[DPM Tharman receiving the book from Professor David Chan]
On 27 November 2018, the Singapore Management University hosted the book launch of “How Working Together Matters: Adversity, Aspiration, Action”, edited by SMU Behavioural Sciences Institute Director, Professor David Chan.
The book documents a multi-year, real-life project of helping more than 1,000 families living in interim rental public housing and reflects on the lessons learned on how different stakeholders can work together effectively in the helping process and in various contexts. In his Foreword to the book, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong commented that this project has “created a model of collective partnership that more social projects can emulate.”
Jointly organised by SMU, South East Community Development Council and World Scientific Publishing Company, the book launch was attended by 100 partners and distinguished guests from the academic, public, private and people sectors. They listened to the Guest-of-Honour Deputy Prime Minister & Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam sharing his views of the book and the Singapore’s approach to helping low income families.
DPM Tharman candidly said that, “If we simply leave it to people to fend for themselves, or to develop self-reliance on their own, it will be much less likely that we achieve what we want as a society”, and he stressed that the real-life experiences in the project documented in the book and the lessons learned showed how collective action and personal responsibility can complement instead of contradict each other. He emphasised the need to focus on education, jobs and owning a home as pillars of Singapore’s social strategies because “those are things that give people the dignity and pride that comes from earning their own success”.
You can read more on DPM’s speech here.
Also speaking at the launch, Senior Minister of State Dr Maliki Osman, who as Mayor of South East District led the coordination efforts in helping the families, shared that it was not easy to bring together the various stakeholders such as the organisations in the public and the private sectors, the volunteers, and the social workers to help resolve the many diverse problems of the families in need. But with a common goal of helping the families to get back on their feet, and after “lots of sharing, lots of sweat, lots of tears”, the stakeholders learnt how to work together and were successful in getting 1183 families moved from their interim rental housing into their permanent homes.
Professor David Chan, who agreed to be Editor of the book after he learnt about the experiences of the families and those involved in the helping process, spoke on how the book showed that economic and social issues were related not just in the academic sense but also in real life for each of the families in need. He added that the lessons learnt on working together, as analysed in the book, go beyond social projects for helping families in need.
Professor Chan said, “Whether we are ordinary people working in teams, academics, policymakers or even Ministers in the Cabinet, we are all always working together and coming with different individual perspectives. While we have good intentions and good abilities, we will also need to learn and understand the underlying dynamics of working together, so that we can, with the clarity and the conviction of our mission, do something effectively and make a real positive difference to people’s lives and to society.” He added that a whole-of-society approach means that, “all of us come together, that despite our differences in views sometimes, we can look at the commonalities and the complementarities that can emerge from the differences, so that the diversity of perspectives becomes a strength rather than a weakness.”
The book launch ended with Professor Chan presenting a copy of the book to DPM Tharman.
The book is available at major bookstores and the World Scientific website.
For more visual highlights of the book launch, please click here.
Below are the links to the various media reports and some visual highlights of the book launch: