Values in Action

XinminCares

XinminCares is one of our school's signature programmes. Recognising that Values-In-Action is part of the key Student Development Experiences (SDEs), we have sought to establish XinminCares for all students across all levels. For more information, please click here.

Overseas Service Learning

Team Vietnam in front of painted mural

Students in Xinmin Secondary School have many opportunities to give back to the community, but we believe in extending that learning about various communities to even beyond Singapore. To that end, Overseas Service Learning (OSL) is a specialised programme where Secondary 3 students are given the opportunity to embark on a 10-day trip to a rural village in South-east Asia to participate in service learning. Over the course of the trip, students will help to improve the lives of villagers through activities such as building communal toilets, raising the flooring of houses prone to flooding, refurbishing village schools, constructing water tanks, and many more.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had two teams of students travel to Thailand and Vietnam respectively. Team Thailand helped to fix a village well and conducted activities for the village children while Team Vietnam helped to raise the floor of a house that had been severely flooded during the monsoon season as well as give the walls of a local school and university a new coat of paint and murals. Over the course of the trips, the students worked tirelessly during the day to complete the projects while also interacting with local students to help improve their conversational English. There were also nightly reflection sessions to guide the students in learning more about both the communities they were serving, as well as themselves as compassionate contributors.

For many of the students who have embarked on OSL trips, this programme is the highlight of their Xinmin school experience because of how much they are able to learn about themselves and the world at large. In many of their individual reflections, these students realise just how much they end up taking for granted in their day-to-day life. Following the trip, many have endeavoured to improve their outlook and strengthened their desire to continue giving back to the community, both local and overseas.

Xinmin Change Initiators (XCI)

The main objective of Xinmin Change Initiators (XCI) is to give students a platform to pursue their passion for service learning and give back to the community. This is especially so for the Sec 3 and 4 students who have completed their XinminCares programme, or for Sec 1 and 2 students who desire to go beyond XinminCares.

For XCI, students will form their own groups and approach a local organisation of their choice. Working together with the organisation, they will develop a plan/project that meets the latter’s needs, with little involvement of the teacher. An example of this was when in 2022, Xinmin students approached AWWA School @ Napiri to engage the students in crafts activities and games.

The school also provides a list of pre-existing projects/ organisations that students will be able to select from, but still come up with their own way of executing their project. This was the case with students who took part in the Go Green campaign and came up with a survey to find out how to improve on reducing plastic use for food takeaway in school.

In XCI, students are also able to contribute in projects initiated by our community partners. For this projects, all a student has to do is to look out for emails from various teachers-in-charge and sign up to be a volunteer for the project. These kinds of projects are often the first step for students to find out more about the communities that they feel passionate for. This year, we had students take part in Run for Inclusion, a carnival where Xinmin students partnered special needs students from AWWA School @ Napiri for a short walk/run.