Singapore International Foundation

23 Aug 2008

SIF Gala Dinner 2008

Speech by Singapore International Foundation Chairman, Ms Euleen Goh, at the SIF Gala dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel Ballroom.

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Good evening,

Your Excellency President S R Nathan & Mrs. Nathan,

Minister Lee Boon Yang,

And friends of the Foundation …

I am delighted to be here opening this dinner as the new chairman of SIF. Of the different hats that I wear, this is one that I don with pride because of the reach that we have and can have as Singaporeans with a heart.

A couple of years ago, I took part in an SIF project and met one of the senior executives in charge of volunteer projects. He had joined upon completing his degree and by then had stayed some 5 years with SIF. I was curious about why he had elected to stay in a job that did not carry the promise of significant financial rewards knowing that many of his cohort would have been climbing the corporate ladder in the crucial early years of working life.

His response was that he found the job personally fulfilling and the rewards to him were simply to know that he had touched lives and helped people in need. I was inspired by him and by many I have since met who have served and are serving in SIF and by all who have and are supporting SIF today. Indeed, all of you here tonight have been active supporters of our aid projects. SIF pays tribute to all of you, for you have helped us set the path and platform to do much more in the world around us.

Special thanks to my immediate past chairman, Mr. Barry Desker, who has served seven years as chairman of the Board of Governors. He has been a dedicated leader for our mission.

And a special welcome to Jean Tan -- SIF’s new Executive Director. I had to wrest Jean away from a role that she enjoyed and from a boss who was reluctant to let her go. Jean comes to us passionate about our mission and with a drive to make SIF outstanding. I am delighted to have her onboard.

With a more certain future, we have been challenged by our stakeholders to review our horizon and expand it. We will deepen and broaden the range of friendships we make through active international networking; touch lives through a wide array of volunteerism projects and showcase exciting and diverse Singapore

Tonight, we would like to focus on Partner for Good – our Community Partnerships initiative and the theme for our volunteerism. As we forge ahead, we look to the Singapore community to partner us in fulfilling our mission. Our individual volunteers and corporate partners -- whom we will be recognising later on this evening -- help us make a difference. Without you, we would not have been able to complete many of our capacity-building projects in the region. And the promise of a better life would have escaped a significant number of people.

Thanks to all of you, SIF is now emboldened to push beyond capacity-building and enter a new arena – that of community development. As you know, our capacity-building projects are based on the training-of-trainer model – for example, our specialist doctors training fellow doctors in Indonesia over a period that can stretch to three years or more. By moving into the area of community development, SIF will be improving lives more directly and possibly, within a shorter time frame.

Tonight, I would like to share with you, briefly, 3 exciting projects that our International Volunteerism team is working on:

We have a new partner in Temasek Foundation who will be working together with us to support an information technology capacity- building project in Bhutan. The plans to prepare the Bhutanese for an IT-enriched workplace are exciting indeed.

MediaCorp’s Caldecott Productions is another new partner in our new field of community development. Through this partnership, an impoverished dairy-farming community in Phoolpur, India has a chance at reviving their small milk business and building a village cooperative fund that will sustain other families over time.

Philanthropist and IT mogul, Bill Gates, calls this creative capitalism –“an instrument that can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living.”

A third project for which we are in search of a funding partner is the establishment of a mobile library in Hanoi, Vietnam, to offer rural children access to books, games and computer literacy.  Besides bringing books to villages, staff and volunteers will provide children intellectual stimulation through story-telling, games and teaching computer skills.

Quoting again from Bill Gates’s Harvard’s commencement address earlier this year, he said that while he learned about many discoveries at university, the most important one escaped him…

That “humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity."

Since then, the Harvard drop-out, has spent more than 28.8 billion US dollars fixing the gaps in global health and learning; and leveling life’s injustices.

The people in this room tonight prove that one need not be a Bill Gates to help level the world’s inequities. In the past year, through your support of SIF’s overseas projects you have been a catalyst in transforming lives and building capacity in communities that most need it.

We have together helped advance the standard of health, education, IT literacy, social work, physiotherapy and more in Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Bhutan, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Through your choosing to partner SIF, you have helped us achieve some amazing results. I salute you for having the courage to make the difference.

And so, I say again, tonight is a special night for us at SIF. The board of governors debated long and hard about holding a dinner such as this one – ONE combined event to recognize our partners for good.

But the prospect of having you -- our extraordinary partners -- all under roof, was too compelling to resist. Your presence here warms us with the knowledge that our mission is in good hands, and that the road ahead despite  its challenges will be heartwarming for us all.

In the current global economic turmoil, it will be tempting for many corporates to shift attention away from corporate social responsibility programmes. But, as most of the people in this room know, we should not let up on our mission in bringing pain relief to a rural hospital; or simply funding books on wheels that bring learning to children in remote villages. We will continue to keep faith in our mission to extend a helping hand. And we look to your support in doing so.

So that when we meet again next year, we will have reason to celebrate, as Mr. Gates says, not only what “you have done with your talent and your energy alone, but also how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities ... and how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity."

Thank you all for being here this evening – SIF Patron, President SR Nathan, Mrs. SR Nathan, Minister Lee Boon Yang, staff and all of you who have kept faith with us and our mission. We look forward to all of you and more joining us in our journey as a Partner for Good.

Enjoy the rest of the evening.