Volunteer Teams

Who We Are

My Community is a close-knitted group of community arts and heritage enthusiasts. We are bound by our love for our shared love of Queenstown and Bukit Merah, and our common belief in the importance of facilitating greater community involvement in cultural management and urban governance.

Our fast-growing civic society group comprises several hundred volunteers who are at any one time helping out in a variety of tasks spanning research, curation, advocacy, operations and administrative work. All the projects My Community undertakes are ground-up in nature, and volunteers have the freedom to innovate and introduce programmes they think will benefit the communities we work in.

Find out more about our volunteer teams below.

Edit

We are currently conducting cultural mapping activities in the Tanglin Halt area. Cultural Mapping is a process of collecting and organising information and assets that describe social networks, patterns of usage of a place and its significance in lived experiences.

We conduct cultural mapping by conducting oral history interviews, archiving architectural plans and layout, documenting events and lived experiences, and collecting tangible assets.

Information and assets collated from our cultural mapping exercises will be displayed at Museum @ My Queenstown, and our upcoming museum at Block 38 Commonwealth Avenue. Furthermore, our research will be analysed and used in future cultural blueprints and urban plans to benefit the Queenstown community. Join us if you’re interested in research, and keen to see how heritage can bring together communities.

Edit

Our Hello Dawson! team is helping more than 1000 elderly, low-income and physically disabled residents affected by the Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme (SERS) in Tanglin Halt relocate to Dawson. Join us if you have a heart for others, and would like to befriend our Tanglin Halt residents.

Edit

My Community’s volunteer guides currently lead eight community heritage tours in Queenstown, Bukit Merah and Tiong Bahru. Our heritage tours are diligently curated, and offer participants a chance to visit landmarks and hear about the experiences of people to engage with the past.

The tours include sensory cues that evoke history and are layered with personal accounts and experiences that took place on site. By converging collective memories and individual biographies in our tours, we show how communities interpret and negotiate cultural heritage through familiarity, sensory recollection and community ownership. Join our tour teams if you have a passion for sharing heritage with others, and giving life to places of historical significance.

Edit

The museum is completely managed by our dedicated volunteers. We believe that community-building starts from our volunteers having a say in how the museum is being run. Our community museum team is split into “circles”, where each circle is in charge of planning activities and events they deem important and interesting within the museum.

This includes programmes and events like planning talks and seminars, Escape Rooms, school reunions, block parties, museum exhibits, painting sessions, festive activities, as well as other weekday activities. Most of these programmes are open to the public. You can sign up for these activities here.

Edit

Our first community museum, Museum @ My Queenstown, was opened in December 2018. Queenstown residents and volunteers in funded, curated and manage the museum. Museum @ My Queenstown narrates the endearing story of the common man, immortalises our collective memory as a community and celebrates the little things which make Queenstown special.

We currently possess over 1,000 artefacts that will be restored and archived by volunteers. We strive to involve not only volunteers but the community as well in the process of curating items. Come join us if you are interested in being part of the archival team! Our museum collection can be found here.

Edit

At My Community, we are determined to involve the community every step of the way in designing, running and managing the museum. We often seek feedback from residents as to what they want to see, and what they think is important, so that we can incorporate their feedback into museum and exhibition planning and design.

Join the participatory design team if you love connecting with people and believe that people’s voices are key to building inclusive community spaces.