I am chatting with Alice Tan and it is clear that Alice can’t help wanting to help. She has over the course of her career served in the public service, contributed as a Criminal Legal Aid Scheme (CLAS) volunteer and now is a fulltime Community Law Advocate with the CLC. On the latter, she shares that she connects with the initiative on a number of levels. First, the Teochew environment. Alice grew up speaking the language at home and the neighbourhood represents a kind of cultural homecoming for her. Second, the rental flat demographic which, as a child, Alice herself was a part of. She is acutely aware of the challenges faced by that segment of the community and therefore feels that she is best placed to help. 

On more than one occasion, Alice uses words like ‘happy’ and ‘delighted’ to characterise how she feels about her work at the CLC. She expresses the sentiment with so much earnestness and so little ego that my mind can’t quite wrap itself around it. Candidly, I can appreciate how the nature of the work may be meaningful and deeply fulfilling – but delight is a stretch for me. I am curious about the source of her passion so I probe a little deeper. As Alice shares, I realise that what I see as problem-solving, she sees as bridge-building. Access to justice is not just a knowledge gap or a money gap to be filled. It is also a culture gap, a language gap and a physical access gap to be bridged. Alice, through her work on the CLC project, sees it as her mission to build bridges across those gaps for the community. Alice shares how they have received visitors seeking legal advice from outside Hougang, some of whom have travelled considerable distances, which is why the team admits visitors even if they arrive past the formal consultation hours. 

The first time I meet Natasha Baobed is on a visit to a social services organisation in Buangkok. She has an air of no-fuss competence that makes me want to pick her to be on my team in a fight. So, I am a little intimidated when we sit down to talk about her work as Office Manager of Pro Bono SG’s Community Law Centre (North-East) in Hougang (‘CLC’). It does not take long for me to discover that Natasha’s steely exterior belies a deeply empathetic spirit. Her team-mates laugh as they recount how Natasha is the resident ‘counsellor’ whose superpower is her ability to communicate even with people she does not share a language with. I ask Natasha what motivates her to care and she shares that she has always had an interest in the legal field and a passion for social service work – the latter a result of her father’s own active volunteerism. She confides that it was not straightforward to find a way to connect these two passions. 

Her start in the legal services space was as an allied legal professional in the real estate department of a law firm. While she benefitted from her time in that space, she began to feel like her calling required her to be using her allied legal skills towards serving the community in a more direct way. So, when an opportunity arose to get involved in legal pro bono, she jumped at it. Natasha, like many of her teammates, wears many hats. She is involved in running Pro Bono SG’s legal clinics and used to be involved in the Family Justice Support Scheme. Yet, when approached to take on another portfolio in the form the CLC, in her words: 

With just three years of post-qualification experience, it is easy to cast Goh Qian Hui as the baby of the group. That would be a mistake. Right from the start of our conversation, her insights are composed, articulate and thoughtful. Unlike peers who graduated and took conventional routes in legal service, practice or academia, Qian Hui decided to follow her own true north in social services. She shares how difficult it was to try and find a job in the social services sector without any prior work experience. A chance encounter with a job advertisement by Pro Bono SG was all Qian Hui needed to turn her calling into her first fulltime job right out of law school and she has not looked back since. 

Qian Hui speaks with the confidence of someone who not only cares about her work but who cares about thinking deeply and critically about her work. She shares her observations about the ‘last mile’ challenges of the access to justice landscape. She speaks passionately about the need for practice and policy, innovation on the ground and strategic visioning, to work in tandem to address such challenges. She holds my attention with a nuanced articulation of how the Community Law Centre initiative is an important way to address the crucial need to create awareness of schemes of support and provide simple practical guidance of how to access them amongst the people who need them most. She points out that by meeting their needs where they are, and working in tandem with social services which are the touchpoint, the CLC is a meaningful attempt to reach the most vulnerable: the young, the elderly, the severely disadvantaged. With her Community Law Centre Fellow hat on, observations and ideas tumble out of her.