As promised, today I’m going to blog about what went on during the whole 5 hours workshop.
This was a sponsored workshop organized by SIM university for People’s Association. The actual course name is “Friendship Building & Community Bonding Workshop”, conducted by the ever funny man from USA, Michael A Podolinsky.
There was a total of 6 conducted course for all the trainers in PA. In my class alone held at Toa Payoh West CC, there was already more than 200 trainers coming from all part of Singapore teaching different classes such as language, hobbies, cooking, music, art, sports and even healing art/sports.
The class started off by a brief introduction of the workshop. Quickly, before we managed to warm our own seats, we were forced to introduce ourselves to as many people as we can in the hall. Slowly, we get to know more and more trainers from different CCs/RCs teaching various interesting subjects.
Throughout the workshop, the speaker kept asking questions and whoever answered his questions will get a treat from the bag.
Personally, I find this speaker really interesting and he’s simply born to teach networking and bonding. He carries a charisma that allow his students like ourselves to ease and eventually, open up ourselves.
Alot was learnt from this workshop and I must say PA is really trying very hard to equipped all us, trainers with the best skills and knowledge in order for us to impart what we know to them effectively. Same time, encouraging our own students to mingle and talk to each other during our class.
At the back of my mind, I believe they were trying to encourage the trainers to encourage singles in their class to socialise and open up with social circle. This got to do with the whole building a family thing as often encouraged by the Singapore government.
At the end of the day, to get our students to bond would definitely require people to sign up for our classes. During our discussion with other trainers from different traits, we all realised that we had a common problem i.e. the PA wasn’t putting enough effort to help promote our classes to the public.
As for myself, I realised that I’m one of the youngest trainer in PA and looking around the hall, there were only a handful of younger trainers. It must be the whole CC image. To many Singaporeans, they think that community centres are places where only old people come together to socialise and CCs/RCs are known as old-folks entertainment centres.
In fact, true enough, some of the classes which I went to were really filled with people from the older generation. I must say this is a disappointing fact because many of the courses and classes that PA offers were extremely enriching and helpful to the youth. I wish more younger Singaporean would be pro-active in taking charge of their own life and sign themselves up for the classes offered by PA.
Community Centres and RCs are no longer a place for the old people.
Plus plus plus, if you sign up for PA’s passion card, you get members’ rate if you sign up for any courses offered by PA and more immediate discounts the many restaurants and entertainment centres that are tied up with PA’s passion card.
I recently realised that I can get 30% off the tickets for Singapore Flyer with my Passion Card!
