Speech by Mr. Ong Ye Kung, Minister for Health, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Chairman of CDAC Board of Directors, at the CDAC Volunteers and Partners Appreciation Day 2025
FLOWER FIELD HALL, GARDENS BY THE BAY
Friends, colleagues
Ladies and gentlemen
I am happy to join you today for the CDAC Volunteers and Partners Appreciation Day. This theme of this year’s celebration is “Knots of Friendship, Ties that Bind; 关怀有情，心手相连”. It underscores the DNA of CDAC, which is about care and connection between people.
Journey to a New CDAC
Let me first talk about the transformation journey of CDAC over the past few years. It has refreshed the CDAC into a more fit-for-purpose organisation, with a clearer sense of priority.
Our Mission has not changed, which is to promote social mobility within the Chinese community. What has sharpened over the years is how we intend to achieve this.
Specifically, we decided that the best avenue to enhance social mobility is through education of the young. After all, Singapore has an excellent education system, a meritocratic tradition that recognises performance in a broad range of aspects. However, children from vulnerable backgrounds may not be able to fully benefit from good education and meritocracy. This is where CDAC will have to step in to help them.
At our Annual General Meeting in 2017, we announced a two-prong strategy to achieve this – ‘Planting Grass, Growing Trees’, or ‘种草植树’. The former refers to broad-based assistance to as many students as possible, such as the ‘Ready for School’ Project and tuition and enrichment classes. These programmes are already firmly in place.
The challenge is the latter part – ‘Growing Trees’. We needed to build up the programmes progressively, to support and provide meaningful and dedicated assistance to vulnerable children and their families.
One of the earlier changes we made was our funding policies for this group. We moved away from year-to-year assessment and funding, which can result in support coming on and off depending on family circumstances. Instead, once committed, we would support families with school-going children in our mentoring and tutoring programmes throughout the formative years of the children, to enable them to become more self-reliant.
Our management has also been refreshed. Today, we have many members of the CDAC management team who were social workers or MOE educators. Beyond that, we started to train our staff to become mentors and equipped them with counselling skills. We now regard counselling, education and mentorship to be our organisational core competencies, even as we complement our efforts with suitable external vendors.
Finally, we started to develop and implement programmes. It was interesting that the CDAC management naturally gravitated towards supporting students from vulnerable backgrounds through mentorship and role modelling, instead of academic intervention. They felt that for these children, what they needed most was a foundation for better character and motivation to learn. It was a wise insight that I fully agreed with. And it could only come from experienced social workers and educators.
Under this ‘Planting Grass, Growing Trees’ strategy, last year, CDAC offered 8,000 bursaries and 15,000 places for tuition and enrichment, of which 3,500 places were allocated for other student activities, such as learning through play. At the same time, we provided more dedicated and customised help to 1,400 families, as well as mentorship and character-building programmes to 320 students.
In 2024, we recorded our first small deficit after ten years. I see it as a positive development. It means that we have successfully refreshed the organisation and are starting to scale up our work to impact more people. The priority for the coming years is to expand our programmes. By 2030, we aim to double the amount of “grass” planted, and triple the number of “trees” grown, from 2024.
Our Volunteers – Our Multipliers
Throughout this period, we operated with the same resources - 100 staff and a $37 million budget, mostly contributed by working members of the Chinese community, at a contribution rate of 50 cents to $3 a month.
As a non-profit social services organisation, we are of a modest size. But our secret weapon are our multipliers - 1,600 volunteers and 160 partners. CDAC and our beneficiaries have benefitted greatly from your contribution. We want to do more to strengthen our multipliers even further. We can do so in three ways.
First is to invest in the skills and knowledge of our volunteers. For example, from the Supervised Homework Group to Project YOUth Can Shine — we have over 180 volunteers guiding our young learners today. Without their help, we won’t be able to make an impact. But your impact can be even greater if you possess the relevant professional skills.
We will therefore train 600 new volunteers over the next three years in essential mentoring and befriending skills, which are core to the CDAC.
Second, we also plan to deploy up to 1,000 volunteers at the 12 CDAC centres and Vibrance @ Yishun by 2030. These volunteers will encourage the children to pick up hobbies that will help them focus their attention, engage in social groups and learn new skills.
For example, one of our Outstanding Volunteer Award recipients today is Lim Fung, an engineer by training but also an avid photographer. He can help teach our students photography. We will need many more volunteers, such as Lim Fung, who has something interesting to teach the children and help develop their interests.
Finally, CDAC aims to expand our academic and mentoring programmes through our partners’ networks. CDAC will share our curriculum, provide training to our partners, who can then expand our programmes to more beneficiaries, while maintaining the objectives and quality of the programmes.
Closing
A social organisation like CDAC can only make a difference with the help of volunteers and partners. Today, we honour 239 Long Service Award recipients, 9 donors and sponsors, 15 Commendation Award winners, and 1 Special Award recipient. I thank all our award recipients for your dedication and commitment. You have made a real difference to CDAC and our beneficiaries.
I also want to express my appreciation to Associate Professor Corinne Ghoh and Ms Lam Moy Yin for serving on our judging panel.
Let us continue to support the less privileged in our community, uplifting them from their circumstances and enabling them to achieve better lives. By working together, we hope to strengthen the community spirit of “A little from all, together it’s more; 一人一点心，社会更温馨”.
