HAZEEM NASEER

Would it be possible for you to just introduce yourself and your project as well?

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Yeah, sure. Hi everyone, I'm Hazeem. Thanks so much for wanting to interview me and I'm so happy that at least the discussions last year made a lasting impression on you all. So for myself, currently I'm the president and founder of The Signpost Project, and also I'm the co-founder of A Little Change. Let me start off with The Signpost Project; it looks after the tissue seller community in Singapore. So a lot of what we do is mainly befriending services, but this depends on the needs that these tissue sellers have, especially because most of them come from low-income backgrounds and are elderly. We will cater to their needs, for example liaising with government agencies for financial assistance, accompanying them for their medical visits, or even if it's just to spring clean their houses during Chinese New Year, especially because some of them have physical impairments and it's difficult for them to move. So it really depends, it's very individualised and personalised care that we provide. I started it in 2019, so this year will be about the fourth year that we've been running it.

 

The next one would be A Little Change, I started that back in 2016, 2 months before my A-Levels, and that was when I was looking at the whole volunteer scene in Singapore and I thought that I could potentially help change that. What A Little Change strived to do - and still strives to do - is provide a platform for youths to give back to the community, especially to low-income families. One of the key programmes that ALC runs is to bridge the communication gap between low-income parents and their children, especially those who are shift-working parents.

 

What was the inspiration behind starting the project?

 

A lot of it started because a group of friends and I were in Yale-NUS college back then, and that was around the Clementi-Jurong East area, so a lot of us walked around, noticed tissue sellers and just by chance, we started talking to them. We realised that not a lot of them were being supported, or even if they were being supported, some of them found the support to be rather limited. Because of that we started to think and see a gap there, and we wanted to think of something we could do to help plug that gap. That's where it first started, and it largely just started as a befriending kind of thing, where we befriended a lot fo the elderly, we got to know them, and as we got to know them we started to understand a lot more about their problems. And this grew - once the problems grew a lot more complex, that's when we needed assistance from other people because of course we ourselves are not policymakers, we're not social workers trained and that's when we reached out to other people like agencies and non-profits for help. That's where the whole network started to grow. While working with the Ministry of Social and Family Development, that's when we also became one of the founding members of the Vulnerable and Community Network which looks after not just the tissue sellers, but also the cardboard collectors as well as the vulnerable elderly at large. It started with just several conversations with tissue sellers, realising that maybe there's a problem here, and that that's something we could look towards. We found it was pretty ironic, because a lot of these tissue sellers are in very public places, but a lot of their narratives are rather hidden and very private in a sense.

 

If you were to compare the you that was just about to start TSP versus the you today, how has leading TSP changed you as a person and also shaped your values?

 

I think that first thing that I would say is that, as cliche as it sounds, it taught me not to judge a book by its cover. I think there are a lot of stereotypes, especially with tissue sellers. I mean the first thing that comes to mind when you see a tissue seller is like oh, low-income or very vulnerable. Or potentially even the more harmful stereotypes like maybe they're scammers, maybe they're part of a syndicate, they're just there to cheat our money. And as I got to know the reasons why they're here, it can be very varied - of course some of the common ones are financial assistance, but some of them are not even finance-related. Some of them are health-related, for example; all of these elderly do live alone and if anything happens to them while living alone, no one's going to call 995 for them. So what they do is they place themselves in front of shopping malls, in front of an MRT station so it's in a very public place. If anything happens, hopefully a stranger will call 995 if they have a heart attack or if a stroke happens. For some of them, as mentioned they live alone, so they feel that deep sense of loneliness especially when they stay in a very small and cramped room. That's when they go outside to sell and at least have some sort of interaction. A lot of them also potentially have family problems as well, so it's a good way for them to just get out of that space which feels very congested and crammed for them. So that's the thing - we came in with a kind of image of how the tissue sellers may have lived their life, or a stereotype that they embody, and realised that they live very multi-faceted lives, that the reasons they sell are very varied, the lives they live are very varied. It's very similar for us individually as well, the people that we meet generally have very cool stories to tell, even inspirational stories, and I think this is the same for tissue sellers.

 

Have been some difficulties you've encountered in pursuing this project or ALC?

