I finally left my NGO job

and I all I got was this despair against the NGO industrial complex

It has been a little over 10 days since I officially left my job and the days already feel strange. I feel like I have been unemployed for a month. I think it has to do with the relative nature of time. I think this is just how it feels like when you go from having 8-12 hours a day drained at work to suddenly having all the hours at your disposal.

It was a difficult decision for me to leave. The first few days of leaving was filled with crying. Being a community worker meant that I was embedded in a community and had deep relationships with people and families. Before leaving I agonised especially over complex cases involving families with immense financial burdens, isolated elderly folks who had no family in Singapore, and individuals facing difficulties with their citizenship applications, amongst other issues. It wasn’t just a job I was leaving, but a community. There was undeniable guilt in the choice.

If circumstances were different I think I could have stayed in the work for a much longer time. I loved the work on the ground. The human work of nourishing relationships within the community and journeying with people and families. It felt like I was being paid just to be a human being participating in the sacred daily ritual of caring and listening to another. I marvelled at the thought that I was being paid to do the work of being in their homes, sitting cross legged on their floors, listening to them talk for 2 hours straight about their lives. I was honored to be in a position of being their advocate and witness. I could meet them anywhere they requested—at the market, at home, at the bus interchange. None of this felt like work to me. I guess this meant it was a job that was meant for me. But of course this was work on the ground. In truth, this part of the work that was so important, so life-giving, the whole point of the job in fact, was one that I felt increasingly pulled away from.

There’s another aspect of the job of being a community worker. The more tedious work of administration, reporting, endless filling up of forms, work plan meetings, organisational trainings, meetings with leaders, meetings with other agencies, meetings, meetings, meetings. This aspect of the work feels cumbersome. Of course ground workers know it is still necessary. But what happens when this aspect of the job swells more and more, encroaching upon the main work that we need to do on the ground? It’s not just about us feeling more overwhelmed, it’s also about us being taken away from the ground, being less plugged in, and the effect that has on the community members that we are being paid to work with and support.

I struggled with this part of the work. I was often cranky with it, seeing so much of it as farcical and a waste of precious time. I didn’t understand all these plans that would be painstakingly laid out on complex excel sheets that would then be subject to change throughout the year and not even properly followed. I didn’t understand why people would call for meetings just the day before, with no agenda or explanation, and I would have to shift things around for this meeting as if my time was less important. I would sit at meetings where the hours would flow and nothing much was said. Especially on a planning level, all these meetings felt like was to provide the illusion of work being done. Because at the end of the day, someone else has to execute it (ground workers, executives), and the execution sure was not being done in those meetings. Is this really the working world?

When I look back on the letters I’ve written here, I realised I’ve been talking about how overwhelmed and burned out I’ve been at work for years since I was in a communications role. It’s not unusual I suppose in the SSA (social service agency) and NGO sectors. But what pushed me more definitively to leave was a transition that resulted in the organisation feeling less and less led with the values that were foundational to a people-facing organisation. Something as basic as empathy could at times feel stigmatised, as if feeling for your community members was a deficiency, an unprofessional failure to place enough boundaries in your work.

The organisation was turning into so many other SSAs where management staff divorced from ground work were in a position to decide the direction of the work. Where concerns about funding and pleasing those who held the purse strings at times felt more important. Where beef between higher-ups in different agencies could affect work on the ground. Where corporate habits were encroaching on the culture of an organisation that is not a corporate entity. More administrative papers and forms. More nitpicking on staff. More problems identified to have endless meetings about that ironically affects our capacity to be productive. Parachuting of staff who are not ground workers to take up management/director level positions and tell us how to do our jobs. It’s not just that these management staff are not ground workers, that would not matter as much if they were good listeners. But they also introduced a work dynamic filled with contempt and a lack of humility that I suppose came from a more corporate environment. Where once the organisation valued respectful language and treating each other equally regardless of rank, we were now unfortunately dealing with people who thought it was perfectly fine to throw their weight and authority around and talk down to staff.

