Description of Organization

RSVP Singapore is a non profit organisation established in Oct 1998 and is the National Centre of Excellence for Senior Volunteerism. Its mission is to develop senior volunteers and provide opportunities for them to serve the needs of the community. Our goal is to make every senior a volunteer. RSVP outreach to 200,000 beneficiaries each year through our pool of 2,500 senior volunteers. Our community programmes include: MENTORING prog for at-risk primary school children, ENRICHING LIVES OF SENIOR prog for socially isolated seniors, MY BUDDY prog-a home visitation prog for elderly discharged patients, MENTALLY DISADVANTAGED OUTREACH prog for rehabilitating mental health clients and VOLUNTEER LEARNING CENTRE which provides learning opportunity to seniors including volunteer training and IT skills.

Intended use of funds through the YFC 2023 programme

Funds that are raised for RSVP Singapore will be used to expand our community service programmes so that we can outreach to more beneficiaries in the underprivileged community. In addition, we would also like to grow our outreach activities and programmes so that we can continue to reach out to more seniors, to create awareness of senior volunteerism and to recruit them as volunteers so they can through us, give back to the community. By doing so, we will also be helping them to age actively and healthily and in a way, help them delay early onset of dementia by engaging them in meaningful community activities and programmes.

Engaging and involving the YFC participants

As these are youth volunteers with a passion to giving back to the community and working with our senior volunteers, we will invite them to our office to show them our facilities, including our Volunteer Learning Computer labs. We will also invite them to our monthly Open House where they will be able to see how our senior volunteers conduct sharing to other seniors interested to learn more about RSVP and in joining us as members. There will be interaction between the youth volunteers and our senior volunteers where they will get to know about our various community service programmes and our senior volunteers in the respective programmes, including those who are IT savvy IT instructors. We will want to look at creating opportunities for those youths to have intergenerational volunteering activities with our seniors so they can bond by volunteering together to serve the community. Such arrangements will also allow the youths to look through the lens of seniors, better understand how seniors work and think, and provide learning opportunities for them to bridge the generation gap, and drive towards a positive outcome.