Grassroots Organizations

Summary

It is one of the playful ironies of Singapore that so much is made about grassroots in a largely concrete city. But what that insistence on the salience of grassroots thinking invokes is an abiding memory of kampung Singapore. Today, there is a need to preserve at least some aspects of the kampung way of life, not in spite, but because of, urbanization and globalization. The hallmark of urbanization in a high-rise environment is anonymity, or the loss of a palpable sense of living in a face-to-face society where the mere fact of inhabiting a piece of land together creates familial familiarity and social intimacy. What the Government has tried to recreate in the high-rise kampungs of Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates is, therefore, the felt sentiment of people being part of the same economic, social and moral environment.

Enter the People's Association (PA). Set up in 1960, it occupies a special position in the grassroots life of Singapore. As a statutory board, it has the weight of the State behind it, but it is not a purely official body like a Ministry. Instead, being involved in facilitating grassroots activism, it acts as a conduit for popular activity and feedback directed upwards at the Government as much as an instrument of State policy towards society. It is this engagement with grassroots activism that creates natural synergy — and, indeed, an affinity — between the goals of the PA and those of the CEP, which is nothing if it is not a bottom-up exercise.

These common goals made the PA emerge as an obvious candidate for forming a CEP cluster. Institutionally, the PA works closely with the Ministry of Home Affairs, the lead agency, and other CEP cluster leads to promote the programme to and through its Grassroots Organizations (GROs). The GROs belong to the traditional domain which has been enlarged with the CEP. This grassroots CEP work involves strengthening inter-racial ties by building confidence, trust and social capital among people in a widening common space that intensifies the shared experience of being Singaporean.