Going Beyond Basic Needs

If you ever needed affirmation that internships can be life-changing, just listen to the experience of Ms Siti Adriana Muhamad Rasip. “I enrolled into my degree with the goal of becoming a policymaker. But an internship changed that,” recalls the Political Science major, now 30. The internship in question? A three-month stint at the Ministry of Social and Family Development’s Social Service Office @ Tampines, which opened her eyes to the challenges faced by low-income families in Singapore. “I was pretty ignorant before the internship started and had many misconceptions about these families and their hardships,” she adds.

But interacting with them helped Ms Adriana see their plight in a new light. Today, she is the co-founder of Empowered Families Initiative (EFI), which invests in the aspirations of low-income communities. “Our movement calls for society to help vulnerable families thrive, instead of just survive,” she sums up. This reframing of the way we think about poverty has attracted attention from the philanthropy community. In May, a panel of judges — comprising philanthropists, academics, social entrepreneurs and policymakers — crowned EFI as the winner of the inaugural =Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition. This competition offered a grand prize of $500,000 for innovative solutions to eradicate poverty in Singapore.

THE WINNING SOLUTION

EFI’s pitch is based on a simple premise: the most effective way to lift people out of poverty is by empowering families. “Social assistance in Singapore can sometimes feel reactive and designed to cover just basic needs. In such a system, families would always be ‘in need’ — they would only survive and not thrive,” she explains, adding that support measures often do not sufficiently take into account unique circumstances and challenges. 

Her conversations with low-income families, which began during her time at NUS, cemented her beliefs. “A group of us — social service practitioners, and families who have lived through poverty — came together to start EFI,” she shares. In her view, the premise of EFI is that low-income communities are not just made up of people who are in need and helpless. “Many of them are creative and, for instance, want to start home-based businesses to uplift their families,” she says. “But often, the support they receive only covers their basic needs and doesn’t support these aspirations, which means these dreams get shelved.”

EFI hopes to help these families dust off their long-held dreams, which can be related to employment, entrepreneurship, skills upgrading, savings and expansion of social capital. This is not an exhaustive list, adds Ms Adriana, saying that families are given a great deal of autonomy to chart their own course. “It’s important to remember that receiving social assistance should not stand in the way of affording these families dignity to make their own decisions,” she stresses.

THREE TO THRIVE

EFI comprises three aspects: funding for projects of up to $1,500, a savings matching scheme, and efforts to foster a community through regular meetings among participants. To Ms Adriana, each of these plays an equally vital role. She cites the positive experience of the first four families onboarded to the EFI programme in 2022. Two of the families that were running home-based businesses used the EFI grant to buy equipment and increase their sales. Another participant successfully saved $25,000 through the matched savings programme and opened a car-washing business. Yet another participant — a food delivery rider who used to make deliveries on a bicycle — used the grant to obtain a motorcycle licence. With this, he could make more food deliveries and earn a higher income. “All four also reported a higher level of social support from getting to know one another,” concludes Ms Adriana.

These results impressed the =Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition 2023 judges, who included Mr Han Fook Kwang, editor-at-large of The Straits Times. Explaining EFI’s win, he told the national broadsheet, “We looked for a solution which will make a difference to the poverty problem. The team must have a workable plan with a realistic budget to roll out over a three-year period. It has to be implementable by existing organisations and Singapore Family Service Centres, social enterprises and charities. Most of all, it has to be innovative… achieving results not attainable in the current scheme of things.”

The win at the =Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition 2023 has fired up Ms Adriana and her team to take EFI to the next level. “We now want to adopt a ‘scale-up and scale-out’ strategy. Scaling up is about increasing the number of beneficiaries, while scaling out is to engage through this funding, possibly by giving the funding to social service agencies to pilot EFI within their own agencies. Implementing it together will allow the community practice to learn from each other along the way, which is a shift from how we do social assistance.”

But she will have to juggle EFI’s future with another major commitment: her Masters in Public Administration in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value, which she is pursuing in London. “It’s definitely taxing,” admits Ms Adriana, who is back in Singapore to work on her thesis. “But I have a great team of co-founders who are just as passionate about making a difference. We would get on Zoom calls at all hours of the night to put together our proposal for the competition, so I’m certain that our passion will see us through.” 

Text by Keenan Pereira. Photo by Wilson Pang