Refugees SG: First Meeting

L-R: Rishik (TJC), Zhong Hao (IJC), me, Jun Han (RJC)

First meeting for Refugees SG was good- it was also amazing to see how much we were able to do before we even met face to face. The immense amount of ideas and plans that came from the meeting was amazing, and I was thoroughly impressed by the amount that this project has grown, and intends to grow.

The basic idea:

The idea behind Refugees SG is simple: circulate an email asking people to visit the web site and sign the petition, and then send it to ASEAN, Burma and Laos. In an association which Singapore will chair in 2007, a strong movement by its youth to do something will (hopefully) do something to persuade policy makers that something must be done.

The project also works by being very “bottom-up”: a turnkey work-out-of-the-box exhibition package is put on the web site, and any schoolkid can just download it, put it up on the board and have their own exhibition in their school, and can “call” us down to give a talk, if it is possible. This is the more effective method of doing things, as it’s much more direct than a simple email/website campaign.

Short term plan:

In the short term, we’re also sending a request to the Straits Times to do a feature article on the refugees in Southeast Asia, which will raise the general level of awareness (and hopefully interest) in this cause.

We’re starting off next week in TJC, and the moving over to IJC (13th-18th August), before bringing it to RJC sometime later this year. I am hoping that the RJC group which is going down to Thailand this year will adopt this as their local “CIP project”, and bring the exhibition to other schools. This project, after all, solves the root cause of the social phenomenon which they are trying to ameliorate.