Fundraising at NUS and Free Community Church

What an eventful week! The past few weeks were hectic as we planned for our main campaign events to raise awareness and funds for The T Project. We had our fair share of late nights and roadblocks along the way as we made the final preparations for our activities in March, but the experience of everyone’s big hearts was truly worth it. The Swan Project was heartened to be able to interact with many kind-hearted and open-minded people at our events, who took time off their busy schedules to learn more about our cause and contributed in one way or another.

Here’s a glance of our fundraising events:

Booth @ Yale-NUS

We were at the Yale-NUS dining hall on Wednesday 11 March to promote our social cause to the students and staff in University Town. This event would not have been possible without the support from members of The G Spot who invited us to be part of their Ally week and also patiently assisted us in getting the logistics that we need for our booth.

As this was the first of our short stint in campus, we were all up early and eager to receive the crowds. Our booth comprised of various stations:

1. ‘Just As Human’ photo exhibition
2. Live video screening featuring stories of the trans shelter residents
3. Handing out flyers giving an overview of our beneficiary
4. Laptop access to our campaign Facebook page
5. Merchandise sales

While the crowd was not large at the event, many people were highly engaged and interested in our booth, and we are pleased to have reached out to them.

 JIA charity bazaar @NUS Science Foyer

From Monday to Wednesday, 16 to 18 March, we hosted a 3-day charity bazaar at NUS LT27 Science Foyer. This was the flagship event of our fundraising efforts, for which we have been planning and preparing since January. From vendor sourcing to securing the bazaar venue and logistics, there was a lot of work done behind the scenes to make sure that everything runs smoothly on the days.

Together with our own booth set-up at the venue, our partnership with For Flea Sake helped us to bring a whole new bazaar experience to the NUS population. Up to 24 new vendors were selling unique items each day and we were really grateful to have all of them present to make this event a memorable one for all. Thank you once again to For Flea Sake and each of our vendors who believed in our cause!

We were also very fortunate to have Snapple collaborating with us during the bazaar. A bottle of Snapple’s new drink was given to every person who made a contribution to our cause.

Booth @ NUS Arts walkway

Following our bazaar, we set up our booth on Friday 20 March at one of the benches located at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) as a final reach out to the rest of the school population. The photo exhibition also gained much interest from the school population, and we hope to have garnered some awareness of oft-neglected trans issues in Singapore.

Throughout the entire week of fundraising in NUS, we had quite a number of fellow schoolmates and teachers who came down personally to help us promote our cause. Thank you everyone who supported us all the way!

Booth @ Free Community Church

On 22 March Sunday, we were at Free Community Church – one of the better known LGBT-friendly churches in Singapore. After giving a short introduction, we showcased our campaign videos to provide a better understanding of the purpose of our campaign.

 

The people at the church were very supportive and they came directly to our booth immediately after their service ended. At the end of the day, all our merchandises were sold out. Thank you FCC for your immense generosity!

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to express our greatest gratitude to everyone who has contributed to our JIA campaign at our fundraising events, on social media or privately. Your support has been instrumental in helping us kick this campaign off, and we never could have done it without you.

For those who have placed pre-orders for the JIA merchandises, fret not, we will be delivering your purchases to you really soon!

Watch this space for further updates.

The Swan Project – All Fired Up! for International Women’s Day

March has arrived, our JIA fundraising campaign is ready to go and so is the team!

If you were at Hong Lim Park on 8 March, you might just have caught The Swan Project and The T Project All Fired Up! at this year’s International Women’s Day.

Many men and women were there on Sunday to understand more about women’s stories and programmes by civil societies supporting the most neglected women in Singapore. We talked to many people, who were highly interested in our photo exhibition and our merchandise.

Thank you all for the support and believing that transwomen’s issues are women’s issues too.

Next up, we have a sneak peek into our Just as Human photo exhibition capturing the voices of eight Singaporean transwomen as they recount significant moments of their lives and what home means to them.

All shots featured and framed in this collection are taken by the talented Lisabelle Tay. While we are unable to feature all the kind strangers who stopped by our booth and ‘listened’ to their voices today, here’s a big thank you for giving us a great start!

The Swan Project would be launching the full photo exhibition on:

• 11 March (12-2pm, 5-7pm) at Yale-NUS College Dining Hall
• 16-18 March (10am-6pm) at NUS Science Foyer during the JIA Fundraising Bazaar
• 19-20 March (10am-6pm) at NUS Arts & Social Sciences Walkway

Don’t forget to keep up with our events on Facebook as we have been sharing the stories of The T Project’s beneficiaries.

Last but not least, YES – we are taking pre-orders now 😀

We are proud to announce that all proceeds from the JIA campaign will go towards the funding of Singapore’s first transgender shelter and if you have missed our social media updates, pre-orders for our bags and post cards are now available here online!

Featuring the JIA bag by our Swan Project Team and HOME bag designed by Justin Lee

We have a limited stock of postcards available and shipping is only limited to Singapore – click here for more details on the pricing and designs of our merchandises!

Please feel free to contact us personally if you have any queries.

Lots of Love, The Swan Project SG

Capturing transwomen’s stories

As the new year picks up, The Swan Project has also been hard at work preparing for our fundraising campaign. We will be holding a photo exhibit at a few locations throughout our campaign, to illustrate transwomen’s lives and what home means to them amidst the discrimination and difficult life circumstances they face.

Photoshoot for photo exhibit

Last week, we held a photoshoot for a group of lovely transwomen, diverse in their ages and interests, but common in their hope for a trans-friendly environment in Singapore, a place to call home. They sat and talked to us about their lives and thoughts, as we captured their spirit on camera.

