Early in w Singapore’s community efforts against COVID-19, there were a number of initiatives that sprung up to express appreciation and encouragement to frontline healthcare workers and service staff, and to also call for Singaporeans to be united. Sandy’s #StandwithyouSG was one such project. Over the course of three weekends, Sandy and her team put up roving booths at 4 locations covering Singapore’s north, east, west and central areas to encourage Singaporeans to record short videos of encouragement, while holding up sings that spell out “Singapore United” and “#standwithyouSG”. These videos were then compiled as video montages, and were sent to TTSH, as well as uploaded onto Youtube. Sandy’s booth at Our Tampines Hub was also part of the Overcome as One movement organised by the Singapore Kindness Movement that launched on the same day.
Sandy was not new to community ground-up initiatives, having previously organised #SGEatWithUS, supported by the SG50 Celebratory Fund, which was the largest community food event for SG50 NDP with more than 20,000 participants. But even then, she was floored by the amount of support she received during this time. Originally planning for only 640 participants, over 736 people from all walks of life participated in her initiative, that reached out to over 1800 people online. On top of this, the #StandwithyouSG had 50,000 followers of mainly working professionals in different social media platforms. The platforms include personal facebook and websites, interest groups platforms such as investment interest groups, company’s intranet facebook platform. Partners’ social media platforms such as #SgEatWithUs, with 2000 followers, have also actively shared about the movement. Sandy remarked that demographic was varied with the majority of the crowd from children as young as 4 years old to elderly in their 70s. There are families of three generations, young families, young couples, working professionals and teenagers. The make-up of the participants was diverse with mainly Singaporeans of different races and about 15% foreigners.

Most remarkably, this project also provided a platform for other ground up groups to showcase their efforts, including Be Kind SG, Serendip Silver Chorale, Contribute SG and BYOB Clean.

Check out the #StandWithYouSG on social media platforms and view the videos here: https://youtu.be/Zb2fNxVQWXg and https://youtu.be/OrCRiO2fVIg