Supermarket Vouchers For Needy Families And Engaging Seniors Virtually

To support needy beneficiaries under Fei Yue Family Service Centre (Champions Way), our Fencing and Netball academies collaborated to raise funds to purchase supermarket vouchers. They sold homemade brownies, cookies and tie-dye socks to staff and fellow student-athletes. The Values in Action project, which was completed in July under constraints posed by the pandemic, has imparted valuable soft skills to our student-athletes. Together with donations from parents, a total of $3,000 were raised to purchase the supermarket vouchers for the beneficiaries.

“The VIA experience this year was very much different from the past few years. With Covid-19 constraints in place, our usual approach of having physical bake sales in school was no longer viable. This makes it even more challenging to have the full involvement of the two academies (Fencing and Netball),” shared Anna Tay Wan Enn (IBDP Year 5) of the Fencing Academy.

Time management was one of the challenges for the academies as most of the student-athletes have different training schedules and tim-tables. The academies also have to overcome order and delivery challenges by utilising online payment modes and making home deliveries.

“As the saying goes, ‘teamwork makes the dream work’. We had to come together to collaborate on ideas so that we will be able to achieve our goal. Even though we had some disagreements about certain things, we still managed to reach a consensus and go with what’s best for the VIA project,” shared Janissa Tan Wei Ting (Secondary 4) of the Netball Academy.

On her key takeaway from this VIA, Anna shared: “Since this year’s VIA was a student-led initiative, those in charge of the planning and execution of the project were able to make decisions on their own. This added responsibility allowed me to have greater self-awareness of the decisions I was making, and how they may affect the project or others working with me.”

For Janissa, this VIA project has taught her the importance of teamwork and how to put aside differences to work together as a team. She said: “Teamwork is the key ingredient to the success of this VIA project. I have learnt to work with people with different personalities and opinions. It is a valuable life-skill as I will have to work with many different people in the future.”

While the Fencing and Netball academies were busy baking and making tie-dye socks, the Swimming academy supported Fei Yue Community Services in a Virtual Inter-generational Learning Programme (ILP) on 28 June 2021. The ILP, conducted via Zoom, aims to teach seniors about functional fitness and its importance by helping them acquire new skills and develop new interests through online practical lessons. In the virtual breakout rooms, our swimmers got to know the seniors better through ice-breaker activities and engaged them with exercises involving Taichi and Yoga movements.

“For this year’s project, due to Covid-19, we could not do the usual visiting to the Sree Narayana Senior Care Centre and take care of the seniors, something the Swimming Academy has been doing for the past few years. This meant that we had to come up with a new and interesting activity to engage the beneficiaries,” shared Sage Tan (Secondary 4) who led the project.

The organising team initially struggled to come up with an activity that was manageable to organise, meets Safe Management Measures and most importantly, fun and interesting for the seniors.

Sage said: “Overall the journey for this VIA was not easy. However with the support from our Senior General Manager Mr Chin Khen Theen, Coach Jerome Teo and Vice-Chairman Trinity Alcantara Goh, we managed to execute the project smoothly. We are glad that the seniors had a great time, and we enjoyed one another’s company virtually. It was truly a great experience for us, and we’ve learnt a lot through organising this project.”