Designing new ways to give back
Melissa Lee Suppiah
FINDING companies to partner on corporate social responsibility projects, and looking for ways to secure long-term funding – these are some of the issues that non-profit organisations (NPOs) in Singapore face.
So, this holiday season, the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) set out to help NPOs stretch beyond their limited resources to make a greater impact.
To achieve this, NVPC’s Community Matters collaborated with the DesignSingapore Council’s School of X to offer Impact-A-Thon – a nine-week programme aimed at imparting design-thinking methods to various NPOs seeking to reimagine their business models.
“The challenges faced by NPOs tend to be complex and multi-faceted,” said School of X director Tamsin Greulich-Smith. “They are hard to tackle with quick-fix solutions or by applying problem-solving templates.”
Impact-A-Thon enables participants to “break down their complex challenges into manageable pieces, and build new ways of thinking so that they can unlock new solutions by learning and applying design-thinking techniques”, she said.
Over the course of several workshops and tailored coaching sessions, staff from the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres), Children-At-Risk Empowerment Association (Care Singapore), and Image Mission were equipped with tools and techniques to tackle their unique challenges.
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Using a “learning-by-doing” approach, School of X facilitators coached the participants to apply design methods and tools to their own circumstances, helping them to translate the theories and frameworks of design thinking into real-world practice.
Image Mission, for example, set out to build a pathway to sustainable income, citing its long-term goal of “reaching out to 2,025 women by the year 2025”.
The women’s empowerment charity, which provides interview coaching, mentoring and professional attire to women seeking employment, aims to do this by garnering financial support from donors both corporate and individual – whom it calls “Angels”.
“We are looking for Angels to pledge regularly to help us run the Dress for Success and IM Ready programmes and, in turn, for the Angels to be engaged with the beneficiaries in meaningful ways that show the impact of their donations,” said Pang Li Kin, founder and director of the charity.
Image Mission’s Dress for Success programme provides clients with interview and career coaching as well as professional styling and attire for employment opportunities. Meanwhile, its IM Ready programme prepares the unemployed and underemployed for the workforce via career consultations, strategies and tools.
With the help of additional business expertise from Ernst & Young Singapore (EY), participants from Image Mission as well as Acres and Care Singapore undertook research and design activities to come up with practical solutions for their organisations.
The collaboration allowed volunteers from EY the opportunity to share their insights and experience as participant volunteers alongside the non-profit teams, said Panneer Selvam, EY Singapore’s corporate responsibility chair.
Selvam, who is also integrated mobile talent leader of EY Asean’s people advisory services, added that “seeing the progress of the non-profits across the 8-week programme was very encouraging”.
On top of volunteering time and guidance to participants, EY also contributed seed funding to enable the teams to implement their designed solutions.
“The programme also… led us to focus our solution on what outcomes we needed to achieve for our target audience and not for ourselves,” said Image Mission’s Pang.
One of her team members shared: “Besides learning about a new way to approach a problem, I think it was also meaningful to work together as a team differently and experience how we can create great solutions.”
The team from Acres also found the programme effective for tackling its challenges.
The society has mainly engaged businesses in the form of one-off, ad hoc corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects – which are not conducive for long-term financial planning, as sponsors’ donations are not predictable and consistent.
Supporter engagement executive Govintharam Velu said that through Impact-A-Thon, the Acres team developed a framework for a longer-term, more sustainable CSR programme for working with corporate sponsors.
One staff member highlighted the experience of “learning practical strategies for thinking from the user’s perspective”.
For its part, Care Singapore joined Impact-A-Thon in search of ways to refocus its resources to refresh its psychological first-aid helpline, Hear4U, as it transitions from being solely accessible on WhatsApp into a multi-modal service.
The organisation’s enterprise director, Anthony Chng, said: “From a management perspective, this programme helped give form and structure to guide our own exploration of solutions.”
He added: “The involvement of mentors from School of X and EY also meant we got to tap a collective of great ideas and resources, which accelerated our ideation process.”
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