Community Engagement Festival (CE Fest) March 2022

Article written by Tan Hui Shan

Community Engagement Festival (CE Fest) is CAPT’s annual flagship event. In CE Fest 2022, we hope to dispel pre-conceived notions about some communities and be the bridge in sparking a passion for community engagement within CAPTains. This year, CE Fest engaged 203 CAPTains, as well as 26 community partners. With the theme “Rewriting Stories” in mind, the CE Fest 2022 committee provided CAPTains with platforms to listen to our partners’ stories, and rewrite any pre-conceived notions they may have of these communities.

We had a total of 12 trails: Life Beyond Bars, Tales of Our Vanishing Trades, Guiding our Last goodbyes: Morticians, Our Elderly Peddlers’ Stories, Rough Sleepers: The Rocky Road, A Young Hawker’s Unconventional Quest (new), The Colorful World of LGBTQ+, Origins of Our Island’s Produce (new), Unspoken Stories: Unsupported Pregnancies, Migrants: A Home Away from Home, Faith(s) in Peace, and Life Anew: Recovering from Addiction. With the addition of new trails, we provided a wider range of communities in Singapore for CAPTains to explore.

There were three stages to a CAPTain’s journey in CE Fest – pre-engagement, actual Engagement, and the finale. During the pre-engagement session, CAPTains participated in an interactive sharing with our community partners. Following, CAPTains engaged with members of their chosencommunity during the actual engagement. To conclude the event, a finale was held in CAPT where all our community partners and CAPTains involved had a celebratory lunch.

As part of the CE Fest 2022 committee, I touched-base with numerous communities through attending the engagement sessions. At its core, CE Fest 2022 allowed me to have a deeper understanding of communities I would not have interacted with in my daily life, and further sparked my passion for community engagement. Similarly, I believe this run of CE Fest inspired a new batch of CAPTains to rewrite their own stories about the different communities in Singapore.