Speech by MP Kwek Hian Chuan Henry at TEDxPickering Street event in Singapore on 15th July 2017. Watch the video here
Good afternoon everybody. My name is Henry. I’m here to talk about effecting change through listening.
Many of us sitting here are changemakers. When we want to make change, we have a lot of passion. I’ll say that a defining characteristic of a changemaker is somebody who has a very strong view on what they want to see in the world, and going in to try to make that change.
A bit more about myself. I started out as a volunteer since I was a student. In 2015, I was elected Member of Parliament in a neighborhood called Kebun Baru. Kebun Baru is a constituency of 40,000 residents and like many other places, we have the needy among our midst.
What I do is that together with hundreds of volunteers and professional social workers, we try to help the needy. So today I’m here to talk to you not in my capacity as a Member of Parliament, but in my capacity as a changemaker like you. Now the traditional concept of changemaking is to come in guns blazing and effect change. But even at best, this approach has limitations.
Why? Because even if we succeed, we are at best artificial crutches that the community would rely on. Which means that if we exit from the scene the change might not be sustained. Rather I see a better way of effecting change: it’s for us as changemakers to come in and unleash the energy within a community. Because within the community is not just the needy, but the capacity for change and the wisdom to do so. The way to unleash this? Listening. Listening to our beneficiaries, listening to the community and listening to the changemakers within.
Let me share with you a particular experience that I’m sure will resonate with many of you. One day, after a very long extensive effort to distribute groceries to many of our needy, a few of our volunteers and myself sat down at a coffee shop. Suddenly, one of our volunteers, Marilyn, blurted out, “Henry, how many cigarettes did we end up paying for today? Are we helping them or are we killing them?”
What does she mean by that? Well some of you may be aware that we give out grocery vouchers to the needy in Singapore but what sometimes happened in some cases is that some of the beneficiaries take those vouchers, buy cigarettes and beer and they drink away and smoke away!
That kind of behaviour made our volunteers disillusioned. They wonder whether they are helping the right people, whether they are helping people in the right way. At that point I tried to reassure them that we’re doing things the right way, but in my heart of hearts I do know that I had no answer. So then I spent months working with my volunteers to experiment different ways, through trial and error. We realized that the real changemaking is through the power of listening.
There are three ways of doing this. The first, listen to the community. Since 2015, I’ve gone through every household of Kebun Baru, my constituency, at least three times. When I go there and visit with my volunteers, what we do is rather than just say hi and bye, we try to understand our residents.
What do they do? Where are the needy? Where are the socially isolated elderly? Where are the special-needs children? Where are the people with financial difficulties? We also stocktake the community resources. For example, where are the teachers? Who’s the former policeman? Who’s the taxi driver? Who are the nurses? Who wants to step forward and help our community?
When we understand the needs of our community, we can then can come up with very specific programmes. Let me give you some examples. In the last one year, we came up with a free legal clinic for residents. We came up with home delivery service of cooked food to the frail elderly. We came up with uplifting programs for the young poor, and many other more.
But what is more precious than the programmes is that we stemmed the flood of disillusionment among the volunteers. We were actually dealing with a flood of volunteers coming in! It also aligned everybody’s visions because we as a group were out there listening to our community and seeing the community through the same lenses.
The second point I’d like to make is listening to the beneficiaries. This is a picture of Mdm Izam.
She’s the lady in the middle. She’s a single mother with three young kids and an ailing mother. We started a program to help our young poor break out of the poverty cycle. So what we do? We try to make sure that they learn effective parenting skills, try to get them good jobs and try to make sure that the kids go to good kindergartens and after-school care and tuition.
It sounds like a great idea right? Except it really wasn’t! Why do I say that? Because when we tried to reach out to families like Mdm Izam’s,many of them didn’t want to come down! We called them, we visited them, we begged them, but they just didn’t come down. Then we went to Mdm Izam and listened to her. She shared that she is the sole caregiver of so many people in her family, and the reason why she’s not down there is because her kids do not want to come down.
Therefore what we did was design a kids’ programme so that when the parents come down, there’s somebody taking care of the kids. But then the kids were not happy because they were really bored. So what we did is we experimented a lot to make sure that the kids have something interesting to do. Eventually we found something that they liked, which is doing art.
And then something beautiful happened. First the kids enjoyed themselves. Then they started dragging their parents down every Sunday! And the parents became good friends. Very soon we found that we had a very strong support network of single mothers who support each other. They even exercise every week together!
And together they want to be more than just beneficiaries. They wanted to be changemakers. This is a picture of Mdm Izam after the programme.
Instead of being a beneficiary, she said that she wants to help. This is her manning a stall, passing free clothes to her neighbours who are needy. This wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t listen to the beneficiaries!
The third point I’ll make is that we must listen to the changemakers within. As I was saying earlier, this is essential to unleash the power of the community. So in Kebun Baru, we instituted a new system where for every new volunteer coming in, we had in-depth conversations with them to understand what changes they want to see in the world and how we can work with them to achieve that change. We also talked to our existing changemakers to tap on their ideas.
I did mention that we have a fringe program for kids. Right after the programme ended the changemakers came in, did a post-mortem and told us that they want to do more. How? The original idea was that making sure that the kids from needy families can keep up through tuition, through after-school care, through kindergarten. Actually that was not good enough. Because if you start life too far from the starting point of the rest, just trying to keep up is not good enough.
What my changemakers told me was this: If you want them to truly find their way past the poverty cycle, past the glass ceiling, we must inspire them to passion. It is important to have a talent discovery and passion program. Assemble a group of people talented in different views organize the kids find the talent in the kids so that that talent and that passion will propel them to fight through incredible odds in life.
And so, today we are working on a programme to do exactly just that, culminating in a kid’s camp and kids’ performance. It will not just let the kids exhibit their talent but more importantly, to allow their parents to see their passion and to be encouraged by that.
This is a mock-up website of a new effort that we’re doing. It’s called the Hope Collective. By and large we have by now 15 ground-up initiatives focusing on social work in Kebun Baru. We feel that beyond listening, we have to empower our changemakers. So we created this platform for residents to come in to think about all the causes they can volunteer for, and for changemakers to understand what resources are available. We are also making sure that even for people who don’t see a cause they currently associate with, they have the toolkits to change the community.
Some of the ideas that came out of this initiative are- a group called Tech For Good to use technology to help community. An incubation service for other changemaking efforts from the ground up. And we are just getting started!
So I’d like to conclude this story about listening by sharing an interesting anecdote I heard from another TED talk. There’s a TED talk by an Italian change maker. He was into development. They were in Africa and he was part of this group where they would transfer the best know-how from Italy to Zambia. So the Italians were extremely passionate about growing tomatoes there. They brought this idea over to the Zambians and for some reasons the Zambians didn’t bite on this idea.
But never mind, the changemakers persisted. And in the end they succeeded in growing big fat beautiful tomatoes. Until the hippos came in and ate all of them!
Of course the Italians were really upset with the hippos and they asked the Zambians: “Why didn’t you tell us that in Zambia, hippos eat tomatoes?” Then the Zambians responded, “But you didn’t ask!”
“You didn’t ask.” It’s the same as saying “You’re not listening.” So all around the world, changemakers are beginning to understand and tap on the power of listening. So I hope that when we go back after the talk today, whether we are trying to effect change in the community or in business or in in the personal space, let’s not charge in with preconceived notions. Instead, focus on listening. Because it matters and will shape the way in which we want to change the world.