HONOURING THE "I WILL" PLEDGES

"I will participate actively in our school recycling programme."

With this one pledge, Winnie Hoe walked away with prizes from two categories in the Total Defence 2010 Campaign online contest - the "Most Supported Submission" and the "Impact Award".

The 25-year-old took part in the online contest which sought to encourage Singaporeans to turn their pledges into action and taking simple steps to defend the things they care about through two simple words: "I Will".

Hosted by the Ministry of Defence Deputy Secretary (Policy), Brigadier-General (BG) Gary Ang, the "I Will" online contest prize presentation was held at the HortPark on 30 Apr.

Termed Connexion@HortPark, the event was also part of Nexus' series of networking sessions for national education (NE) practitioners. Nexus is the Ministry of Defence's central coordinating agency for national education (NE).

This year's online contest saw a total of 7,556 pledges in the running for three award categories - "Most Supported Submission", "Most Popular Video" and "Impact Award".

The "Most Supported Submission" was determined by the most number of joins for a pledge and the "Most Popular Video" by the number of votes from the public. As for the "Impact Award", it was determined by a judging panel that assessed how creative and meaningful the submission was, the number of supporters behind the pledge and finally, whether the pledge was fulfilled.

Ms Hoe received an iPod Nano Touch 16GB for coming up tops as the "Most Supported Submission" with 364 joins and a Sony Vaio W laptop for bagging second place in the "Impact Award" category.

"I'm very glad that the pledge that the school set out to achieve made it to the second prize," said Miss Hoe.

The MacPherson Primary School teacher explained that while the school has always been recycling, efforts to do so were not widely advertised.

"Through the pledge, we hope to encourage people to make an effort to recycle and also help raise funds for the less privileged in the school," she added.

To garner pledges, Miss Hoe went around the school to collect recyclables, and even organised an inter-class competition where the class that brings in the most recycled waste will win a prize at the end of the year when the results are tabulated.

The "I Will" contest is part of a nationwide effort to inculcate NE values to Singaporeans. Gone are the days when NE was about preaching messages to the people. Instead, Singaporeans are now encouraged to discover NE on their own, and even take ownership of it.

The theme of Total Defence 2010, was taking the theme of self-reflection into personal action with the two words, "I Will".

During his opening address for Connexion@HortPark, BG Ang cited the example of Youth Initiatives, the winner of the "Impact Award" category. The youth group, which was set up to encourage youth-initiated fund-raising events, turned the pledge "I will Organise a Charity Event for Club Rainbow (Singapore)" into reality.

They organised a fund-raising walk and run on 7 Feb for Club Rainbow, a charity helping youngsters with chronic illnesses. Called Colour Their World 2010, the event attracted over 350 participants.

Another prize winner, Jasper Tan, clinched the top prize in the "Most Popular Video" category with his pledge of upholding proper MRT Etiquette. Mr Tan, who walked away with a 13-inch MacBook Pro 1, told cyberpioneer that his inspiration came from his experiences of being a constant victim of "MRT pushing".

"Other than that, I also saw that people were hogging the priority seats that were not meant for them," said 22-year-old undergraduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Mr Tan explained that when such scenarios happen, all people would do was just to stare and nothing else. He hoped that through his video, people would confront those who take up priority seats and uphold MRT courtesy.

On being awarded the most popular video with 427 votes, Mr Tan felt that he was just lucky as his video was "not very fancy".

"But it shows that people have been watching my video and I hope that I have conveyed my thoughts and ideas to them," he said.

The overall "I Will" campaign certainly resonated with Singaporeans, with about 50,000 pledge cards collected - five times more than the 10,000 collected last year.

"With more of these ground-up actions, I am confident that collectively, we can better reinforce the ethos of our country, and build a more cohesive and gracious society," concluded BG Ang.