By Cheung Chun Jing (17A01A), President

If you want to volunteer, make a change, or impact the lives of the needy, you’re at the right place! RI Red Cross Youth Chapter seeks to serve the community, whilst developing our members to become better leaders and citizens. As RCYC members, all of us become part of a legion of over 9,000 volunteers under the Singapore Red Cross’ nationwide humanitarian effort.

In RCYC, you will be exposed to a wide variety of volunteer opportunities, after being trained in Standard First Aid. Volunteer opportunities include:

• Internal First Aid Duties (e.g. IHGs) and External First Aid Duties (e.g. Chingay parade, community sports events, family day carnivals, First Aider on Wheels @ East Coast, etc)

• Self-initiated service projects
• Weekly service under the VWO of your choice
• Organising school wide blood drives
• Organising school wide fundraising efforts for overseas disasters
• Project RICE (a collection drive to bring food, beverages and household items to the vulnerable)
• Overseas Humanitarian Project (members go to countries such as Philippines to plan first aid/hygiene/cultural activities for kids, repaint schools, provide administrative/logistical support, etc)

And many more… (the list will never be exhaustive because each batch comes up with different volunteer opportunities by themselves. From time to time, HQ also initiates different service projects!)

Besides volunteer opportunities, you can also expect to be given the opportunity to actively sign up for leadership and community courses such as the Youth Leadership Programme, Youth Agents of Behavioural Change Programme, Mentoring secondary school kids in an OBS-like Red Cross Youth Challenge Camp, etc.

How our CCA works

Before becoming official members of RCYC, you will be interviewed by EXCO. We are looking out for people who are passionate in active volunteerism. Members are expected to cope with heavy school workload whilst keeping up with their volunteering commitments. As our CCA focuses heavily on volunteerism, how much one takes out of the CCA depends on how much one wants to commit.

Typically, we give members the flexibility to shape their own volunteering journey in RCYC. Besides the compulsory general meetings every wednesday, most events are on a sign-up basis. We also give members the autonomy to “create” their own events by gathering their fellow batchmates and initiating any service-related projects at any VWO. As such, no two members will have the exact same volunteering journey in the CCA. Nevertheless, we require all members to at least organise an event in their term, be it a community home visit or a school wide blood drive or a learning journey for the CCA.

To embark on an exciting, self-directed volunteering journey, do sign up for our CCA interviews! If not, you can always contribute in little ways without being a RCYC member, such as donating blood during our blood drive held in Feb 2017.