Young Singaporeans stepping up to tackle social issues

Since it began in 2019, the Youth Action Challenge (YAC) has encouraged Singapore’s youth to come up with ideas to tackle social issues, in partnership with the Government and the private, people, and public sectors.

It has worked with more than 800 youths across 170 projects over the years.

The YAC is an integral part of the SG Youth Action Plan, a five-year plan focused on harnessing youth energy, creativity and voice to shape the future of Singapore in 2025.

For Ms Maya Ibrahim, 26, the YAC was an ideal opportunity to get advice on how to scale up her financial literacy programme, Money&Me.

She co-founded the programme in 2019 after she started her first job in management consulting at professional services company Accenture.

To mark the start of her “adulting” journey, she decided it was time to map out her finances.

​​She shares that the “language of money” and personal finance often made her feel out of depth and emotionally drained in the process.

“Schools don’t teach you about personal finance, and some people may not have role models in their lives to learn from,” says the National University of Singapore (NUS) alumna.

Keen to tackle the issue, she and her friends joined the NUS Resilience and Growth Innovation Challenge to develop solutions that build confidence and skills to empower youth to make financial decisions for their future. 

Receiving a $49,240 grant to fund their initiative, Ms Maya and her team conducted research and developed a six-week programme covering saving, spending, earning, borrowing, insurance and investing.

Each week consists of an interactive workshop followed by a one-hour mentoring session to help participants set and work towards financial goals. The team completed two runs for 35 youths in February and September last year before the team joined the YAC.

Organised by the National Youth Council (NYC) in partnership with the Citi Foundation and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Youth Co:Lab initiative, the YAC provides training, mentorship and grants of up to $50,000 for youths to turn their concepts into reality.

Season Three of the YAC, which started in October 2021, saw over 80 teams and more than 310 youths pitch solutions centred around four key themes — environment and sustainability, jobs and mentoring, support for vulnerable groups and mental well-being.

“One of our biggest takeaways was that we needed to figure out how to function as a business if we wanted to expand our programme. We needed to identify different types of customers, such as schools or social service organisations, and decide how to monetise our work,” says Ms Maya, who quit her management consultancy job in December last year to focus on Money&Me.

The team will use its $7,800 YAC grant to run more editions of the programme, and to create a card game aimed at starting conversations on money management.

It is also in talks with self-help groups Mendaki and the Chinese Development Assistance Council to trial regular workshops on financial literacy.

“We want to build safe spaces where young people can ask questions and learn skills to help them make better financial decisions.

“Based on the feedback that we’ve gotten so far, we believe that we can make a difference in more people’s lives.”

Mr Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Culture, Community and Youth, & Trade and Industry says the YAC was initiated to encourage youths to step up and create positive change for Singapore and the society by providing them with a platform and support to make an impact.

“Through the YAC, youths with ideas or who want to tackle the wicked problems of our day can team up with like-minded peers from diverse backgrounds to build solutions, and receive mentoring from industry experts and policymakers.

“Their projects have made a tangible impact. In turn, Singapore benefits from the ideas and enterprise of our young changemakers."

In Singapore’s push to go digital, tech product designer Petrina Yeow, 26, was troubled by how the elderly struggled to keep pace as younger generations moved comfortably online.

Through the YAC, Ms Yeow and her team, WLD Champs, designed a Digital Sandbox Series that brings youths and seniors together to learn digital skills and co-create projects.

The programme is a companion to Work Live Digital!, a community project that Ms Yeow and her friends started last year to provide free basic computer classes to low-income seniors and connect them to opportunities to further their skills after the classes.

She explains: “When we were brainstorming ideas for the YAC, we decided that we want to use digital technology to bridge, rather than divide, generations.”

The programme, which is slated to start next year, will group secondary school students with seniors to learn skills such as video editing and mobile photography from digital experts over four weeks, and guide participants to collaborate on group projects.

Ms Yeow adds that the YAC’s process was essential to the Digital Sandbox Series’ development.

“We were matched with relevant mentors who gave us valuable advice, such as a geriatric counsellor who shared with us the needs and wants of the seniors she works with.”

