have grown up, often come back to pay it forward.

As families regain their stability, our hope is to enable and empower those in rental to uplift themselves out of their circumstances. This should include more families being able to move out of rental housing and into their own purchased home, so that their children will have a more stable environment to realise their potential.

We will introduce this mode of integrated social service support, in two to three neighbourhoods for a start. Ultimately, we want to improve our delivery of social services to these families. This is part of the broader efforts that I mentioned earlier on more effective integration of social services.

Today’s symposium allows all of us as a community to discuss how we can collectively provide coordinated and sustained support to uplift these families. The speakers today will share their experiences and perspectives. For the social workers and future practitioners joining us, this event serves as a good platform to deepen our knowledge by learning from each other’s best practices and exchange of ideas.

In closing, I would like to thank all the partners who have actively worked together to make this government-community initiative happen. You have contributed to the positive outcomes of a number of residents who once stayed at the two IRH blocks, and you have demonstrated that better outcomes can be attained when we come together collectively, to explore creative solutions in overcoming the challenges.

Thank you.

Chapter 2

Housing & Development Board (HDB) and the Interim Rental Housing

John Lim

A good morning to everyone. My name is John, and I am the Deputy Director for the rental housing department at HDB (Housing & Development Board). I am very thankful for the opportunity to be part of Project 4650. The journey has been a challenging and yet a very meaningful one. I hope, by sharing what we did and the lessons we learned, it will inspire more people to help those vulnerable families to reach their goals of owning a home and improving their lives.

Today, HDB houses about 80 percent of our local population. Most families will be able to afford to buy their first home from HDB through some form of public housing subsidies. For a small segment of the population, which are of a lower household income and they have no other housing options, they can be assisted through our public housing rental scheme. However, a family’s fortunes may change over time, and there will be some families moving between being homeowners and being public housing rental tenants. It is very challenging for those having to move from being homeowners to being tenants. HDB recognises that each family has its own unique circumstances, and that housing is one of the many problems that the family may be going through in various areas such as employment, healthcare, childcare, and family relationships. Thus, it is very important for HDB to work with other agencies and partners to help these families navigate through their challenges and help them get back on their feet again.

To understand Project 4650 and the HDB Interim Rental Housing (IRH) scheme, it is useful to know the background to how the IRH community came about in 2009. In 2007–2008, there was a major financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the United States investment bank. It led the Singapore economy into a recession and people were unable to service their home mortgages. This has led to some of them losing their home eventually. As a result of this major financial crisis, HDB were particularly concerned about the housing needs of several groups of people.

The first group was the queue for public rental flat back then in 2008, which reached as long as waiting for 21 months but these families needed a place to stay urgently in the meantime.

The second were those homeowners in mortgage arrears and they were right sizing to a smaller flat through HDB’s help. However, the new flat required time to be built and they needed somewhere to stay during the period of transition.

The third was a sandwiched group. These were families who were previous homeowners but who did not meet the criteria to apply and rent a public rental flat, and they needed some time to build up their finances towards buying their own home again.

With that background, HDB officially launched the IRH scheme in January 2009. Fortunately, at that point in time, there were some vacated old SERS (Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme) flats that were not due for immediate redevelopment, and so we used them to house these families. We used these flats because, as I have just shared, the demand back then for public rental flat was very high and we were in the process of building newer rental flats and that needed some time.

The old SERS flats were mostly three-room flats, and a small segment were four-room flats. Two families would share a flat to keep the rental low and affordable. This was a similar arrangement if they were renting a room from the open market through a landlord, but the difference was that we were renting these flat out at a much lower rental rates. Nevertheless, HDB took great care in pairing the families according to their preferences to minimise possible disputes.