These photos, along with the transwomen’s stories, will be showcased first in a photography exhibit that will be held together with a bazaar on the NUS campus in March. The event serves to highlight the issues that transwomen in Singapore currently face and their aspirations for the future. Furthermore, all proceeds received from the sale of event merchandises would be donated to support this social cause.

Through this, we hope that our target audience (youths aged 18-35) would gain a better understanding of the transgender community.

We hope to remind everyone that transpeople are people, after all.

With the help of our talented photographer Lisabelle Tay, members of The Swan Project met up with a few transwomen and we commenced the photoshoot!

Check out some exlcusive BTS shots:

Our photographer hard at work

Members listening attentively and jotting down notes

One of the photoshoot participants

It was a long and tiring day, but we gained so much more.

We would like to thank our photoshoot participants once again for a fruitful afternoon, and of course The T Project, a local community committed to building Singapore’s first transgender shelter, for helping us to organise this shoot.

Filming for our campaign videos

To help our target audience and the wider public better understand the lives of transwomen and the issues they face, we are also producing a video for the campaign.

This video features interviews with transwomen who find themselves without a home and highlight why there is such a pressing need for a fully-equipped shelter.

Told from their own perspectives, we hope that their words can evoke feelings of empathy in our target audience.

With the help of Wan Ling, a friend proficient in videography and have directed several short films in her school days, members of The Swan Project went down to the shelter for the filming this week.

While waiting for our complete video, here are some BTS shots.

One of our lovely participants sharing her story

Wan Ling and Fiona

All in all, it was yet another rewarding experience and we definitely had a great time filming.

Stay tuned as we bring you more updates on our upcoming event in NUS and more insights into the unique merchandises that we are selling!

2014 End of Year Update

Happy holiday season everyone! The Swan Project has come a long way since our inception as a school project, and we hope to have made a difference in 2014 by sharing the stories and perspectives of the transgender community in Singapore.

Throughout our research process, we have gained much more knowledge about the issues that transgender people face in the Singaporean context, often unseen and neglected. If you wish to better understand our research methodology and results, check out a summary of our research process as well as more detailed weekly updates. To gain a clearer picture of the problems that transmen and transwomen face, visit our Stories page.

Now, where do we go from here?

As articulated in our Proposed Solutions page, we will be embarking on a campaign

JIA.

This social change campaign will begin with our first proposed solution: a fundraising effort for The T Project, the first transgender shelter in Singapore. To help them set up and obtain sufficient resources to run a full-fledged shelter serving trans needs, we will be pursuing a few fundraising approaches.

As we move into 2015, we will be finetuning our initial plans and eventually implementing them in the first quarter of the year.

This is where we need you.

Stay updated by checking back on this blog for our Campaign Updates, as well as our growing Voices section that feature stories personally penned by transpeople.

On a final note, please join us in welcoming our two new members Benjamin and Fiona, who are fantastic additions to our team.

 

The Swan Project is all geared up for an exciting year ahead; we hope you are too!

#8: Our Proposed Solutions

#8

In last week’s research update, we provided a brief description of the problems faced by transgender individuals in Singapore. These were problems mentioned by our participants during the interview sessions.

We believe that all these problems are important issues that should be highlighted to the public and we hope that our blog can continue to serve as a means to raise awareness of the challenges faced by transpeople.

Our next step involves selecting the problems to address. The reason why we are not targeting all the problems that have been raised by our participants is because of practical and feasibility concerns. As we intend to collaborate with relevant NGOs to develop and implement our proposed solutions, we have to think about solutions that would be realistically achievable in the context of Singapore and available resources.

Some issues might also require policy changes or changing of societal attitudes that would take a very long time to implement or cultivate. While these are goals we ultimately wish to achieve, we also have to take into consideration the how pressing or urgent select issues are that plague the trans community. In addition, problems such as the ones involving religion and family are rather private and sensitive, and therefore not actionable.

Thus, taking all the above factors into consideration as well as participants’ opinions, we developed a set of criteria to follow when selecting problems to address:

And here are the problems that we would like to address:

After the selection of the problems and much brainstorming, we are proud to present our proposal:

It’s Time for T:
A transgender movement in Singapore

‘It’s Time for T’ is the overarching theme of our proposed solutions. It highlights the idea that the T in LGBT has been in the shadows for too long and it is now time for the public to give some attention to the transgender community in Singapore. And that’s why we are launching ‘It’s Time for T’ as

A social change movement that seeks to promote understanding and awareness of transgender individuals in Singapore

Four solutions will be developed and implemented as part of this movement, addressing different sets of problems faced by transgender individuals in Singapore. These are problems that we have identified after considering their prominence and whether or not feasible solutions could be implemented to address them. Next, the solutions were built upon based on suggestions from our participants and our own brainstorming sessions.

Here is an overview of our proposed solutions:

The four solutions can be divided into 2 categories – Short term implementation and Long term implementation. The ones on the left (i.e. Crowdfunding, T-Catalogue, Workshops) are solutions that can be implemented in a shorter period of time; we hope that these would also bring about a quicker impact in improving the lives of transpeople.

The solution on the right (i.e. T-Exhibit) will implemented in the long run to help sustain the efforts from the short term solutions in achieving better understanding and awareness of the transgender community. Eventually, we would also want to target institutions to bring about structural changes to accompany the cultural changes we hope to create.

You can find more detailed descriptions of our proposed solutions by clicking on each bubble: