What: One year sponsorship of free weekly breakfast to total of 200 elderly at 4 Senior Activity Centres, rotating among each centre of 50 elderly per week

When: June 2016 – May 2017

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Xinyi, Club President:

Yet another gift on commitment. In RBKD, we firmly believe in spreading the love. To those of you who have been to Rui En’s events, I am sure you understand what I mean when you have something to look forward to and how a single activity/event can brighten your day. Yes, this is exactly what we are trying to do for the elderly, to let them have something (free breakfast) to look forward to monthly, a little something to brighten their day.

We are halfway into the one year project now, and to be honest, it is not easy. The commitment level required is high; imagine climbing out of the bed at 6/7am to cook the red bean soup/make our way to north south east west of Singapore, the force is strong to stay in bed. But when you are there, the smiles and thanks from the elderly makes you forget about the early hours and empty stomach (yes, many of us serve with an empty stomach as we struggle to get out of bed and reach in time, so skipping breakfast becomes a frequent affair).

I must say, this is the single most challenging charity project we have done so far, with the duration and cost of project enough to deter others from doing this. But we will see through this, one way or another. Because this is how we do things in RBKD. We don’t give up.

PS: You might find it unbelievable but the elderly do not know who we are, where we are from. They recognise us but we never saw the need to make known our identity deliberately. It’s the RBKD’s way of ensuring we stay true to the reasons why we are even serving.

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Melissa, Participant:

I consider being able to volunteer with RBKD for the Breakfast Project a great opportunity for me to do something for the community. Without RBKD’s initiative, I would definitely have trouble finding places to volunteer at because I wouldn’t know where to start, or know which organisations are transparent and reliable; that my helping them would benefit others directly. That’s also why whenever I come back to Singapore from Sydney during my school holidays, I would try to go volunteering with RBKD as much as possible (even though it starts really early in the morning and sometimes I really need more sleep).

I really appreciate how RBKD makes it so much easier for me to do something good, and the Breakfast Project is really fun for me because I get to wash all the cups and dishes after the elderly finish eating – I love washing dishes! I just find it so therapeutic.

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Jonah, Participant:

It was a simple help out by serving food and drinks to the old folks. At the same time I am returning a bit of favour back to society by providing some form of service to the elderly who contributed to society back in their working years.

Sometimes things around us tend to make us take things for granted as we been living in a country with basic needs met compared to the less well-off countries which have a harder time meeting their basic needs. Young people like us should help out by volunteering if they willing to use some of their time and effort to give back to such a stable society and economy.

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Madeline, Participant:

The breakfast project was a great way to get myself out of bed early on a Saturday morning; we spent the morning preparing and serving food – with bananas, biscuits, bread, coffee and macaroni soup prepared for them, they definitely had quite a spread to choose from!

In the middle of the session we live-streamed Joseph Schooling’s historic gold medal finish, and as Murphy’s law would have it the stream got cut off right before the race ended and we were left hanging. But we returned to serving breakfast feeling super pumped up.

A simple breakfast might not seem like much to us, but hopefully these sessions would bring these elderly together, spark some meaningful conversations, and give them something to look forward to each month

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Yeeling, Participant:

Usually during my school days as a CCA of community service my teacher would bring us to elderly’s homes and chat with them, but this time around was my first time joining the breakfast project. We prepared the food by ourselves and served them. After, the smile on their face will make you happy.

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All Time Favourite: Our 10 Years' Gifts, Community