SSR Seminar Series: Photovoice to Discover Community Assets in a Mature Neighbourhood in Singapore
Video Recording
Seminar Details
Divisional Director
Strategy & Transformation
AMKFSC Community Services Ltd.
Ms Ng Bee Leng is a social worker by training and is currently the Divisional Director of Strategy & Transformation Division at AMKFSC Community Services. She is passionate about working alongside low-income communities to catalyse asset-based community-driven initiatives to advocate for equitable social conditions that enable people out of poverty. She believes in asset-based community development (ABCD) that focuses on a community’s strengths rather than its deficits. She is an official ABCD Guide, accredited by Nurture Development and ABCD Institute in Europe.
Bee Leng hopes to see Singapore as a society where communities are like homes, where helping a neighbour or stranger is as natural as helping a family member—a home where ground-up solutions are co-created WITH and BY, rather than FOR, the community, and a home where we live out our pledge of justice and equality.
Senior Assistant Director
Community Development Strategy
AMKFSC Community Services Ltd.
Ms Woo Peiyi is a social worker, lecturer and researcher drawn deeply to the principles and values of community development work. She is a person with immense curiosity, loves asking questions and building on meaningful conversations. Making sense of discoveries are important to Peiyi and she takes immense joy in documenting and coding her findings with the hope to contribute to learning - a core value that has led her onto the path of teaching and practice research. Peiyi strongly believes that research must benefit practice, and practice can in turn guide research. She does these through a variety of methods such as reflective practice, field notes, design thinking and photovoice approaches.
Peiyi’s international experience in nonprofit spaces in the United States, Nepal, China and Singapore have provided her with opportunities to iterate and deepen insights in her practice. Case studies and stories that she shares have become an integral feature in her experiential learning classes and workshops. In 2022, Peiyi was awarded the Good Design Research Grant from DesignSingapore Council. The opportunity has helped her discover ways to contribute to the community development field in Singapore and she hopes that the project will support grounds up thriving community building in Singapore. Peiyi holds a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University in the City of New York.
Senior Research Fellow,
Head, Policy Lab,
Institute of Policy Studies,
National University of Singapore
Dr Justin Lee is Senior Research Fellow and Head of Policy Lab at the Institute of Policy Studies. He is interested in implementing and testing participatory budgeting, citizen’s assemblies, interest-free loans to the poor, and worker-owned cooperatives. He has created a wiki platform that allows citizen mapping of social needs (socialcollab.sg) and will soon test whether a roving community innovation lab can catalyse local initiatives in different neighbourhoods. He is Chairperson of ArtsWok Collaborative and serves on the board of Trampolene and the research committees of Singapore Children’s Society and SINDA.