{"id":3849,"date":"2023-10-01T14:57:20","date_gmt":"2023-10-01T14:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-alumn-nus.pantheonsite.io\/alumnus\/?p=3849"},"modified":"2025-07-15T16:07:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T08:07:57","slug":"going-beyond-basic-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/2023\/10\/01\/going-beyond-basic-needs\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Beyond Basic Needs"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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WHO SHE IS<\/h3>\n\n

Ms Siti Adriana Muhamad Rasip is the co-founder of Empowered Families Initiative, which seeks to harness the strengths and abilities of low-income families by investing in their aspirations. The initiative took home the top honours at the inaugural =Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition, a nationwide contest of ideas to eradicate poverty.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

If you ever needed affirmation that internships can be life-changing, just listen to the experience of Ms Siti Adriana Muhamad Rasip. \u201cI enrolled into my degree with the goal of becoming a policymaker. But an internship changed that,\u201d recalls the Political Science major, now 30. The internship in question? A three-month stint at the Ministry of Social and Family Development\u2019s Social Service Office @ Tampines, which opened her eyes to the challenges faced by low-income families in Singapore. \u201cI was pretty ignorant before the internship started and\u00a0had many misconceptions about these families\u00a0and their hardships,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n\n

But interacting with them helped Ms Adriana see their plight in a new light. Today, she is the co-founder of Empowered Families Initiative (EFI), which invests in the aspirations of low-income communities. \u201cOur movement calls for society to help vulnerable families thrive, instead of just survive,\u201d she sums up. This reframing of the way we think about poverty has attracted attention from the philanthropy community. In May, a panel of judges \u2014 comprising philanthropists, academics, social entrepreneurs and policymakers \u2014 crowned EFI as the winner of the inaugural\u00a0=Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition<\/em>. This competition offered a grand prize of $500,000 for innovative solutions to eradicate poverty in Singapore.<\/p>\n\n

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POVERTY IN SINGAPORE<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n

Public rental flats, which are synonymous with vulnerable families, are not uncommon in Singapore. At the start of the decade, some\u00a052,000 households\u00a0lived in such flats, according to estimates by the Ministry of National Development.\u00a0

Efforts to uplift these communities include the Fresh Start Housing Scheme, which helps families with young children \u2014 who have previously received one housing subsidy and are currently living in public rental flats \u2014 own a 2-room Flexi flat or 3-room flat.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

More than\u00a0700 households\u00a0who lived in public rental flats bought homes in 2022, with some tapping the scheme.<\/strong>
Source:\u00a0The Straits Times<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n\n

Over the past 10 years, more than\u00a07,800 rental households\u00a0have bought homes, while another\u00a02,300 households\u00a0have booked units and are waiting for them to be completed.<\/strong>
Source:\u00a0The Straits Times<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n\n

THE WINNING SOLUTION<\/h4>\n\n

EFI\u2019s pitch is based on a simple premise: the most effective way to lift people out of poverty is by empowering families. \u201cSocial assistance in Singapore can sometimes feel reactive and designed to cover just basic needs. In such a system, families would always be \u2018in need\u2019 \u2014 they would only survive and not thrive,\u201d she explains, adding that support measures often do not sufficiently take into account unique circumstances and challenges.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Her conversations with low-income families, which began during her time at NUS, cemented her beliefs. \u201cA group of us \u2014 social service practitioners, and families who have lived through poverty \u2014 came together to start EFI,\u201d she shares. In her view, the premise of EFI is that low-income communities are not just made up of people who are in need and helpless. \u201cMany of them are creative and, for instance, want to start home-based businesses to uplift their families,\u201d she says. \u201cBut often, the support they receive only covers their basic needs and doesn\u2019t support these aspirations, which means these dreams get shelved.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

EFI hopes to help these families dust off their long-held dreams, which can be related to employment, entrepreneurship, skills upgrading, savings and expansion of social capital. This is not an exhaustive list, adds Ms Adriana, saying that families are given a great deal of autonomy to chart their own course. \u201cIt\u2019s important to remember that receiving social assistance should not stand in the way of affording these families dignity to make their own decisions,\u201d she stresses.<\/p>\n\n

THREE TO THRIVE<\/h4>\n\n

EFI comprises three aspects: funding for projects of up to $1,500, a savings matching scheme, and efforts to foster a community through regular meetings among participants. To Ms Adriana, each of these plays an equally vital role. She cites the positive experience of the first four families onboarded to the EFI programme in 2022. Two of the families that were running home-based businesses used the EFI grant to buy equipment and increase their sales. Another participant successfully saved $25,000 through the matched savings programme and opened a car-washing business. Yet another participant \u2014 a food delivery rider who used to make deliveries on a bicycle \u2014 used the grant to obtain a motorcycle licence. With this, he could make more food deliveries and earn a higher income. \u201cAll four also reported a higher level of social support from getting to know one another,\u201d concludes Ms Adriana.<\/p>\n\n

These results impressed the\u00a0=Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition 2023<\/em>\u00a0judges, who included Mr Han Fook Kwang, editor-at-large of\u00a0The Straits Times<\/em>. Explaining EFI\u2019s win, he told the national broadsheet, \u201cWe looked for a solution which will make a difference to the poverty problem. The team must have a workable plan with a realistic budget to roll out over a three-year period. It has to be implementable by existing organisations and Singapore Family Service Centres, social enterprises and charities. Most of all, it has to be innovative\u2026 achieving results not attainable in the current scheme of things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The win at the\u00a0=Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Competition 2023<\/em>\u00a0has fired up Ms Adriana and her team to take EFI to the next level. \u201cWe now want to adopt a \u2018scale-up and scale-out\u2019 strategy. Scaling up is about increasing the number of beneficiaries, while scaling out is to engage through this funding, possibly by giving the funding to social service agencies to pilot EFI within their own agencies. Implementing it together will allow the community practice to learn from each other along the way, which is a shift from how we do social assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

But she will have to juggle EFI\u2019s future with another major commitment: her Masters in Public Administration in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value, which she is pursuing in London. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely taxing,\u201d admits Ms Adriana, who is back in Singapore to work on her thesis. \u201cBut I have a great team of co-founders who are just as passionate about making a difference. We would get on Zoom calls at all hours of the night to put together our proposal for the competition, so I\u2019m certain that our passion will see us through.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fresh perspective on society\u2019s approach to poverty is essential, urges Ms Siti Adriana Muhamad Rasip (Arts and Social Sciences \u201916).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6514,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-impact"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3849"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6460,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3849\/revisions\/6460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}