 

I'll talk about TSP first, I mean the more recent things that have happened. Some of the challenges - one is trying to manage various stakeholders, for example when getting financial assistance, how do you really work with the agencies? Of course, the priority will always be: how do we support the needy and the vulnerable? In this case, that's the tissue sellers, especially those who need financial assistance. A lot of times we have to work together to ensure that we're able to fulfill their needs comprehensively, but at the same time being able to provide their needs sustainably. Even though we look at financial assistance, we also look at the long-term, like what other opportunities are there for them to be self-dependent as well. For example, how do we include other partners to fulfill needs that government agencies may not provide like food? So we look at food banks such as Meals on Wheels to provide catering food. I think a lot of times, managing that kind of logistics and being able to work around the different priorities to be able to ensure that comprehensive support for tissue sellers has been a challenge especially when it comes to coordination because everyone has different groups and even different quantities of people that you need to cater to. For example, a social service office probably has thousands of cases that they have to handle. Sometimes things may slip through, but it's not necessarily a fault of anyone's, it's just how we ensure that we cover for each other. So let's say if we know of an urgent case, then that's when we constantly follow up with an agency and if that agency may not have the bandwidth, we look for support elsewhere. In that sense, it also has a silver lining because you also learn how to see different people's bandwidths and how different organisations play very different roles to ensure that we have this whole slew of organisational networks that's coming in to provide that kind of net to be able to support maybe even a single individual. Whether it's ensuring that they have food, or getting the kind of assistance that they need especially if it's medical. And of course in terms of their social needs, us being able to check in on them every other week to ensure that they're all okay. So I think that's definitely one of the challenges that one might face.

 

The other one is also looking at how we might change public behaviour. Very recently, a Mothership article was featured about some tissue sellers earning quite a lot of money; I believe the headline was "this particular tissue seller earns $200-400" and you see some of the comments like "oh, of course they don't need that much" or "why are they earning so much" or "they're just earning because it's a scam". Even within our day-to-day operations, during our volunteer runs and walkabouts, we also sometimes see people moving away from tissue sellers. I think at the end of the day, a lot of these harmful stereotypes just perpetuate a distinction between tissue sellers versus non-tissue sellers, if that's even a worthy distinction to make. It's a very arbitrary distinction because a lot of them are just trying to make ends meet and when they sell tissues, it's also up to people to buy them. It's not very fair that, for example, a kid goes up to try to buy tissues but the mom pulls the kid away saying "no no no you shouldn't give money to them". We're thinking of how we want to tackle all of these stereotypes - one way of course is social media, but how? Social media is mainly awareness, it doesn't necessarily affect behaviour. This is something that we’ve been tackling, and we also try and get people to come and volunteer to do the walkabouts — whether it’s volunteering for 1 month or 2 months, we want them to be able to listen to their stories and really understand what’s going on before passing any judgement or even acting in a harmful way to these tissue sellers.

 

What’s an unforgettable moment for you? Or a story you have heard that had a lasting impact on you?

 

I’ll share 2 stories, one from ALC and one from TSP. So starting from TSP, this was just after the circuit breaker and there was this uncle, a tissue seller, and I managed to catch him just in time as he was eating lunch. And he was just telling me all his problems about how he was struggling financially, with COVID and everything there weren’t many people going to shopping malls. People were scared of just interacting with others, right? So they may not necessarily interact with him or pass him money, and because of that finances were very tight. He had to support his children and his wife was also retrenched, and it was a very very difficult process for him. Even his kids were quite distant from him because they know he’s a tissue seller, and because finances were tight, there were a lot of tensions within the household. As he was eating lunch, he started tearing up and he said to me, “I’m very glad that you’re my friend.” And I think that stuck with me — I genuinely don’t think I did a lot, I just sat there and listened to the story. And maybe that’s just what matters, just tiny actions like that can make such a huge impact on people. That same principle can be applied to so many things, you don’t need to raise a million dollars or something to make change. Sometimes it’s really just lending a listening ear, and that could just mean the world to someone. This also actually relates to a quote I found on Facebook which is really cool! It was that a lot of times people are scared when they travel back in time, that when they make a small difference it might affect the present drastically. But no one really thinks that if you do something small now, it will drastically change the future. I think that was really powerful, and I think it’s very similar here, that you can just do a small thing: maybe it’s just starting a conversation, it’s just lending a listening ear — you’re not even having a conversation, just listening! — and that can make a really big difference in someone’s life. Why I started a lot of the things I did actually stems from this.

