SUSS Students Empowering the Young to Serve the Community

During the mid-year school holidays, past and present SUSS student leaders of the Community Service-Learning Project Learn, Love, Live, supported by SUSS Office of Service-Learning and Community Engagement (OSLCE), conducted a five-day Community Engagement Workshop at Crest Secondary School. One of the key objectives of the workshop was to guide Co-Curriculum Activities (CCA) student leaders from Crest Secondary School in planning meaningful community-engaged projects with their CCA members. In addition, it aims to deepen their understanding of their societal role and awareness by strengthening their understanding of purposeful engagement with their communities.

^{Crest student leaders together with SUSS student leaders at the end of the five-day workshop.}

Crest Secondary School is a specialised school offering a curated curriculum that includes academic learning and vocational training for students in the Normal Technical stream. The school focuses on skills development to prepare students for the transition to post-secondary skills training at the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) and for employment.

SUSS student leaders designed and curated activity books to guide Crest students in the foundations of community engagement through various experiential learning activities.

^{Snippets of the activity books designed by SUSS students.}

Crest students going through the activity book during the workshop sessions.

^{Crest students going through the activity book during the workshop sessions.}

A main workshop activity features Crest students exploring their neighbourhood to identify the assets of their surroundings. This requires them to activate their observation skills and to interview different individuals within the community.

^{A Crest student interviewing a shopkeeper to understand more about their assets within the community.}

Through the different activities, it allowed Crest students to apply the concepts and learnings shared during the workshops into planning for a community engagement project to lead their CCA members in. Davia Yew, Vice-President of Crest’s Innovation Club, echoed this as he shared his experience, “I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop. I had the opportunity to work with my CCA Captain in bringing about a community project that would use the strengths of our CCA and also help the community partner by identifying their needs.”

^{Davia Yew, Crest Student Leader, passionately sharing his takeaways.}

In addition, Ms Janice Tay, Subject Head of Physical Education (PE) and CCA of Crest Secondary School, also shared similar sentiments and observations of her students from the workshops. She highlighted, “The workshops were well-planned and customised to the students' needs. The student leaders from SUSS were approachable and able to build rapport with Crest students easily. Overall, my students learnt a lot from the workshops!”

^{An SUSS student leader and Crest students during the Community Exploration session around their neighbourhood.}

Through this initiative, SUSS student leaders had the opportunity to pay-it-forward by drawing on their leadership skills and sharing past community engagement experiences with Crest students. One of the SUSS student leaders, Syed Iqbal, a Year 2 Social Work student, shared this takeaway through his reflection, "I believe that the Crest student leaders benefited from the workshop. We could see them stepping out of their comfort zone and delving into their projects with such passion and zealousness. Apart from that, we as student leaders were able to hone our leadership and communication skills as we guide them through the five-day workshop. I reckon that future collaborations like this would serve as a meaningful platform between students of different ages and streams."