COVID-19 and Volunteering from Home

It is 13 July 2020, which means we’re closing into the first month of the ‘Phase 2’ safety measures in Singapore brought to us by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In all honesty, it is indeed crazy to me that we’ve already entered into the second half of the year because it feels like the new routine and culture of staying, working and studying from home the past few months has sped us through to today.

As we’re all currently adjusting to a ‘new normal’, mass gatherings and events still can’t go on due to the new safety regulations and emphasis on social distancing. Therefore, any programmes that involved gatherings of more than five would have to resort to online alternatives. From the start of circuit breaker measures (or even stay-home implementations before this season kicked in at the start of March 2020), I took on a role of a volunteer as a video editor for a weekly kids’ programme. On normal, healthy circumstances, children from ages 7-12 would gather for this specific programme to learn about important values to take on in life. Themes for the lessons every month would be predetermined based on these character values and will take on the form of various engagement activities, stories and lesson plans for the children to learn about them. The challenge with a programme structure such as that in a global pandemic would be surrounded by the fact that children and volunteers will most definitely make up a group of more than five, and of course you can’t run a fun, child-friendly activity physically without letting the children inter-mingle and be a little noisy.

The solution? The whole programme basically had to go online. This spells Videos and Social Media!

Video editing and designing lesson graphics for social media pages throughout long periods of time can get pretty daunting and feel repetitive. Sometimes, I find myself forgetting about the cause I’m working towards to and shifting my focus to more technical aspects of what I’m doing like checking from time to time that our graphics are aligned with the themes we’re on, content is being perfected in videos, things like that.

I never realized how easy it was to burn out mentally (and emotionally) while working from home, especially when you’re working on media related projects. I felt so overwhelmed at one point because I knew that there were plenty of high expectations placed upon our work. Since everything is going online now, it becomes all the more challenging to ensure our content stand out.

I would say that one of the highlights of doing this for a long run would be that just yesterday, I came across an Instagram story posted by our Programme Coordinator. She's part of the team vetting these lesson videos I've been working on bi-weekly before they're ready to be seen.

On stories, she expressed how excited she was to see so many children responding and learning from these video packages online, she also mentioned how parents have been posting on their own IG stories about how their children were so engaged and entertained by these videos.

Of course I reacted to her series of IG stories and sent her a DM, along the lines of ‘Wah that’s amazing!!!’

Then here comes the best part!

She wrote back to me, thanking me for doing this since the start of moving the programmes online even before Circuit Breaker measures kicked in. She also mentioned that their corporate team had the videos streamed all around the globe, and that even children from countries as far as Germany, Austria, Auckland, Canada and many other countries are watching them weekly as well.

I have been thinking a lot about how reconstructing programmes that are most commonly known to operate best physically such as funfairs and mini carnivals for children into lesson packages that would allow us to bring about the same cause through online platforms.

I believe this pandemic has brought us to a place that revealed to us opportunities to reach out to a wider community out there. Yes, the initial intention of moving our stuff online was to continue to engage our children in Singapore, but I never realized that editing for good could potentially extend to a wider crowd.

I have read some testimonies, both local and international about the values and lessons the children have learnt from the videos.

This is one big takeaway I’ll remember, whenever I start burning out from all the intense video editing in days to come.

I hope everyone is still staying safe at home and observing good hygiene practices!

To more meaningful days ahead in trying times.

- Shay 😊