LIL3 Session 1: Listening Circle on Digital Inclusion

In 2020, our founding chairperson Anthea Ong started the Mind The Gap Collective (MTG), a collaborative effort between A Good Space and 7 other organizations as an emergency response during the Circuit Breaker period in Singapore.

While MTG eventually raised and disbursed $1.12M in short-term financial assistance to 766 low-income individuals and families, we learned that the issues they faced were complex and wondered how else we could support them to overcome their challenges in the longer-term.

In particular, the issue of Digital Inclusion stood out. When we were all forced by the pandemic to go online to learn, work and stay connected, many were cut-off from such access due to the lack of Internet connectivity, devices or digital literacy, especially those from low-income communities.

In the last two years, there have been various efforts to help to bridge this 'digital divide' but these issues will persist even after the pandemic, how can we do more?

So we want to build on these efforts by gathering a diverse group of stakeholders to listen to each other, find common ground and commit to working together to create longer term change around the vision of:

"What can we as a collective do to improve digital inclusion for rental communities in Singapore?"

This Listening Circle event is part of the Listening Living Labs (L3) with Low-Income Communities initiative launched by A Good Space. The L3 is a multi-year program where we will gather multi-sector stakeholders who care about digital inclusion (e.g. businesses, academics, non-profit organizations, persons with lived experience, etc) to listen to each other and ideate solutions to bridge the digital divide.

We have designed the L3 by adapting from the Collective Impact framework, a tool for solving social challenges by gathering organizations and people from different sectors to create high-impact change to address complex issues such as poverty in the U.S and Canada.

This L3 is currently stewarded by leaders representing different sectors within low-income communities, including:

• Mr Johann Annuar, Executive Director, Engineering Good
• Ms Ruth Tan, Executive Director, South Central Community FSC
• Ms Joyce Teo, Executive Director, Community Foundation Singapore
• Ms Elaine Loo, Director, Service Strategy & Innovation, NCSS
• Dr Natalie Pang, Senior Lecturer & Deputy Head of Department, NUS
• Dr Carol Soon, Senior Research Fellow, IPS

The Listening Circle is part 1 of a series of 5 workshops where we'll gather multi-sector stakeholders together to have a facilitated dialogue on the theme of Digital Inclusion. In particular, we will have an action-oriented discussion on the following 4 questions:

• What are the key issues relating to the digital inclusion of public rental flat residents that we need to address now?

• What initiatives have been implemented in recent years to address these issues, and how effective have they been?

• What is the change we wish to see for these issues?

• What actions are we excited to create together that would make a difference?

At the end of the session, we will put out a call for participants who'd like to go beyond listening and discussion to join us for our subsequent ideation workshops. They are:

• 13 Aug, Workshop 2: Identify opportunities for actions and form workgroups

• 3 Sept, Workshop 3: Generate ideas for actions that can be done in 6 months

• 1 Oct, Workshop 4: Draft a plan to acquire resources needed to implement actions

• 29 Oct, Workshop 5: Launch 6-month workgroups and call for volunteers

*All dates stated here are TBC.

A Good Space is Singapore's first co-operative of changemakers, set up to convene diverse changemakers to work on social issues, together. We currently have 32 members representing 15 different social issues and communities who collectively share resources, ideas, and collaborate on projects.

We are united by our belief that together, we can do more for the issues we care about than we can do alone. To learn more about A Good Space, please visit: www.agoodspace.org. For enquiries, please reach out to us at livinglabs@agoodspace.org.