Never Too Young To Be A Silent Hero – Mr Mohamed Faizal

This year’s Silent Heroes Awards is especially significant for two reasons.

The first is the fact that this year’s Award marks a decade of the awards itself. What started out as a grassroots movement has, primarily through the leadership and determination of its primary architect, Mr MP Sellvem, turned into a broader national movement.

Over the years, in my involvement in the Silent Heroes Awards in the past few years, whether as a volunteer, as a member of the Advisory Board, or as Chair of its Selection Committee, I have continuously been inspired by the many wonderful deeds and powerful actions that the hundreds of nominees and dozens of awardees have undertaken.

This year’s awardees are no exception to this, and their contributions reflect that fact that the heroes amongst us are every day people who through their powerful work and contributions have made a profound difference in the lives of others.

The second (and more exciting!) is the fact that this year also marks the founding of the Silent Heroes (Student) Award. It represents the next leg of the development of the Silent Heroes project, one which brings the awards back to the grassroots and facilitates the celebration of the many silent heroes amongst our youth. It is sometimes said, quite rightly, that the youth are a relatively small percentage of the population; but 100% of the future; and will therefore, in many ways, define the society that Singapore, and the world, will be in decades to come.

The awardees this year reflect the very best of what the future has to offer, and if their willingness to serve and give back serves as any indicator, our future will be a very promising one indeed. Although the award this year has only involved a handful of schools (who we are very grateful to have been able to work with for this initial year), this represents a nascent start to what we hope will be a flourishing new movement to celebrate good deeds amongst our youth, and I am confident we will be able to build on this momentum in the years ahead to make it yet another national movement, much like the Silent Heroes Awards itself.

Finally, it would be churlish of me not to highlight that while I have been very privileged to serve as Chairperson of the Silent Heroes (Student) Award, the true “heroes” who have made this happen are Mr Sellvem and the very capable Organising Committee working behind the scenes to make this happen, namely Mr Alvin Chow and Mr Ang Eng Tat.