I am Sangeetha, a year 3 student in NUS majoring in social work. I signed up for SW3105 believing that I had already understood community work in the context of social work. SW3105 focuses on community work in the field of social work, where we collaborate with members of the community to incorporate services and programmes together with them. Typically, community work involves connecting with members of a particular estate and understanding their needs as one community. Upon building sufficient rapport, trust and interpersonal relationships with the residents, there may be opportunities to enhance community bonding and social cohesiveness to improve the quality of well-being amongst residents residing in the community. As a community worker, you go in, you listen, you work together with people, and you have fun in the community. I pictured it as something warm, familiar and light-hearted. To my surprise, I left the course with more questions than straightforward answers, and found the experience deeply uncomfortable but somehow necessary in becoming a social worker.
The course introduced us to the concept of “bumping spaces”, one of my biggest takeaways from last semester. The informal, unplanned corners of community life where real conversations happen. A corridor, a void deck, a wet market, a playground, a walkway, a bus stop, the minute before a conversation happens. It was in those spaces, during our bumping spaces interviews, where we heard the lived experience of community members navigating real life stressors, some even living in urban poverty. The quiet exhaustion behind their narratives, the way they shared about falling between the cracks of the systemic barriers, expanded my understanding of the challenges of an ordinary Singaporean. Those conversations were not a part of just any assignment. They shaped the personal values, worldviews and perspectives I bring to my everyday experiences.
Tutorials usually give us students an experience of applying our learnt theories into practice. However, for SW3105, the discussion group exercises took form in terms of allowing us to integrate concepts autonomously by sharing our views and questions of specific theories and the practices of community work in real work settings. One discussion group exercise that sticks with me till this moment is the multi-stakeholder role-play activity. Differing from the typical mundane tutorial lessons we’re often exposed to, the role-play activity simulated a real-life scenario where different organizations came together to talk about a common problem affecting the community. The exercise involved us being assigned to represent a different organization responding to a crisis. The situation comprised residents without shelter living at Kensington Park. My group took on the role of Family Service Centre (FSC) as a stakeholder involved in this matter. Around the same table, there were groups representing stakeholders such as National Parks, the Destitute Department, a voluntary organization, and the Social Service Office. Our task was to negotiate a timeline together with all the stakeholders to ensure the homeless residents occupying the spaces of the parks were able to evacuate the spaces safely. Moreover, we primarily had the responsibility to convey to different agencies that while it was important to ensure residents evacuate the spaces, it was necessary to comprehend their unmet needs and gaps in accessing resources in the community. Ultimately, it was critical that we provided residents with support to have shelters as they were rough sleepers. I thought it was a simple task. I mean, what’s there so complicated about this?

It was not simple.