A Lifetime of Skills

A lifetime of skills through CAS

How does Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) encourage students to demonstrate initiative, perseverance and develop life skills? We go behind the scenes and chat with the students leading CAS projects for Caring for Cambodia and Singapore Young Leaders’ Summit.

CARING FOR CAMBODIA (CFC)

Service is a common theme for CAS projects and that was the case for Year 13 students Sophie, Rechardt, Eve, Hannah and Olivia as well as Ellie, Carissa, Erica, Trinity and Oliver. Sophie’s group, for instance, came up with the idea to send books to underprivileged children to help them learn.

BOOKS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

Sophie said: “When Mr Roberts heard our proposal, he told us about the Caring for Cambodia (CFC) CAS group that he wanted to run again this year. We thought that the charity, which focuses on educating children from poor areas in Cambodia, would be the perfect fit for our book drive idea.”

Now that they have decided to focus on CFC, their next step was to plan how they would get the books to the underprivileged children in Cambodia. Although they had wanted to collect hard copy books, the students quickly realised that it was better to raise money to buy books instead. The reason for this was simple. Sending the books over to Cambodia would require more manpower than the CFC team could afford. It was also better to buy books in Khmer that the CFC school libraries really needed instead of the English storybooks that Sophie’s team would have collected.

The students had now changed their focus, but COVID-19 restrictions meant that they were unable to advertise their campaign at the school. Sophie explained: “We had to learn how we could go about collecting money online and being on homebased learning meant that we couldn’t do things the traditional way like posters around school, displays in the libraries, presentations during Form time etc. Despite this challenge, we still managed to reach out to people via online platforms like Microsoft Teams, Tanglin Facebook pages and groups. Our efforts paid off in the end because we managed to raise SGD 3437, which bought 1885 books!” Despite the difficulties they faced, Sophie’s team learned the importance of teamwork, collaboration and trusting their teammates to make a project happen. But the most important lesson of all? “Never giving up, even in the face of the hardest challenges when it seems like everything won’t work out,” Sophie said with a smile.

CYCLING FOR EDUCATION

Ellie’s group, on the other hand, decided to make use of their newfound hobby in cycling to raise money for CFC. She said: “We wanted to challenge ourselves mentally and physically as we felt that this would raise the most money. A few people in the group had been cycling during the circuit breaker so we decided that this was our best option!”

Ellie and her teammates decided to cycle 88km each. This added up to 440km and is the approximate length of Cambodia’s maximum extent. After finding out that it costs USD 180 a year to educate as well as provide clean water and hot food six times a week for one child, they set a goal for USD 4500. This amount, they figured, would be enough to educate and feed 25 children for a year.

Although it might seem straightforward to simply cycle for charity, Ellie and her teammates learned that communication, teamwork and planning were the keys to success. “At times, we met with difficulties during the planning process. For example, we couldn’t quite reach our goal distance with our pre-planned route, so we had to double back. Our watch trackers also ran out of battery at around 58km, so we had to calculate the rest of the distance on our phones. We also had a couple of navigation issues that led us to getting lost, but it all added to the enjoyment!”

Biking for 440km wasn’t easy nor smooth going but Ellie put it best when she said: “We all learned that we were much more capable than we thought and to take everything in our stride, or in this case a pedal, and continue to the end!” » 31

THE CAS BRIDGE PROJECT 2021 - SINGAPORE YOUNG LEADERS’ SUMMIT

Another CAS project that deserves a worthy mention is the CAS Bridge Project 2021 led by Year 13s Ahaan, Isha, Abhay, Sarah, Shreya, Christina and Adriana. David Roberts, CAS Coordinator, gives the lowdown on their tremendous efforts:

The CAS department at Tanglin Trust School has been working with The Bridge Institute for four years. The Bridge Institute offers exceptional opportunities to young people and challenges them to change the world. The inspirational Mac Mackenzie and his colleagues, together with the CAS staff at Tanglin Trust School, have helped students to develop leadership skills and experience service-learning firsthand. Students work on real projects with organisations that are locally based, but often have an international reach. Previous programmes have included The Butterfly Project which was designed to help major companies based in Singapore make a substantial difference to the community in which they operate.

The following year, students took on a rigorous investigation into a major international investment firm. The firm was keen to seek a youthful audience’s views on how they could address issues in their business model that were of concern to young people. In 2020, the CAS Bridge group branched further afield with the One For One initiative. By organising an event to promote sponsorship for adult literacy and skill development in collaboration with the Head Held High organisation in India, it brought their leadership skills to the fore.

All of these prior initiatives involved only Tanglin Trust School students, but for 2021 it was decided that other schools would come on board and The Singapore Young Leaders’ Summit was born. Tanglin Trust students worked with students from Anglo Chinese Junior College, Dulwich College, Hwa Chong Institution, Raffles Institution and United World College. First Sentient Investors, Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact provided additional sponsorship and expertise to offer leadership and advice to support the students involved.

The Singapore Young Leaders’ Summit ran from March to November 2021 and the agenda was dedicated to answering the following strategic question: How can businesses, schools and government work together to build a more equitable, prosperous and sustainable future and support the delivery of the Singapore Green plan 2030? To address this challenge, the young leaders operated in five groups and sought to reimagine the world in which they lived.

Because of Covid, all sessions were held online and took place on Saturday mornings with follow-up sessions in mid-week. The Saturday morning lectures were inspiring and covered subjects such as the Sustainable Development Goals and how to develop a sustainability mindset; design thinking; how to take people with you; sensemaking and networking; how to develop a business case and prototyping. The final session entitled Being a Changemaker was led by Henry F. De Sio Jr who coordinated Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign in 2008.

The groupings encouraged collaboration between students from the different educational institutions and they were required to complete tasks during ‘sprint sessions’ that were time-contingent. Sprint Session 1 invited students to identify problem statements and build solutions. Sprint Session 2 was concerned with refining solutions and building implementation plans, whilst Sprint Session 3 involved the completion of the formal policy proposal. The ideas for change in this summative document were presented to a panel including ministers from Singapore. The groups all worked diligently towards their final goals and the quality of the submissions was praised by the prestigious panel. Of the initial groupings, four visions that addressed four of the central pillars of the Green Plan 2030 were taken forward and are currently being considered. The project finished with a closing event that again, due to Covid, took place online. It was an impressive summary of the programme’s achievements, and Minister of State Alvin Tan congratulated the groups and commented upon the depth of the students’ research and the creativity of the solutions that they forwarded. Students were commended for their work and received commemorative certificates and a copy of The Changemaker Playbook by Henry F. De Sio Jr. We hope the ideas it propounds will inspire these young leaders to continue to instigate further change in the future! ■

L to R: Students received commemorative certificates and a copy of The Changemaker Playbook by Henry F. De Sio Jr., Inspiring Saturday morning lectures, Mac Mackenzie speaking, Pledgers at the

closing event of the Butterfly Project, pre-Covid