Since 2009, we have assisted about 5,700 of households through the IRH scheme. Of the IRH households assisted, 43% moved on to rental flats, 30% to home-ownership, and about 18% are still in the IRH (e.g., waiting for completion of their own homes) and 9% moved on to other accommodations (e.g., stay with family). At the Bedok IRH, we see a higher percentage of families (i.e., 38%) moved on to home ownership. This is likely the result of the intensive social intervention led by PAVE together with other government and social agencies, as well as strong community support in Siglap. I will leave it to Sudha to share more on the work that went into the interventions.

Let me now share two cases with you to illustrate some of the important points about the helping process in the IRH.

The first case is Madam Tan (not her real name). Madam Tan was a mother of four children. She and her husband sold their 4-room HDB flat in Jurong to pay off debts, including HDB mortgage arrears. Her husband had a long-time alcohol addiction, and he would spend all his money on beer and 4D (4-digit) gambling bets, neglecting the family’s needs. He worked as a security guard, and later as a cleaner, but he kept most of his earnings to himself. Madam Tan shared with us that he would give the family only around $10 a day. Thus, Madam Tan took up multiple part-time jobs to support their children who were all schooling. Her eldest child recounted to us that at times they would not have enough rice for their meals.

In 2011, HDB helped the family to move into the IRH after they sold their flat. In 2012, PAVE took on the case. At the point in time, the family had already fallen into IRH arrears. PAVE helped draw up instalment plans and sourced for rental vouchers. With PAVE’s help, Madam Tan secured a full-time job. She took on the family’s financial burden, so that her children could focus on their education.

In 2013, the family managed to buy a 2-room HDB flat in Punggol. But this was not without its challenges. They had already taken two HDB loans, and thus were no longer eligible for another. Furthermore, banks were unwilling to extend a loan to them because the loan amount required was too small. Hence, we made an exception to the rule and granted the family a third HDB loan. However, despite HDB’s help, the family faced another problem. The flat they bought did not come with any fixtures. They needed about $3,000 for basic renovation before they could move in. So, PAVE and SECDC (South East Community Development Council) linked them up with a community group, which paid for the flat renovation. The family finally had a home of their own. Unfortunately, after they moved into their new home, Madam Tan’s husband had a workplace accident. He suffered brain injury and was admitted to a nursing home. Once again, PAVE stepped in to provide social support for the family.

On the bright side, all of Madam Tan’s four children completed their tertiary education. One was already working and helping with household expenses, lessening Madam Tan’s financial burden. Due to the family’s financial prudence, their flat was fully paid off by 2016.

Madam Tan’s case showed HDB’s limitations in what we can do as a housing agency despite our best efforts. It was only through working with our partners such as SECDC and PAVE that the family was able to overcome their challenges and achieve their dream of owning a home again.

The second case is that of Mr. Ng, married and had a young daughter. He used to own a mover business. His business was not doing well, and so he decided to sell his 3-room HDB flat in Toa Payoh to pay off his debts to keep the business afloat. That was in late 2007. He was one of the many small business owners affected by the recession due to the financial crisis.

Unfortunately, things did not work out for Mr. Ng. He used up all of the $89,000 cash proceeds from the sale of his flat, but his business still folded in 2008. The family was unemployed, and they were facing eviction by their landlord in the open market. In 2010, we assisted him to move the family into the IRH at Bedok. With more stable housing, his wife managed to find employment as a cashier. This provided an opportunity for us to work with the family towards buying a flat.

Unfortunately, Mr. Ng’s mental health deteriorated. He was diagnosed with severe depression by the IMH (Institute of Mental Health). His condition placed a heavy strain on the couple’s marriage, to the point where they were no longer on talking terms — they would communicate via written notes and mobile phone text messages. However, they continued to stay together for the sake of their daughter. Due to Mr. Ng’s emotional state and the couple’s dynamics, it b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Foreword by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
• Preface by Professor David Chan
• Contents
• Part 1 The Art and Science of Finding Solutions to Families in Crisis: A Journey of Project 4650
• Part 2 Critical Reflections on the Helping Process