CEO Message: Many thanks and looking forward to the year ahead!
February 1, 2019 |
Here we are again at the end of one year and the start of another! It’s amazing how time flies at Aidha! We have had another action-packed year and look forward to an exciting year ahead as well.
First and foremost, I want to say a huge thanks to all members of the Aidha community. Aidha makes the impact it does only because of the enormous collective effort by volunteers, donors, supporters, staff and students. We have had a great year with more students than ever before who are getting more out of our courses as we continue to improve and expand our programmes. This can only happen because so many of you are making a contribution to Aidha in such a variety of ways.
In this bumper edition of the newsletter, you will find articles on Aidha’s key events in the latter half of year, namely Graduation, the Graduation business plan and personal financial plan competitions, and our much loved annual Unspoken Life Photography Exhibition. We also wanted to let you know of our exciting new collaboration with the charity Daughters of Tomorrow that is the first time we have provided such an in-depth adaptation of Aidha’s financial education training to low income local women.
As usual in the newsletter, we also shine a spotlight on some of the wonderful, colourful personalities that are part of our community. In this edition, we introduce you to one of our most creative and artistic alumni, Ritchelle Mantiquilla, who, among many other talents, is one of the photographers regularly featured in our Unspoken Life exhibition. Also, we share the story of one of our very dedicated volunteers and mentors, Azmeen Ansar, and lastly, we thought you would enjoy getting to know our team members, Wendy Ng, Shibani Pandya and Ophelie Grollier.
As for other happenings, many thanks to those that have already contributed to our annual Gift of Education campaign! With your help, we reached the campaign goal for the Xmas phase of the campaign. We will shortly be launching the Chinese New Year phase of the campaign and are particularly urging employers to “give an ang pao of lasting value” to their helpers. As you receive the campaign messages do please forward to employers in your networks.
We are also starting to organise the Aidha Tour de Singapore that will take place as part of OCBC Cycle on 12 May. Participants need to be registered by mid-March, so we will be rallying supporters and also reaching out to our corporate partners to send teams to join us. We will be sending more information on this soon and if you are interested to participate or if you think your company might be interested to send a team, please email us at [email protected].
For this year’s International Women’s Day we will be organising screenings of the wonderful documentary, The Helper, a warm, truth-filled account of both the sacrifices and achievements of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. We are still finalising on dates and venues and will update soon as those get confirmed.
One last exciting initiative on the horizon is that Aidha is planning to develop a new suite of financial education short courses (ranging from 2-6 hours in length) that will provide in-depth practical information to help with specific important financial decisions. This content will complement our existing long courses and will be relevant for existing students and alumni as well as non-Aidha students. We maintain a firm belief in the transformative value of our current long course model but we are enthusiastic also to further expand our support to our students and others in the FDW community through valuable new learning opportunities. Stay tuned for more on this in the coming months.
All the best to all for 2019 and the Lunar New Year ahead!
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