SINGAPORE – A new fellowship has been launched to nurture and support leaders of ground-up initiatives, so that they can better meet the community’s needs.
The SG Strong Fellowship will award up to 15 fellowships and each fellow will be given $10,000 for their ground-up initiative.
The fellowship is given by philanthropic organisation The Majurity Trust, and it is supported by a $250,000 donation from global investment firm GIC.
Mr Masagos Zulkifli, Minister for Social and Family Development (MSF), launched the fellowship on Thursday morning. The fellowship aims to build a community of ground-up leaders where fellows can collaborate or even pool their funding to collectively tackle bigger and more complex problems.
Mr Masagos noted the role philanthropic groups play in building up the social impact ecosystem. He pointed out that The Majurity Trust partnered GIC to fund ground-up groups and initiatives during the Covid-19 pandemic, through its SG Strong Fund.
“The next bound is in partnering each other, to do good, better,” he said. “We need to work together, leveraging our various strengths and resources, to tackle issues. We need to create an ecosystem that enables good.”
Over the past three years, the Fund has supported 150 ground-up groups and helped over 390,000 beneficiaries like migrant workers, rough sleepers and low-income families. One applicant for the SG Strong Fellowship is Ms Zulayqha Zulkifli, a 28-year-old social worker. Her family started helping their neighbours hit by the pandemic in April 2020, by buying them groceries and other essential household items. Her father is a retired cleaner and they live in a Housing Board two-room rental flat.
Ms Zulayqha said of the Project Hills initiative working to benefit residents of rental flats that she belongs to: “The fellowship’s nurturing approach is helpful for small organisations like us to do what we have to do, without having to worry much about funds.”
Maritime workforce boosted with first maritime post-graduate scholarship, job redesign guidebook
Making Singapore a regional centre for philanthropy
Join ST’s WhatsApp Channel and get the latest news and must-reads.
p.st_telegram_boilerplate:before {
display: inline-block;
content: ” “;
border-radius: 6px;
height: 6px;
width: 6px;
background-color: #12239a;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 13px;
}
a.st_boilerplate {
font-family: “SelaneWebSTForty”, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;
}