SINGAPORE: A volunteer with the Workers’ Party (WP), Fuad Hasan, was featured in a video on June 11 (Thursday), giving the public a small taste of what it’s like to be a volunteer for Singapore’s most significant opposition party.
Mr Fuad, 28, explained in the video posted by The Workers’ Party Youth Wing on its Facebook and Instagram accounts that he’s currently volunteering with the Punggol team, doing house visits and market visits.
The team, headed by the party’s GE2025 slate in Punggol, Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh, Alexis Dang, Jackson Au, and Alia Mattar, has been busy on the ground since last year and recently reached a milestone of 10,000 house visits.
The young volunteer said that it’s the team that keeps bringing him back.
“You could say that politics exist because of community. We might think that after work, all of us are tired, but we still make the time (for the visits), and I can feel the passion from them, so that really makes me want to come back,” he said.
As for why he chose to volunteer with the WP in the first place, Mr Fuad said, “I wanted to be somewhere where the problems can be addressed at its core. I can’t live with myself if I just hope for them to win the elections and don’t do anything about.”
He added that the WP team on the ground takes feedback from residents seriously and is always ready to listen. And while they can’t help directly with policy issues, they bring the feedback to the party’s MPs, who then raise these issues, such as Kenneth Tiong (Aljunied) and He Ting Ru (Sengkang).
Mr Fuad was also asked if he had “one rule” for house visits. Noting that every estate and every resident has a different story, and while most may seem “very cheerful” when they first come to the door, “once you start to talk to them, they start to pour out their issues.”
His number one rule, therefore, is to treat every resident with respect and dignity, and always have the desire to learn something.
Mr Singh also made an appearance in the clip, praising Mr Fuad for always being approachable, describing him as someone who “lends a listening ear and understands what people go through.”
Meanwhile, Ms Dang said that new WP volunteers learn a lot from Mr Fuad, adding that he has “this special power to let people share what’s on their mind with us.”
“People are telling us how things are. People are telling us, ‘don’t try to go a different way.’ Anyone who signs up as an opposition volunteer shows that (they) have the guts, the passion, (they’re) willing to make sacrifices. You should stand up for what you believe in,” he said.
Read also: Alexis Dang says WP volunteers have visited 10,000 households in Punggol