 

In ALC, what happened was that our flagship project got cancelled and this was definitely a huge blow to our self-esteem because this was the flagship project that was meant to start the organisation and get us started on the right foot. But we scrapped that because we realised that flagship event was more so for its grandness, rather than the fact that it was very meaningful. We decided to scrap that 2 weeks before it was supposed to go through. We started small, we did a care package giveaway during Christmas. What happened was that as we were giving care packages, we passed by one of those garbage collection centres and there was an auntie and a little girl who were collecting garbage. As we were giving the care package to them, I was about to move over and the little girl just tugged at my shirt. I was so confused, I was like “do you want another one?” but she didn’t. I mean she was really shy, but the auntie said “no, she wants to do a Christmas exchange” and she gave me her teddy bear in exchange for the care package. I haven’t actually seen her afterwards and when I looked at the teddy bear, there was the name of a programme that she was from and I searched it up. The programme was for low-income families. She will never know the impact she has made on me and I also realised at the same time that you don’t really need that much to just make someone’s day. And that’s how I started and continued to volunteer my time — because it’s for those kinds of moments, right? You make a difference to someone no matter how small it may be. It could just change someone’s life.

 

We’ve read that TSP collaborates with MSF and other government officials, so we wanted to know how this process works and how you believe that NPOs such as TSP and other volunteering organisations contribute to the bigger picture?

 

I think when we collaborate with agencies, it’s very useful to know and be very clear about what role each agency plays. We look at the government as a whole and the ministry of MSF in general as well; each department, each division has a role to play and understanding intuitively what role they play is crucial especially when you want to do a collaboration. Because you don’t want to go to the wrong department or the wrong agency, then you have to send a bunch of emails and it just stalls time. But that also means that it’s a lot of trial and error. You won’t know which department to go to unless you send out the first email, right? Being like hey, I have a case that I need to settle, how do I navigate this? I think a lot of times, these collaborations also happen as you gain experience. It’s hard to know how much ground-up knowledge you have, because it’s also very difficult to collaborate when as an organisation, we might not necessarily have enough knowledge to contribute. The collaborations between government agencies and TSP worked out because we spent quite a couple of years working through some of these cases. And even within the first year, when we had a case, we worked with the tissue seller to try and get as many details as possible so that when we wanted to do that collaboration, we already had a foundation to work on. The biggest trouble I see is that sometimes people may collaborate for the sake of collaboration, there is no specific purpose, and I think that’s when resources are split and become redundant. That, generally, is rather wasteful sometimes — the best case is that it’s wasteful for the organisation, but the worst case is that it’s wasteful for the beneficiaries. That’s where you must be able to understand what role you play. So for example, within a vulnerable community network, TSP looks after the tissue seller community, and that’s a very specific role. You may say tissue sellers are a very specific community, it’s very small, but that’s the role we play. That’s what we’re best at. Other organisations look after elderly, like the vulnerable elderly at home. Other organisations look after the cardboard collectors, but we know the role that we play and if we need financial assistance, we know which agencies to go to. If we need medical assistance, we go to the medical social workers, that kind of thing. This will sound pretty overwhelming, all the information and just knowing who to go to and what to do, but this is a lot of trial and error and just having a foot in sometimes. Once that first collaboration goes through, a lot of things become easier because you can just ask around within that network. I can just ask, let’s say within MSF, oh hey I have trouble with tax returns for one of the tissue sellers. As a student, I have no idea how to do tax returns. Sometimes having that kind of diversity in our volunteer pool will also help tremendously, so when we asked our volunteers “does anyone know tax returns?”, we had a retired auditor who was really useful and he came down to help uncle with his tax returns on the IRS app which was really nice. So I think when it comes to working with agencies, it’s good to know what your focus is and what your limitations are. Understand your strengths and weaknesses so that other people can better help you cover your weaknesses and also see how your strengths contribute to the overall development, how you guys can support the vulnerable or the beneficiaries that you’re looking at.

 

Do you have any tips for youths who are hoping to start their own projects and run it sustainably?

 

I think one thing is don’t be afraid of failure. I think it is perfectly fine to start something and then realise that hey, maybe this is not what is needed. In fact,  it could drop off, but you shouldn’t let that fear of it dropping off or it failing in the future stop you. I think it’s always better to do something rather than just wait and let someone else do it. The second thing: while you’re starting something, it’s really good to go volunteer at another organisation as well or just learn the ropes, how other people do it from the inside. And then you can apply those lessons in your own startups and projects. I think starting out will always be very difficult with 0 knowledge, but I think you can always start small, even if it’s just having small conversations or that small event of giving care packages away. You can dream big, but for your initial goals, it’s good to always start small, achieve one step at a time. I think it’s always better to take thousands of small steps than try to reach for that one huge leap.