This award is created in memory of Tan Mingwei, who was a medical student at Cambridge University.

During her university and school holidays, Mingwei went on a few volunteer trips overseas. She completed a medical attachment at a HIV-AIDS clinic in Botswana, and volunteered with mobile and neurosurgery clinics in Nepal under the Cambridge Mountain Trust. When she was a student at Raffles Girls’ School, she taught English to underprivileged minority children in Taiwan. She also taught handicapped archers when in Raffles Junior College. She was greatly inspired by the overseas volunteer trips that she went on.

Hence, this award is set up for the purpose of awarding Tan Mingwei Gobal Community Service Grants which would allow students to carry out meaningful community work in developing countries like she did, and perhaps be transformed by the experience like she was.

Please click here to find out more on Tan Mingwei.

The award will be given to students who are going to carry out community service or for internships with community service providers in developing countries. Students must go there to impart a skill or service which is both lacking in and needed by the community. The award aims to encourage projects which help communities sustain themselves over the longer term.

The skill or service could be directly related to the student’s field of study (such as medicine, engineering, IT, science, and environmental studies), or could be a more generalized skill such as teaching. Projects where students are imparting or applying knowledge, as well as learning skills related to their areas of study at the same time, will be favoured. Students who have shown initiative and passion in doing community service before will also be favoured, though those who are doing so for the first time will not be ruled out.

Projects which would be suitable for the award include but are not limited to the following:

The project may be organised under a pre-existing programme and/or organization. This may include, but is not necessarily restricted to, the following:

Note: The awards will be preferentially given to individuals with initiative in seeking out projects, rather than to members of organized groups of students.

A minimum of four awards, valued at no more than S$1,500, will be given each year. Two will be given to NUS students and two to Cambridge students. NUS will manage the endowment, but the institutions where the students come from will decide who should be awarded the awards.

• The award can be given in conjunction with other awards.
• There will be no special criteria for students in terms of their grades or year of study; the grant will be given based on the potential value of the proposed project, in terms of skills imparted to the community and/or learned by the student.
• The project should last at least two weeks.
• Students applying for the grant should provide a project description giving:
     a) the project objective and proposed outcomes,
     b) an explanation of how these match the community’s needs,
     c) an explanation of the kinds of skills/services that they will be deploying or learning;
     d) a budget of the proposed project (airfare and transport, materials, food, accommodation, etc); and
     e) a timeline of the project.
• A report of 1,000 to 1,500 words with a few photographs on the student’s experience in the project should be submitted to the respective home university/college within four weeks of completion of the project.
• Students should also send a postcard to the respective home university/college from the location of the project when they are there.
  

For NUS students, click here to download the application form.
For Cambridge students, click here to download the application form.

At least 2 months prior to the start of the project.

Project period must be at least TWO weeks.

Please submit your application form to iroawards@nus.edu.sg (attention: Ms Hamidah Salleh).