Ms Yeow’s team received a $20,600 YAC grant for the series. The money will go towards hiring digital experts, securing venues, renting laptops and marketing.

“Having youths and seniors come together to learn and practise digital skills can be a great way to overcome the digital and generational divides.”

When classes were moved online during the Covid-19 pandemic, Anglo-Chinese Junior College student Yaw Dong Jeun struggled with the pivot to home-based learning.

“I felt very stressed, especially during the circuit breaker, because it was such a new experience and really unconducive to my learning,” says the 18-year-old, who was preparing for his O-level exams in 2020. To cope, he had frequent video chats with his friends.

“That gave me the idea of building a mobile app where youths can help one another. They can talk about their troubles and others can share their thoughts and experiences,” he says.

After Mr Yaw and his team, You’th, joined the YAC, they discovered in their research that many youths found it hard to confide in their peers. Those that the youths approached also typically lacked the skills to support them adequately.

These findings led the team to fine-tune their idea for their app, SteadyBo, which they aim to launch by the end of October.

SteadyBo will feature an anonymised platform for young people to share their problems and get a listening ear and advice. It will also include self-paced educational courses provided or certified by mental health professionals.

In a nod to the online gaming sessions with his friends, Mr Yaw plans to gamify the courses.

“We want to implement a reward system, where users can earn in-game currency from the courses and exchange them for avatars, pins and other customisation options,” he adds.

The team plans to use most of its $7,600 YAC grant to consult mental health professionals and flesh out its educational courses. What remains of the grant will go to app maintenance.

Ms Eadren Tan, vice-president of communications at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council Asia-Pacific and YAC mentor says: “The distance between dreams and reality is action. The YAC gives young people first-hand experience of the challenges of being an entrepreneur, leader and executor all-in-one, without the risks of damage to reputation or monetary losses.”

For Yishun Innova Junior College student Olivia Law, 17, bubble tea is a guilty pleasure. “I love the drink, but I don’t like throwing away the plastic cups and contributing to plastic waste,” she explains.

Determined to tackle the issue, she and two friends — former secondary school classmates — joined the YAC last year. Their project, BUBBLON, aims to create a reusable silicone cup for bubble tea.

“If people can bring their own cups for coffee and other drinks, why not create a reusable cup for bubble tea?” she says.

The team developed and refined the design for the cup as part of their YAC journey. It has a detachable handle to replace plastic carriers, a strainer to keep bubble tea pearls near the top of the cup so users do not have to use straws, among other convenient and environmentally-friendly features.

The YAC’s workshops and mentors were helpful in making the cup’s design viable, she says.

“They taught us to think about the bubble tea shop workers’ needs too, not just from the point of view of the consumers and sustainability. With this in mind, we put in a translucent strip so that the workers can more easily measure ingredients.”

The team was offered a $6,600 grant to continue work on the reusable cup but turned it down to focus on their A-level exams.

Still, Ms Law is grateful for the opportunity. “The experience was incredible. We learned so much about how to make projects more feasible and desirable in the real world.”

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Empowering youths in the region

Co-created in 2017 by the Citi Foundation and UNDP, Youth Co:Lab aims to invest in and empower youth across Asia-Pacific countries to speed up the implementation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through leadership, social innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Youth Co:Lab has engaged more than 200,000 participants across 28 countries, powering and helping to scale close to 9,500 youth social entrepreneurs and over 1,200 youth-led startups.

As partners of the YAC, the Citi Foundation and the UNDP extends their networks, expertise and resources to empower youth, and incentivises stakeholders to invest in youth-led solutions and social entrepreneurial ventures.

To deepen its youth empowerment work, Youth Co:Lab will be organising its regional summit in Singapore in July, where YAC teams are selected from each season to participate, meet like-minded youth and contribute to the region.

Ms Manon Bernier, deputy resident representative for UNDP Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, says the YAC “complements Youth Co:Lab's objective of supporting youth to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs, thereby resulting in a better Singapore — and world — as they bring their impact-driven ideas into reality.”

Calling the YAC a one-of-a-kind opportunity for youth, she adds: “It is also an inspiration for governments and key stakeholders across the region looking for new ways to empower and invest in our youth entrepreneurs to attain a better future.”