In Review 2021: The Jubilee Year Edition

MUSINGS

Sharing our Shared History In a community, individual stories make up the whole — so let’s hear it from the Project Spring-Winter (PSW) Executive Team!

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JSM Village has come to life, and both the Nursing Home and Little Seeds Preschool are up and running in their new premises. We’ve all become quite familiar with PSW’s major milestones over the years, but the team that saw the project through has kept a relatively low profile. Here, we ask them to share significant memories, experiences, and takeaways from their involvement.

John Suan Project Executive Director, 2015–1 May 2016 It was more of a surprise than anything else to have been part of PSW, actually.

God has a sense of humour. You move out of Singapore, you think a chapter of your life is over, but you never really know when God will float up pieces of the past and ask you to pick them up again. I’d actually only come back from Canada to spend time with my son who was doing his National Service, when Bp Rennis asked if I was available to help out by working with Ps Joshua to kick off PSW: pull a team together, set out working pieces and get gears in motion, appoint architects, supply a working brief, ensure that subcommittees are in place, etc.

As ex-Group CEO for SAMH and SACS, I’d had opportunity to serve the Diocese, but at a certain distance. PSW was different, up close and precious; doing it with Ps Joshua and Bp Rennis, with whom I go back a long way, was a real joy.

I particularly treasure the shared thinking process; it was beautiful to see this coming together of like-minded individuals, this shared grappling with the concept of social work from a service perspective, of building both hardware and software. I also enjoyed helping the architectural team understand our hows and whys—it helped that a few of them were SJSMers as well—and then seeing PSW come alive in the drawings.

I handed the reins over to Michael Wong and left Singapore just before the final goodbye to the old open-air carpark, but I’ve remained in the project group chat, so I’m aware of and in touch with PSW’s progress. I like to think that I’ve always been there whenever any of them needed a sounding board. All in, I’m just really grateful to have been a part of this process.

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