Young people can benefit from getting involved in community affairs and understanding the needs of the community. These valuable experiences can help them with their careers. Mr. Henry Pan has always been interested in children’s education. He shares his story about becoming a volunteer by accident in his younger days.
It was 8 December 1979. Henry’s wife was invited by a family friend to attend a forum discussion. He had to stay home to look after their 3-year-old daughter. However, Henry was worried that the little girl might miss her mom. Seeing that it was not a formal meeting, and that he had to drive his wife to the meeting anyway, he decided to take their daughter and sit on the sideline of the meeting as an observer. His wife would be available if their daughter needed her.
The meeting was called by the then Principal of the Sydney Chinese School, Mr. Wee Teck Teo. Australia had started to implement multiculturalism policies at the time and the government encouraged ethnic communities to establish community services. Mr. Teo wished to apply for government funding to establish a child care centre for the Chinese community. He organized a forum to discuss the matter. He believed that child care was a matter closely related to ladies and thus invited women he knew to attend the forum. Henry’s wife was one of them.
There were around 20 people at the forum, and they were all actively participating in the discussion. Henry could relate to the topic and shared his daughter’s experience at a mainstream child care centre. For example, when his daughter became hot during outdoor play, the care worker would remove her child’s jacket; however, they would not help her putting the jacket on later, making her getting sick often during the colder days. Parents had to take time off to look after the sick child and it was very inconvenient.
Henry shared some of his personal views which were acknowledged by the other attendees. The participants believed that Henry should be involved in the organizational work, with the goal of getting government funding.
After the Christmas and New Year holidays, the group met again on 12 January 1980. From the original 20 plus people, only 8 to 9 joined the meeting. Many people were eager to share their views but showed reluctance to participate in organizational work.
A problem emerged after a short while during the discussion. For the project to proceed, there needed to have someone who could be available during working hours to liaise with relevant government departmental officials. The attendees at the meeting were all young Chinese migrants who all had to work and would not be available during working hours.
Henry was the only one whose work hours were quite flexible. He was a Teaching Fellow at the university. His workload was not heavy, while he was required to do his PhD studies. His research topic was noise pollution. As the equipment for his experiments was noisy, he could only carry out his experiments in the night time. He thus had some free time during the day. Everybody was looking at Henry.
Henry was unanimously nominated as the coordinator for the project. He was asked to shoulder responsibility for the organizational work.
Henry was not mentally prepared for taking up this ‘hot potato’, having to produce submission to the government asking for funding to establish a childcare centre for the Chinese community.
Henry had no previous experience in community work. It was a huge difficult task to deal with government departments.
Starting from zero without any resources, what was the journey like? Stay tuned for the next article!
💡Conclusion:
Young people often face many difficulties and challenges when they start a new career. They need to have the courage to face and conquer the challenges.
