Coordinate.sg (CSG)

A digital platform that showcases and connects youth projects, and centralises opportunities for youths in Singapore.

Coordinate.sg (CSG) is an online youth-led platform that showcases projects initiated by youths in Singapore. It aims to recognise the pursuits of youth in Singapore, featuring a wide variety of projects - from personal passion pursuits to the likes of social entrepreneurship ventures. 

Through our Showcase gallery on our website (coordinate.sg), youths are not only able to discover outstanding and unique work directed by other youths but also reach out to peer mentors who can provide project-specific insights based on their own experiences. Furthermore, they can also reach out to the teams behind such projects for potential collaborations.

Additionally, on our Opportunities hub on our website, we plan to centralise opportunities available to youths both locally and globally. Such opportunities include competitions like hackathons, grants , funding avenues, and workshops held by various organisations and even universities. Using Airtable, a spreadsheet-database hybrid software, we have created a sorting system for said opportunities, which has customisable filters and clear organisation of information.

Through these 2 main types of digital services, we hope to not only celebrate the pursuits of youth outside of the general education curriculum, but also to empower them in their endeavours.

Celebration: To broaden meritocracy in Singapore. Singapore's education system has gained a reputation for being highly competitive and overly-focused on grades. Our meritocratic model is constantly criticised for its over-reliance on academic credentials as a proxy for merit, and according to research by OECD, Singaporean students experience significantly higher levels of anxiety compared to the global average. The term “broadening meritocracy” has been used repeatedly by various ministers, believing that “fundamental cultural change” is needed to relieve the stress that students face, while also encouraging students to develop their strengths beyond what is tested in school. Despite recent efforts by the Ministry of Education (MOE), progress has been slow. According to survey findings, the prevailing skewed perspective of merit from our commonly perceived yardstick of success — academic grades, is the biggest obstacle Singapore has to overcome to make bigger strides. Though absurdly ambitious, we wish to help change public perception of success, pushing society to celebrate the success of those who do well in non-academic areas through positive storytelling of our local youths.

Empowerment: To provide equitable access to opportunities. Competitions, grants, workshops are catalysts to the pursuits of youth who may not have necessary support systems in place. Yet, knowledge of such opportunities are way too decentralised - subject to school emails, word of mouth, or even membership to premium academic centres. By concentrating such opportunities in one place, our youths can rely less on chance or money to find the resources they need to further their pursuits.

Our solution aims to serve the youth of Singapore (~age 13-27), targeting both students enrolled in Singapore’s education system and youths pursuing their own projects or endeavours outside of academic-related activities.

However, due to the complexity of the issues explained, there are many stakeholders involved which we plan to reach out to as well.

The pressure that students in Singapore experience is largely due to the people around them - parents, teachers and schoolmates. Currently, grades remain the deep-seated proxy for excellence. Students are more inclined to spend their time focusing on academics, rather than pursuing other interests. Most parents have a high expectation for their children’s academic performance, teachers are expected to produce top academic talent and students themselves compete academically to beat the bell-curve in order to secure the limited spots for their next progression in the system. Like the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”, a true paradigm shift in this area would require a whole-of-society effort, from schools to parents to students themselves. Thus, in our operations, we plan to engage with education institutions and parents, not just students alone. For schools, a more formal recognition of the involvement of students in non-academic activities of their own organic accord as well as platforms for them to pursue their own projects would be crucial. For parents, a better understanding of the diverse talents among children and embracing them is key to alleviating the unhealthy stress of pursuing the same definition of success.

Firstly, our team consists of youth who have all gone through the same education system, while also being from a range of different educational institutions, from polytechnics to junior colleges. Moreover, most of the team have embarked on their own non-academic projects out of their own initiative (e.g. art installation, social projects, side businesses, etc) and understand the fundamental obstacles that other youths our age would face. As we worked on CSG the past year, we have also experienced several significant problems that youths may face when balancing between the common school workload and external pursuits.

Secondly, we have formed a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), currently consisting of around 6 teams that are working on their own projects right now, inclusive of projects we classify as Passion Pursuits, Entrepreneurial Ventures and Social Projects. The board gives us feedback on the services we provide, evaluating their usefulness and relevance.

Additionally, as our target audience is youths - mostly students, and our team being in the same communities as them, we are in very close communication with the youth community, be it in school or in our private social lives.

Moreover, we are also in communication with a few schools and organisations, including the School of Science and Technology, National Youth Council and Youth Corps. We are still in the early stages of communication with them, but so far, we have managed to discuss what kind of support their students may need, and are in talks on potential collaborations to address them.

Since our launch on 20th March 2021, we have made some noticeable progress. We were awarded a reimbursement grant of $3,000 from the National Youth Council through the Young ChangeMakers initiative, and invited to share at 2 different schools - Eunoia Junior College and the School of Science and Technology, presenting to an estimated total of 630 students. We have also grown our Instagram page to 375 followers.

For our Showcase gallery, we currently have a total of 13 projects featured: 3 Social Projects, 7 Entrepreneurial Venture and 3 Passion Pursuits. We are in communication with several more, and some are a work-in-progress.

For our Opportunities page - yet to launch officially, it currently has 2 opportunities listed. We plan to reach out to various organisations and institutions that offer opportunities for our local youths this year (2022).

Although we have operated for almost 1 year, I believe the Pilot stage is still most accurate to describe CSG. In the past year, we have experienced several significant challenges due to inefficient workflows and external factors such as the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Levels. Taking our insights from 2021, we have remodelled most of our operations, and will test them out this year.

