Singapore is good at delivering services to communities. It is far less practised at letting communities organise for themselves — and it has never built the institution for that purpose.
A child is falling behind in school. If the family can afford it, they pay for private tuition. If they cannot, a self-help group or a social service agency arranges it, heavily subsidised or even free of charge. Everyone looks for high-quality tutors. It is a clean intervention with measurable outcomes, and it works for many students.
But are there pathways that have not been explored?
Could youths learn from their peers instead of professional tutors? Could older youths from disadvantaged backgrounds form a tuition cooperative to coach slightly younger cohorts, and earn income for their families as they do so? Could social enterprises working in this space help such community-owned ventures succeed, rather than treat them as competitors for the same pool of funding? Can we unlock a community’s capacity to teach and learn from one another?
These are not necessarily better answers than standard private tuition. They are different questions — and in Singapore, almost nobody is institutionally responsible for asking them. We have built a formidable apparatus for delivering services to communities. We have built little for communities that want to organise themselves.
That gap is not an accident. When help is designed to be professionalised, scalable and measurable — as it must be when public money is involved — it privileges a logic in which citizens are people with problems and the sector is the expert that solves them.
Nothing in that logic is wrong; vulnerable and disadvantaged people badly need professional social services. But the picture is simply incomplete. And none of what follows is anti-state or anti-market. It is a claim that a healthy society needs a third force with its own logic and its own institutions, strong enough to stand alongside — not simply beneath — the other two.
AN ORPHANED MIDDLE
Singapore has just made that gap wider. When the National Council of Social Service (Amendment) Act took effect on Aug 1, it narrowed NCSS membership to frontline service providers and moved to a fully Minister-appointed Council, sharpening the body’s focus as a sector developer. The clarity is welcome. But it leaves a number of non-profits not directly supporting social services without a natural home.
In the parliamentary debate on the Bill, MP Denise Phua backed its intent but warned against over-centralised decision-making, disproportionate administrative burden on smaller organisations, and the loss of the sector’s capacity to respond to conditions on the ground. Her caution applies well beyond the social services.
For years, the NCSS has served as the de facto voluntary sector association for all manner of non-profits lacking an umbrella body of their own. The role was always awkward: its membership base is diverse, and as a statutory body it takes direction from its parent ministry. That amendment resolves the awkwardness by giving it up.
This leaves about 1,950 charities unrepresented if we take Commissioner of Charity figures and subtract those under NCSS. Even if we remove the religious charities, there will be 500 to 600 organisations estimated to have no associational body.
WHAT AN APEX BODY IS FOR
Some third-sector organisations already have a home: social enterprises have raiSE, cooperatives have the Singapore National Co-operative Federation. A great many have none at all — no one to represent their interests, convene their peers or safeguard their values. Elsewhere this is unremarkable. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations in Britain, the National Council of Nonprofits in the United States and the Community Council for Australia all exist to do precisely that: act as independent, sector-led representatives for charities, non-profits and voluntary groups.
It would be easy to frame this as a question of fairness — every part of the third sector deserves its own umbrella body, the same way industries have trade associations. But fairness is the smaller point. The larger one is about who has the legitimacy to define the problem in the first place.
WHAT COMMUNITIES SAFEGUARD
An independent apex body could assert, first, that mutual aid is not a lesser form of ‘service’. Groups facing hardship hold unrecognised strengths worth surfacing, not only deficits that need fixing, and ordinary neighbours can look out for one another without waiting for a state grant, a formal programme or a credentialed expert to lead the way.
Secondly, that some things are better held in common than owned. Knowledge, tools and spaces can be pooled so they benefit everyone, rather than being licensed out for revenue or guarded as competitive advantage. The sector can be a site of serious economic activity — in service of people and planet rather than profit.
Thirdly, that civic organisations should relate to one another as peers and collaborators rather than as rivals competing for the attention of the same state funders and philanthropic donors.
This is what associational logic means in practice. It lets civic groups set their own agendas from what they observe on the ground, even when those concerns fall outside current government priorities or state funding cycles. It moves the sector from being a partner in policy implementation to an independent co-creator of social value.
THE MISSING THIRD ANSWER
We argue endlessly about nationalisation. We argue about privatisation. We have almost no vocabulary for the logically equivalent third option — call it communitisation — in which some assets and some decisions are held not by the state and not by the market, but by the community that uses and sustains them. Singapore’s third sector is currently too weak to make that case for itself.
A ‘WE FIRST’ SOCIETY NEEDS A ‘WE’
During the 2025 National Day Rally, when PM Lawrence Wong called for Singapore to become a “we first” society, most of us heard this as an appeal to individual conduct: volunteer more, give more, look out for your neighbour. But a “we” is not only a disposition, it is a set of institutions — and Singapore has yet to build ones a genuine “we” would require.
An umbrella body of this kind would do more than plug the administrative gap that the NCSS amendment leaves behind. It would give non-profit and civil society organisations a shared infrastructure, a stronger voice and, critically, the standing to develop and defend values that neither the state’s administrative logic nor the market’s commercial logic will reliably protect.
So, to return to the child falling behind. The tuition will keep arriving, and it should. The question is whether anyone in Singapore is free to ask what else that community might have done for itself — and whether we will ever build the institution that lets them.
Justin Lee is a Senior Research Fellow and Head of Policy Lab at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore.
To understand the differences between service provision and other means of addressing social issues, read this article.
Top image from Canva.