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2018-08-13
Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship & Philanthropy (ACSEP);
This study investigates the relationship between poverty awareness and the willingness to redistribute income, using an incentivized lab experiment with a between‐subjects design. Participants watched one (randomly determined) film out of three possible films for a translation exercise. Those in the treatment condition watched a film about poverty in Singapore; the other two films served as a control condition. I find that the showing the lives of people in poverty affect preferences for redistribution, making the viewer more tolerant towards a government redistribution of income. This effect remains robust even when controlled for emotional or mood states. I find no conclusive evidence of the impact of showing poverty on the viewer's contributions to charity. Showing poverty appears to have a positive effect on donations, but this effect reduces to close to zero when controlling for emotional and mood states. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the more the viewer likes the film, the more influence the images have on the donations of the participant.
2017-05-05
The Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (ACSEP) in National University of Singapore;
This is an exploratory study on the state of the charity sector in Singapore using the Commissioner of Charities Annual Reports from 2007 to 2013, available from the Charity Portal. The depth of analysis is much limited by the availability of inter-sectoral and intra-sectoral data as well as the length of time covered by each annual report.While there are studies that use the same data, we attempt to rationalise the data trends and their implications for strategy making by would-be entrants, practitioners and policymakers.We first present the broad trend in the net number and revenue growth of registered charities to understand the size of the sector and its financial health. Overall, the whole sector has been growing at a steady rate in terms of numbers and total amount of receipts which include grants, donations and others. Among the three components, grants, or the money given by the government, contributed the most to the total receipts. A more microscopic review shows that the percentages of others to total receipts are increasing.We analyse the receipts per charity in each subsector at the level of the total receipts as well as its three components. It was observed that different subsectors have different mix of receipts with government grants dominating in the Education subsector, followed by the Arts and Heritage subsector and the Health subsector.Taken together, this study could be of interest to aspiring entrants who wish to do good while staying afloat at the same time. For instance, the social and welfare subsector is able to generate a greater proportion of receipts from the sales of goods and services. This suggests that models employing social entrepreneurship may be appropriate in building sustainability in this sector.Finally, subject to the data at hand, we explore the possible research questions raised in the literature that may be of relevance to practitioners and policymakers. We discuss topics such as the relation of donations and economic conditions, crowding-in or crowding-out effects of grants, the cost of donations, and fundraising strategies.Given the trend of an ageing population, the Social and Welfare subsector may have a greater role to play in the future. Therefore, this warrants more in-depth research on these issues to bring innovation and sustainability in transforming society and community.
2010-07-18
Public Impact;
Describes Singapore's use of performance-linked "competencies" and rating scales for each competency, modeled on effective teachers' behaviors, to measure, reward, and develop teacher performance. Considers lessons for U.S. teacher evaluation systems.
2015-01-01
The Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (ACSEP) in National University of Singapore;
This paper attempts to address the gap in knowledge on the contributions by philanthropic players to national development in Singapore. Using grounded research, it explores the evolution of giving by individuals, the community and the private sector in Singapore from the end of World War II in 1945 to today. It looks at how each group gives towards prevailing social needs, unexpected events and crises as well as government calls for community support across fve key phases in Singapore's journey to nationhood. To provide context to the giving, the political and socio-economic situation of each time frame and concurrent government social welfare provisions in each phase are also described.
2010-12-02
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD);
Singapore is one of Asia's great success stories, transforming itself from a developing country to a modern industrial economy in one generation. During the last decade, Singapore's education system has remained consistently at or near the top of most major world education ranking systems. This chapter examines how this "tiny red dot" on the map has achieved and sustained so much, so quickly. From Singapore's beginning, education has been seen as central to building both the economy and the nation. The objective was to serve as the engine of human capital to drive economic growth. The ability of the government to successfully match supply with demand of education and skills is a major source of Singapore's competitive advantage. Other elements in its success include a clear vision and belief in the centrality of education for students and the nation; persistent political leadership and alignment between policy and practice; a focus on building teacher and leadership capacity to deliver reforms at the school level; ambitious standards and assessments; and a culture of continuous improvement and future orientation that benchmarks educational practices against the best in the world.
2013-03-01
Open Society Foundations;
The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.The city-state of Singapore, with its five million people, has fully embraced the technology and opportunities presented by digitization. Nearly nine out of ten households have broadband access. Mobile phone penetration is 150 percent (most are smartphones), and there are 340 TV and 46 local and foreign radio channels.However, the government—and the Singaporean people—are still highly sensitive to the belief that the stability of their multi-ethnic population (Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians) is fragile, stoked by the memory of two bloody race and religious clashes in the 1950s and 1960s. This has long shaped the role of the media as non-adversarial.So individuals, groups, and media professionals operate within a state-sanctioned sphere and observe what are called "OB markers" ("out of bounds" lines used in sports to denote an area beyond which play is not allowed). These are the boundaries of acceptable and permissible political public discussion, which opposition politicians view as a form of self-censorship. The government has recently acknowledged openly that those markers are shifting.Despite the advances that have been made in recent years, there is a need for further steps to encourage diversity in content across all media. In addition, though Singapore has escaped the decline in professional standards that has accompanied media liberalization in many other countries, more needs to be done to retain talent and to raise the standards and skills of the city-state's 70,000 media professionals, particularly as demand increases for new forms of content creation and distribution.
