The End of Project Gracehaven: Challenges and Opportunities
At the point of writing this post, it has been three days since the end of our final session with Gracehaven. It was definitely a bittersweet experience working at Gracehaven, while I will definitely miss being a workshop with the residents there, I am also glad that I have ended any working ties with the institution itself.
Challenges
The first challenge with working with Gracehaven were their expectations of us to fail. We worked with Gracehaven's resident psychologist, J and their communications manager, S, for this service learning project. I definitely felt small with their remarks that we were 'test subjects' and 'guinea pigs' as if we did not take this project seriously. What compounded to this was the fact that S has been attached to a few of our sessions only to make the same remarks again and again. At first, this served as a really big factor in demoralising us but soon those remarks gave us an impetus to actually work harder to ensure that this workshop was a resounding success. It was evident in the efforts of our group mates as well. I think everyone realised they had an eventual vested interest to make this workshop run smoothly and it was common among all of us; we wanted to prove S wrong.
The second challenge we faced was the communication troubles we had with S and J. They were clearly having their own internal conflicts within Gracehaven which I felt was highly unprofessional considering they were at least in their 40s. The fact that they could not put their differences aside actually affected our own workshop as well. Clara (who was our main point of contact with Gracehaven) constantly received conflicting instructions from the two and this made it difficult for us to communicate and make congruent their expectations from the workshop and our own delivery as well. I think Clara learnt a lot from this experience though, I could see the evolution of how she became more firm with them (which if you know her personally, is highly unlike her) and also took no nonsense from the two 40-year olds.
The last challenge I could think of was how we were not ready for the discussions that were going to be brought up by the residents during our workshop. For some of us, I think it was hard to deal with how open they were in discussing their own self-injurious behaviours. To describe the cuts on their wrists as barcodes, describing everyday tools such as colour pencils, cloth and paper as mediums to engage in self-injurious behaviour and their own reasons for being in Gracehaven was indeed unsettling. For myself, I remember how one resident told me that she was here because she wielded a knife in front of her parents and another resident was sharing how she was sad and angry at the same time that her parents refused to visit or contact her. I think that did change me in a way; their experiences were much more raw, and the candid nature of their sharing did put us off guard. However at the same time, this made us aware of the issues that beset Singapore right now and this was what I wanted to learn in the first place so I was thankful eventually that they were so true with us about their feelings and experiences.
Opportunities for Learning
Overall, although Gracehaven was a challenging organisation to work with, it does present a lot of opportunities for those who do want to work with them. I think the lack of support from the organisation definitely does make you more independent and the struggles to make it a successful workshop does become all the more satisfying when it does become a success. Secondly, it does serve as an avenue for students to work in a professional capacity; communication channels from Gracehaven do respond like uninterested for-profit organisations rather than a passionate, motivated non-profit one and this allows students to understand the nuances of communicating with them as such. I think as students, we are so used to having it our way, to receive replies an hour or two after sending an email or a text that we fail to forget that in many ways, we are the 'customers' of NTU and there would be severe backlash if they do not treat us as such. However, we are not students to Gracehaven, we provide a service and in many ways, Gracehaven is the customer instead. That lucidity of navigating through and being careful of what to say in each and every communication instance with Gracehaven allows for much more maturity of writing and bringing ideas across. The last challenge that serves as an opportunity is to allow students a taste of what real-world issues are actually like. We are the leaders of the next generation and if we do not expose ourselves to what goes on in everyday Singapore, we can never hope to improve the lives of those that fall through the cracks. Empathy, even among sociology scholars, are severely lacking because they live in a world of privilege and this is possibly the greatest critique of the discipline. To have perspective-taking, to have empathy and to realise that life is not all sunshine, really does improve a person not just simply in the realm of academia, but holistically as well.
Challenges
The first challenge with working with Gracehaven were their expectations of us to fail. We worked with Gracehaven's resident psychologist, J and their communications manager, S, for this service learning project. I definitely felt small with their remarks that we were 'test subjects' and 'guinea pigs' as if we did not take this project seriously. What compounded to this was the fact that S has been attached to a few of our sessions only to make the same remarks again and again. At first, this served as a really big factor in demoralising us but soon those remarks gave us an impetus to actually work harder to ensure that this workshop was a resounding success. It was evident in the efforts of our group mates as well. I think everyone realised they had an eventual vested interest to make this workshop run smoothly and it was common among all of us; we wanted to prove S wrong.
The second challenge we faced was the communication troubles we had with S and J. They were clearly having their own internal conflicts within Gracehaven which I felt was highly unprofessional considering they were at least in their 40s. The fact that they could not put their differences aside actually affected our own workshop as well. Clara (who was our main point of contact with Gracehaven) constantly received conflicting instructions from the two and this made it difficult for us to communicate and make congruent their expectations from the workshop and our own delivery as well. I think Clara learnt a lot from this experience though, I could see the evolution of how she became more firm with them (which if you know her personally, is highly unlike her) and also took no nonsense from the two 40-year olds.
The last challenge I could think of was how we were not ready for the discussions that were going to be brought up by the residents during our workshop. For some of us, I think it was hard to deal with how open they were in discussing their own self-injurious behaviours. To describe the cuts on their wrists as barcodes, describing everyday tools such as colour pencils, cloth and paper as mediums to engage in self-injurious behaviour and their own reasons for being in Gracehaven was indeed unsettling. For myself, I remember how one resident told me that she was here because she wielded a knife in front of her parents and another resident was sharing how she was sad and angry at the same time that her parents refused to visit or contact her. I think that did change me in a way; their experiences were much more raw, and the candid nature of their sharing did put us off guard. However at the same time, this made us aware of the issues that beset Singapore right now and this was what I wanted to learn in the first place so I was thankful eventually that they were so true with us about their feelings and experiences.
Opportunities for Learning
Overall, although Gracehaven was a challenging organisation to work with, it does present a lot of opportunities for those who do want to work with them. I think the lack of support from the organisation definitely does make you more independent and the struggles to make it a successful workshop does become all the more satisfying when it does become a success. Secondly, it does serve as an avenue for students to work in a professional capacity; communication channels from Gracehaven do respond like uninterested for-profit organisations rather than a passionate, motivated non-profit one and this allows students to understand the nuances of communicating with them as such. I think as students, we are so used to having it our way, to receive replies an hour or two after sending an email or a text that we fail to forget that in many ways, we are the 'customers' of NTU and there would be severe backlash if they do not treat us as such. However, we are not students to Gracehaven, we provide a service and in many ways, Gracehaven is the customer instead. That lucidity of navigating through and being careful of what to say in each and every communication instance with Gracehaven allows for much more maturity of writing and bringing ideas across. The last challenge that serves as an opportunity is to allow students a taste of what real-world issues are actually like. We are the leaders of the next generation and if we do not expose ourselves to what goes on in everyday Singapore, we can never hope to improve the lives of those that fall through the cracks. Empathy, even among sociology scholars, are severely lacking because they live in a world of privilege and this is possibly the greatest critique of the discipline. To have perspective-taking, to have empathy and to realise that life is not all sunshine, really does improve a person not just simply in the realm of academia, but holistically as well.
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