Refugees SG: Thoughts thus far

Refugees SG’s pilot project in TJC has been overwhelmingly successful, 277 page views on the first day, 167 the next, and there are already 122+ the last I checked today. That’s probably because the TJC population is just that big, and you have certain limits to how many visitors you can have.

The next steps:

The next step is pretty simple. The viral campaign will launch tonight, with the “viral” email going out to the Refugees SG yahoogroup, who will forward it to their friends, who will forward it to their friends and so on.

I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to how many signatures we are going to manage with this campaign. Chances are, I’ll probably be wrong- grossly wrong- if I tried. 1,000 seems too easy to reach following the last 2 days, and anything else, too unpredictable.

After that, the question is what we do with the signatures that can make the maximum effect. Will have to mull over a strategy for this over the next 2 or so days.

After this project:

After Refugees SG, I’d want to do something local, again. Refugees SG was a something in me, seeing something in our ASEAN community that needed to be changed urgently. However, the more I’ve worked on it, the more I realise my heart for doing something is still very local.

Overseas causes have always been much easier to sell, easier to push because of the stark juxtaposition of their circumstance next to ours. Convincing Singaporeans that the one-room flats need as much help as the refugees will be a considerable challenge; so will convincing Singaporeans to perhaps donate their GST credits to people who really need it.

Activist? Not

Refugees SG has also placed me smack into the category of an activist, which I am not. I respect activism, but I have always been of the opinion that it is the work of the policymakers, and not the activists, who make the difference in society.

Activism without a base political movement is likely to amount to nothing; Refugees SG started as a complement to the work of the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC). A voice crying out is useless if there are no hands to do the work; likewise, activism is nothing without political power; a single policy can in one fell swoop achieve what millions of charity/aid dollars can only hope to do.