SMU-X

By the end of the gamified experience, the initiative seeks to foster sustained volunteer engagement through tasks that build empathy, leadership, and communication. It also aims to encourage meaningful reflection via self-assessment challenges and digital badges tied to soft skills, while evaluating the model’s potential for broader application across future SMU projects and external collaborations.

Our networking-while-volunteering initiative aims to spark and sustain interest in volunteering for nursing homes among SMU students by offering values aligned with their career priorities. We also aim to increase both employment opportunities and volunteerism rates among university students.

We noticed that the majority of initiatives in Moral Home for the Aged Sick are focused on nursing care. The majority of initiatives at Moral Home for the Aged Sick are primarily focused on nursing care. While Moral Home does organise music sessions for residents, opportunities to incorporate music more consistently into residents’ daily lives remain limited.

University students are often hesitant to volunteer in eldercare, viewing it as uninspiring or emotionally distant compared to more engaging volunteer roles, where their hesitation is amplified by limited training and ageing stereotypes. Moreover, while volunteerism rates among young adults appear high, this is largely due to mandatory community service at universities like SMU and NUS. This creates a “bathtub volunteerism” cycle, where volunteer rates drop sharply in adults aged 25-34 as priorities shift to career and family, only returning later in life, resulting in sporadic and unsustained volunteering with poor quality of engagement (NVPC, 2019; UD, 2025).

C4RE PATH aims to cultivate a consistent, confident and compassionate pool of volunteers who can form meaningful relationships with the residents while developing their professional skillsets.

By the end of the one year pilot period, we aim to recruit at least 40 student volunteers from the six local universities, with at least 80% attending three or more sessions and 60% committing for the full year (at least 10 sessions). This will be measured through completed administrative forms, attendance record and reflection entries. Additionally, we aim for at least 60% of volunteers to report achieving their personal development goals as reflected in end-of-program survey which includes self-competency survey, and qualitative feedback from the volunteers.