On Saturday, 27 April 2024, AWARE held its 39th Annual General Meeting, the first in-person Board Elections since 2018. At the AGM, which AWARE President Ong Soh Chin presided over, 80 members were present. 

In her opening remarks, Ms. Ong reminded all members and staff present that AWARE needs to remain strong, steadfast, and vigilant, particularly in this climate of turmoil and disruption around the world. She also highlighted the importance of bouncing back from challenges. AWARE clocked a record fundraising year with $2,980,000 raised. She added that with the expansion of the senior leadership team, AWARE will only grow from strength to strength. 

After Ms. Ong’s introduction, AWARE representatives gave updates on each department’s key work during 2023. The full details can be found in the Annual Report 2023, but below is a summary. 

The CARE Department comprises the Women’s Care Centre (WCC) and the Sexual Assault Care Centre (SACC) and was represented by Stephanie Tolentino, Assistant Manager (Case Management and Counselling), together with Hon Hui Yi (pictured below), Senior Executive (Case Management). In 2023, CARE supported 3,378 across all services, which translates to 65 clients per week. 

WCC launched their brand new multilingual callback service, allowing more non-English speaking women access to the help they need. As a result, the Women’s Helpline received over 4,000 calls, with close to 3,000 hours of support given to clients. 

Additionally, WCC conducted close to 2,000 counselling sessions with clients, with 93% of those surveyed feeling empowered to understand themselves and their choices after the services. WCC also aided 122 clients who sought help from the legal clinic. Meanwhile, SACC served 786 clients in 2022, with the majority of cases involving physical sexual violence. Across services, close to nine in 10 clients felt well-supported through counselling, case management, legal support, and befriending services. 

Other highlights of the year for SACC include training caseworkers on sexual assault support, investing in staff wellbeing in order to minimise burnout and communicating openly on how CARE staff can be better supported. 

Caroline Callow, Senior Consultant and Organisational Development Facilitator at Catalyse, reported that in 2023, Catalyse focused on three key pillars of offerings: harassment prevention consulting and advising, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consulting and training, coaching, and development. 

The team focused on promoting more comprehensive engagements beyond one-off training sessions, revamped their website, and intensified electronic direct mail (EDM) communications and social media platforms to leverage their extensive reach. By the end of 2023, the proportion of the Catalyse client base represented by Global Fortune 500 organisations had increased by 15% from 2022. Looking ahead to 2024, Catalyse aims to leverage the Workplace Fairness Act to strengthen its position as trauma-informed experts, to move forward with the important work of running workplace investigations and to facilitate conversations around restorative justice. 

Sugidha Nithiananthan, Director of Advocacy, Research and Communications (ARC), highlighted the four main areas that the department had focussed on in 2023: gender-based violence, marginalised women and girls, families and caregiving and workplace fairness. Some of the key achievements of 2023 include the successful inclusion of coercive control as abuse in legislation by Minister Sun Xueling, the doubling of paternity leave and the Workplace Harassment Discrimination Advisory (WHDA) which served a total of 252 clients in 2023. 

In terms of research, ARC has started on a report on transnational families with the South Central Community Family Service Centre, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Finally, Ms. Nithiananthan mentioned that AWARE has reached a combined following of almost 51,000 across all platforms and has maintained a high media coverage of 314 media mentions in 2023. 

Isabella Tan, Executive of Fundraising, provided a comprehensive overview of the work that the department has done for the past year. As previously mentioned, 2023 was a milestone year as the organisation managed to raise a total of close to $2,980,000, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels. It was particularly heartening to the team that AWARE’s 11th Annual Ball, which is the main source of fundraising, managed to raise a record-breaking $771,000. 

Other successful campaigns that also displayed the strength of AWARE not just as an insular organisation but as a diverse community included Voices for Change, which raised $504,000 in total. Moving forward, seeing as there has been a decreasing trend in individual giving, the team has decided to make increasing individual donations one of its main priorities. 

The Support, Partner and Act through Community Engagement (S.P.A.C.E) department, consisting of Shamima Rafi, Manager, and Izzaty Ishak (pictured above), Senior Executive, shared that the team had three key focuses when planning for capacity-building activities in 2023. These three areas were: eradicating sexual violence, providing comprehensive sex education and building feminist leadership. Ms. Shamima shared that since 2021, the Sexual Assault First Responder Training workshops have trained close to 1,500 participants. In 2023, the S.P.A.C.E team held nine public runs and six dedicated runs for student leaders from institutes of higher learning. 

Another highlight of 2023 was making comprehensive sex education more accessible to disadvantaged communities, which saw the team collaborate with social service agencies such as Methodist Welfare Services Girls’ Residence and Lutheran Community Care Services. In 2024, the department seeks to explore and innovate beyond boundaries as it seeks to establish a new online portal for sex education, kickstart feminist fellowships amongst change makers aligned with AWARE’s values and engage men in conversations on what healthy masculinity can and should look like. 

Yasmine Tan, Director of Operations, highlighted that 2023 was the year of building organisational capacity and leading operational functions. Using a three-step framework of understanding, improving and preparing, with the Operations team conducting employee surveys and polls to collect feedback from staff. Based on this understanding, the team tidied up the organisation’s internal communications by creating a one-stop depository cataloguing important organisation information, prioritising staff bonding, and establishing a comprehensive risk management policy. Looking at the year ahead, the team aims to improve AWARE’s retention rate by looking at solutions to increase staff capacity. 

The AGM concluded with the Election of the President and the new Board (pictured below) for 2024-2026. Voting for non-standard items this year was via secret ballot using Balotilo, an e-voting platform.

This year’s nominees reflect the diversity of AWARE’s community, with the elected Board members ranging in age from 34 to 62 and backgrounds in law, advertising, finance, philanthropy, and various corporate environments.

Many of the elected Board are not only long-time members of AWARE but also change makers and leaders in both civil society and the private sector.

Aarathi Arumugam, who previously acted as the Treasurer for two terms, was elected as AWARE President for the upcoming term. 

Lihui Zeng and Anju Patwardhan ran unopposed as Treasurer and Assistant Treasurer, respectively. The other six board positions were contested, and the successful candidates were: Filzah Sumartono, Ijin Tan, Joanne Theseira, Kanak Muchhal, Penelope Shone, and Stacey Choe. 

Ms. Ong rounds out the board, and will remain on for a year as the immediate past president. 

She expressed her gratitude towards members and the Board, invited members to join her in thanking the staff and the outgoing Board, and handed the baton over to incoming AWARE President, Ms. Arumugam.

This recap was written by Cassandra Goh, and photos by Sandra Chua and Cecilia Woo.