Young NTUC engagements for better Mental Health

 

Last week, I joined a team of peer supporters for a design sprint (a Peer Supporter Learning Circle session) at the One Marina Boulevard NTUC Building. Vincent, a fellow peer supporter, led the session with facilitators from the Youth Development Unit whom he had trained the week before. Mayor (SE-CDC) Fahmi Aliman (also a labour MP (attached to NTUC's administration and research unit) came to listen in and shared some closing remarks pledging to continue fighting for us employees in Parliament. He said he would be looking into rest spaces and safe spaces for workers, especially low-wage workers.

In smaller teams of 6, we first did brainstorming and ideation using post-its before clustering them up to eventually converge on two ideas or areas of interest. We then began thinking of potential solutions. Somehow or rather, being an educator, they picked me to help write down the points for the team (and also present). I summarised our ideas to that of Workforce and Workplace initiatives. We wanted to create an informal and possibly anonymous platform for workers to share their stresses and stressors. Peer supporters could help moderate and create informal befriending groups that can help to raise awareness on mental health matters. Also, we planned to create a safe space in all our workplaces, including a booth/capsule with relaxing music, access to mindline.sg and other mindfulness-related media for use during breaks. This is something I have personally trialled at my workplace (and I wrote about it briefly here). I think that there is a way to scale this further and will share more as I uncover further insights from my pilot study.

The other activity I attended with Young NTUC youth leaders was a team-bonding activity where we played archery tag at Changi Business Park. I feel that some of these activities are good ways to bond, destress and have fun with others and that helps one cope for one's mental health too. We got to choose between a hunting bow or a horseback one and shot arrows with some foam head (rather than the sharp metal tip). The gameplay was something like dodgeball but to me, it felt super tiring (maybe it is my age catching up to me) as we had to run and get our arrows from the middle of the court at the start of each round.

I met and got to know fellow educators and some other union representatives too. Winning the 'Most Valuable Player' award, I was awarded with a set of toy bow and arrows. I must say that this was a fun activity that perhaps I can introduce to my future school be it for students or for colleagues.

Side note: The workshop used the KJ (Kawakita Jiro) process in a way.

We brainstormed individually in silence, then clustered and voted on the areas to work on. Then split into groups to work on the areas that resonated with us individually.

In the respective areas, we tried to identify the main idea we thought could work, what we might gain from it, what's needed to make it work, who benefits most, and what we might be giving up (if the idea were implemented).