CAPTISS 2014
17 Sep 2014 - 18 Sep 2014
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September 2014 marked the inaugural edition of the College of Alice & Peter Tan’s International Student Symposium (CAPTISS). More than 300 university students from Singapore and the region attended our symposium. CAPTISS aims to be an interdisciplinary platform that allows free exchange of ideas and experiences between social groups and change-making individuals from both Singapore and beyond. It also aims to bring together diverse perspectives, allowing students to reflect on their own understanding and practice of building connections with the community, and, thus, enriching their appreciation of a broad spectrum of ideas, innovations and enquiry in the field of community engagement.
This year, the theme was “Making a Difference through Community Engagement”; panel discussions therefore featured topics such as “Building Community Resilience” and “Design, Technology and Disability”. We were honoured to have both local students, as well as foreign delegates from Cambodia, China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, share their experiences on community responsibility.
Among those who contributed to the meeting was a joint team of medical students from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Cambodia’s Puthisasthra University. They spoke on the importance of building relations with local health systems and universities for the long-term viability of community-based health programmes. In yet another thought-provoking presentation by a foreign delegate, Sai Kham Phu, a student from Chiang Mai University, Thailand, shared his work on providing assistance to Myanmar migrants in northern Thailand, who face a number of obstacles ranging from statelessness to exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Social Enterprise panel demonstrated the importance of the concept of ‘social’ necessarily existing concurrently with ‘enterprise’, and promoted the understanding of related issues. One of these is the significance of total participation by stakeholders – beneficiaries, organisations and institutions alike – in enabling social enterprises to succeed despite different contexts and societies.
In a plenary session, Mr Jack Sim, founder of the Base of Pyramid Hub philanthropic initiative and the non-profit World Toilet Organization, gave a provocative yet humorous analysis of how selling toilets to the world’ poorest 4 billion people at the “base of the pyramid” could be both meaningful and profitable. He suggested that billions in Third World countries could escape the vicious poverty cycle through the same business route that Singapore took from the 1960s to the 1990s.
In another plenary session, Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser from the NUS Department of Sociology shared how Singapore’s rapid development over the last 50 years has resulted in social inequalities and reduced social mobility. As a result, the “Singapore Dream” has evolved in the face of these challenges, Assoc Prof Tan gave suggestions on how citizen groups and young people could mitigate current challenges to help reduce social inequality.
Finally, CAPTISS 2014 also included poster presentations and small hands-on group activities which were followed by large group sharing sessions. These provided opportunities for participants to share on their own academic and social communities, as well as learn from others’ societies and perspectives.
This year, the theme was “Making a Difference through Community Engagement”; panel discussions therefore featured topics such as “Building Community Resilience” and “Design, Technology and Disability”. We were honoured to have both local students, as well as foreign delegates from Cambodia, China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, share their experiences on community responsibility.
Among those who contributed to the meeting was a joint team of medical students from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Cambodia’s Puthisasthra University. They spoke on the importance of building relations with local health systems and universities for the long-term viability of community-based health programmes. In yet another thought-provoking presentation by a foreign delegate, Sai Kham Phu, a student from Chiang Mai University, Thailand, shared his work on providing assistance to Myanmar migrants in northern Thailand, who face a number of obstacles ranging from statelessness to exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Social Enterprise panel demonstrated the importance of the concept of ‘social’ necessarily existing concurrently with ‘enterprise’, and promoted the understanding of related issues. One of these is the significance of total participation by stakeholders – beneficiaries, organisations and institutions alike – in enabling social enterprises to succeed despite different contexts and societies.
In a plenary session, Mr Jack Sim, founder of the Base of Pyramid Hub philanthropic initiative and the non-profit World Toilet Organization, gave a provocative yet humorous analysis of how selling toilets to the world’ poorest 4 billion people at the “base of the pyramid” could be both meaningful and profitable. He suggested that billions in Third World countries could escape the vicious poverty cycle through the same business route that Singapore took from the 1960s to the 1990s.
In another plenary session, Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser from the NUS Department of Sociology shared how Singapore’s rapid development over the last 50 years has resulted in social inequalities and reduced social mobility. As a result, the “Singapore Dream” has evolved in the face of these challenges, Assoc Prof Tan gave suggestions on how citizen groups and young people could mitigate current challenges to help reduce social inequality.
Finally, CAPTISS 2014 also included poster presentations and small hands-on group activities which were followed by large group sharing sessions. These provided opportunities for participants to share on their own academic and social communities, as well as learn from others’ societies and perspectives.