2018-01-01
Sasakawa Peace Foundation;
The study reviews the current state of impact investments in Singapore and Hong Kong, particularly those that have engaged with foundations. It further looks at the trends and challenges of the impact investment sector before presenting a list of recommendations.Impact investment assets globally represent a mere 0.2 percent of global wealth as reported by the Global Impact Investing Network. By increasing this share to just two percent, the potential of impact investments can reach over US$2 trillion (UNDP, 2016). Impact investments can play a significant role in sustainable development in the Asia Pacific region, potentially providing socioeconomic progress for the billions of people living in the region. Foundations in the region can potentially play a significant role given the billions of assets they can deploy.
2018-02-01
Agence Française de Développement (AFD);
This study looks at an emerging trend in which wealthy families, individuals, and corporations in Asia set up foundations to institutionalise their giving. This giving is motivated by a myriad of factors beyond prestige and status, including the desire to give back to society, religion, family and personal values, the desire to drive change, personal experience, and/or affiliations.This study finds that philanthropic foundations in Asia can be characterised by their operational model, governance structure, and philanthropic focus. In emerging economies in Asia like Myanmar and China, these foundations tend to give nationally and operate their own programmes. On the other hand, foundations in developed economies like Singapore and Hong Kong tend to give both regionally and nationally via grants to civil society organisations that operate programmes, as opposed to running programmes themselves. Further, families tend to retain significant control of foundations in Singapore and Hong Kong, while programme funding serves as the preferred funding mode.This study also discusses the various challenges and opportunities faced by the nascent philanthropic sector in Asia that can address some of the developmental and structural gaps left by the public, private, and people sectors.
2014-01-01
World Future Foundation;
WFF is a grant-making foundation, based in Singapore, but for the world. It provides financial support to a number of organizations and programs related to environmental and social sustainability research. Through these programs, WFF hopes to bring forth a wide range of new technologies for the benefit of the current generation and generations to come. WFF is the first philanthropic foundation in Singapore funded by entrepreneurs from mainland China, and is professionally managed by an international team. This not only highlights globalization in the philanthropy sector, but also reflectsthe central status of Singapore in the global philanthropic domain. WFF is a private foundation. It does not raise funds from public, rather it invites public-spirited and influential Chinese entrepreneurs and professionals to join and lend their strengths to accomplish these great undertakings. WFF's motto, "For Our World, For Our Future", reflects its founders' ambitions and aspirations.This report relates to the 5th Anniversary of WFF, remembering and analyzing the most important projects and prizes organized by the foundation and how it has impacted positevely in society.
2013-04-25
The Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (ACSEP) in National University of Singapore;
This publication is the second in a series of ACSEP working papers concerned with what is termed 'entrepreneurial social finance' in Asia, which explores how philanthropy is responding to the financial and nonfinancial needs of the region's social entrepreneurs. The term philanthropy is most commonly associated with straightforward grant making, most usually making donations where all capital is lost and no return expected. In modern practice, philanthropy is more sophisticated and diverse than this, wanting to utilise as many tools as possible with the goal of creating sustained social change. Recognising this, philanthropy is defined in this study, as the deployment of financial and human capital for primarily social impact. For this reason, this paper investigates the growing interest in 'impact investing,' which seeks to use non-grant finance to maximise the social and financial outcomes by investing in social businesses. This study employs an essentially qualitative methodology. The researchers conducted 40 face-to-face and telephone interviews in Singapore, India, China, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand between March and November 2012. In-depth interviews were chosen as the central component of the study to gain insight into the personal motivations of lead individuals who had founded or who are managing philanthropy organisations.
2013-03-06
Aspen Institute Education & Society Program;
High-performing organizations are dogged about nurturing talent and leveraging it to drive organizational improvement. The organizations that are particularly good at this carefully track both high potential employees and high-performing ones. They think intentionally about the career progression of these employees and incentivize them to both grow their skills and apply them in response to organizational needs. Managers are assessed based on their ability to develop and retain talent, and employees know that if they perform well, they will have opportunities to advance their careers. The American public education system does almost none of these things, at its peril. To meet the unprecedented demands facing public education, school systems must strategically pursue teacher leadership as a critical lever. This requires first establishing a vision for what teacher leadership can make possible in the system and how it can address identified needs. Having established clarity of purpose, the work then lies in establishing criteria for teacher leaders, defining the roles available (and how they relate to further differentiation of teaching roles), creating time for teachers to lead (and be led by others), and designing a financial model that is viable long term. It also lies in creating the structures, systems, and culture needed at the school and system level to support teacher leadership, and building a strategy that both encourages innovation in teacher leadership and builds incremental systemic change needed to sustain teacher leadership in the long term. There is not a single, right approach. What matters is that systems get started and that they pursue the work intentionally and strategically, learning from their early work (and that of others), guided by an inspiring vision that reaches beyond current roles and responsibilities for teachers.
2013-05-01
Kordant Philanthropy Advisors;
Interest in impact investments is growing worldwide, with Asia in particular holding great promise for innovation. But who are impact investors and what causes do they support? Which organizations are working in this sector?