The core technology that powers CSG is a web application. Our main services of the Showcase gallery and the Opportunities hub are built onto our website.

For the Showcase gallery, a virtual portfolio of every project we feature is displayed on the website. Under each portfolio, a whole range of information regarding the projects are shown, and depending on the team behind the projects, an online form can be set up to facilitate communication between the users and the Peer Mentors nominated for each project.

For our Opportunities hub, we have built a grid-style gallery using a spreadsheet-database software called Airtable. Using the filter functions, users can easily sieve out the desired type of opportunity they would like to find - Competition, Recruitment, Workshop, Gathering, Grants & Funding. Also, the opportunities are sorted out by the deadline of signups.

The numbers we use to measure the total number of people we serve would include our follower count on Instagram (375), as well as our size of the audiences in the talks that we have given in schools (630) such as the School of Science and Technology, Singapore, and Eunoia Junior College. The current number would also include the youths behind the projects we feature or in the midst of communication with (30). This would amount to a rough estimation of 1030 people. Since our platform features other youths with their own youth projects and audiences, the actual number would likely be larger than the above. 

For now, we cannot accurately determine the number of youths we will reach through our main marketing strategy which is Instagram, but we can provide the number of projects we plan to feature next year as well as the number of organisations / educational institutions we wish to reach out to in 2022.

In 2022, we plan to feature another 10 more projects on our Showcase gallery, as well as to solidify our collaboration efforts with the 2 schools we have presented in, totalling 2050 students. Moreover, we are currently communicating with the Youth Corps Singapore as well as the National Youth Council, which would have varying audience sizes. However, we are unable to gauge the number of youths we will reach through them as of right now.

Our main impact goal for 2022 would be for us to expand our audience size, using our Instagram’s follower count as the main measurement for growth, and hopefully see more youths use our platform to further their non-academic pursuits - be it through being featured in our Showcase gallery or take part in the opportunities presented on our Opportunities hub.

Taking our insights from 2021, we plan to outsource our outreach efforts. Instead of manually searching for a suitable project to feature, which has proven to be rather difficult, because the project ecosystem is still relatively small and niche in Singapore, we plan to reach out to various educational institutions to nominate their best student projects, as well as to youth organisations such as Youth Corps and the National Youth Council which have their own youth leadership development programmes. This way, we will not only reduce the amount of time spent on finding projects ourselves but will be able to tap into the networks of other schools and organisations - increasing awareness of our project as well as sparking potential collaboration opportunities with the schools and organisations.

Growth: Our main indicator is our Instagram’s follower count. Since Instagram is our main marketing platform as well as where we post announcements regarding our platform, we can use the follower count to measure the size of the youth community we are directly engaged with online.

Quality of engagement: Another indicator would be our website’s unique visitor count as well as pageviews. While we use our Instagram page for youth engagement and building a community there with our website being the web application that hosts our services, we can use the built-in website analytics to track how much of our web traffic is directed from Instagram. This allows us to track how many of our followers actually use our services or find interest in them. From here, we can also make sure of Instagram’s Q&A story features to receive feedback from our community to find out how we can improve on the Instagram-to-WebApp conversion ratio.

Support: Additionally, we also will be tracking the number of new projects we feature on our Showcase gallery. This year, we plan to undertake fewer project features than last year, as we have remodelled our plans for how project features should be curated and focusing more on the after-support aspect for the featured projects.

Network: Indicators of the growth and health of our network of partnerships are the level of coordination and collaboration between our partners as well as the number of new partnerships (e.g. schools and organisations) we acquire on a quarterly, be it for project outreach (Showcase gallery) or for provision of opportunities (Opportunities hub).

Technical: Management of an online youth-led platform has proved to be much more difficult than we have thought. Improper handling of our Instagram page could lead to poor community engagement, which may have a detrimental impact on our plans to expand through social media.

Financial: Currently, we have very limited funds. For 2021, we were fortunate enough to have received a $3000 reimbursement grant from the National Youth Council. However, this grant came with many limitations on what we could, some restricting our marketing strategies and operations,  while having strict requirements for what reimbursements we could receive. As of right now, our founder has been paying for the operations out of his own pocket as a student, and has optimised our operations to keep costs to a minimum.

Legal: For now, our team lacks knowledge regarding the legalities involved in CSG. Though we have yet to encounter any legal issues, we should be prudent in anticipating that legal issues that we are not prepared for may arise in the future, especially when our platform involves the handling of information pertaining to many users and even organisations.

Our team is composed of not only people of different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds, but also some that are in polytechnics who are more well versed in the technical side of things. Our core team is composed of people with ample leadership experience, and we have members studying in various industries, such as the media and communication sectors, further helping us with our outreach strategies. We also frequently volunteer with organisations in our community so that we interact and make connections with youths who have projects and passion as well. As constituent members garner work experience and make connections, we are able to find partnerships with different organisations in Singapore, and hopefully globally. 

Furthermore, since all of us have gone through the Singapore education system recently, we are extremely close to our target community (which we ourselves are a part of) That is why we have  a comprehensive understanding of the problems we are addressing and how they arose. While the government may be actively tackling this issue as well, we can supplement their efforts with our deeper understanding of the problem today.

CSG has 2 ongoing partnerships, and 1 additional partnership currently in development. For the past year, we’ve been working with Singapore’s National Youth Council (NYC) and obtained their Young ChangeMakers grant. We have also worked with the School of Science and Technology, Singapore to introduce CSG directly to a large student audience, and are currently discussing plans to extend the partnership. Recently, we have started conversations with Singapore’s Youth Corps to see how we are able to join forces.