Maybe this is a familiar story for many NGO workers. Meetings are called in lieu of a decision to be made about programmes, policies or work matters that affect the community. Exhausting hours pass by where workers share their thoughts in this illusion of a consultation process. After all of this, the original decision that management desired is unilaterally made anyway despite exhausting appeals by workers. In the end, hours of precious time and much emotional labour was expended for practically nothing. Programmes the community were working on or benefit from can close overnight and upend their lives. Of course, that is if you’re even included in said meetings. I usually was not, and simply had to accept the changes were done.

Working in an organisation where the management does not trust or value the work done by its workers is a disaster waiting to happen. In such an environment, workers are always in the defensive position. When the management’s priorities and allegiance seem to lie more with corporate donors and authorities, what would possibly happen but undisguised contempt for ground workers? We end up having to be in a constant state of defense. We have to defend the value of our work, defend the community’s need for it, defend the fact that working with people cannot be forced into the rigid KPI demands. Trying to explain the extremely basic point that the impact of community work will always be difficult to quantify in numbers is met with the charge that we have a victim complex. While me and my colleagues were constantly overworked, working nights and weekends, the organisation decides to come up with a new form for us to declare our working hours. One of the worst things I heard was the fact that there were colleagues who were now tasked with surveillance, asked to snoop through social media accounts. Maybe they might find this post.

It felt demotivating to go from the life-giving work I was doing on the ground, to having to explain why it was important, or that it had value to my higher-ranking colleagues. I had to bear constant devaluing of my work, and criticisms I felt were unfair and more guided by the technical fact of funding. Since the work I was doing in the community was not covered under any funding, maybe it was an automatic impulse to devalue it since that would help justify any future decision to stop the work happening there. I don’t know why they could not just say: “The community work you are doing is not funded and this is stressful for us. We may have to re-consider our presence there. This is not your fault, it has nothing to do with the quality of your work.” Instead, I had to listen to my work be held to higher standards just because it was unfunded while similar work done in other community teams could be rightfully acknowledged and praised.

I worked as a one-woman team for most of my time on the job. When it came to the yearly review, I had to see my job grade lowered, another effective demotion after my position was demoted the year before to account for teams combining and leadership positions shifting. This restructuring by management also meant less ground workers were made to do the same amount of work since workers who left were not replaced. Me and my colleagues often commiserated on the deep level of physical and psychological exhaustion that we felt. It strained the relationships between colleagues too when what I saw as management level failures were deflected as a problem that ground workers needed to resolve.

It pained me a lot to leave, but I knew I had to for the sake of my mental health. I could no longer stay in a place where I felt undervalued, demoted (forget anything about ‘career progression’!), criticised, ignored. I didn’t want to sit through another meeting where I had to endure a chronic mansplainer. I could not remain in a place where basic conversations about racial diversity in leadership was a difficult one to have, and minorities had to do the emotional labour of explaining basic power dynamics to higher ranking staff who were all of the majority race. Before I left I found it unremarkable that potential leaders identified were also all of the majority race. This, in an organisation where we were primarily working with a brown, specifically Malay demographic. I suppose this, too, is a common story across NGOs, charities and other SSAs in the country.

When I left, I didn’t want any appreciation circles or events. It felt hollow to me. I didn’t want the gestures of appreciation when I did not feel it while I was there. In any case, it was too late. I was leaving, days early too since I could not encash my leave. My only comfort in the organisation were my colleagues, who were struggling like me, and whose heart fought to remain pure in a changing environment.

The meaningful goodbye I had was the one in the community. I am thankful for my time in the NGO. It is the end of an era of my life for me. I learned a lot about the limits of NGO work in addressing systemic issues especially in a country like Singapore. The truth is that despite the organisational flaws and pain I went through, I learned most from the community. It was they who taught me so much, who tided me through disappointment after disappointment, who held me when I cried after tough, conflict-ridden days. Those are stories perhaps for another time.