Minds’ new CEO eyes expansion of services to help more people

SINGAPORE — Services to persons with intellectual disabilities can often be provided in fragments, but things may change now that Mr Tony Tan See-Boon, former chief of social enterprise NTUC Link, is heading the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (Minds). He also intends to build on the voluntary welfare organisation’s services and expand them, including hiring more staff members, in order to reach out to more persons with intellectual disabilities.

Mr Tan, 53, officially joined Minds on May 22 as its chief executive officer (CEO), taking over from Mr Keh Eng Song, 62, who retired after a 10-year stint there.

Speaking to TODAY, Mr Tan noted that while the current services provided to persons with intellectual disabilities might be necessary for those who have different needs at various points in their lives, others need a more “whole-person” approach to help them transit into different stages of their lives.

“Everything that we do — our assessments, our intervention, our educational and training programme — must, in a way, be mutually reinforcing and also build on each other, almost like building a scaffolding,” he explained.

While it seems “conceptually obvious” to provide continuous help to its clients — and there are already services in place — Minds can provide more vocational training in its schools to help its clients ease into the workforce upon graduation.

“Schools are very important, but there is no point going through school to get some qualification,” he said. “What we need to do is to build in a lot of the vocational aspects, so that in the early times in school, we already have the good assessment tools to see (the person’s potential and) work towards that.”

While Minds already serves a broad swathe of its target community, Mr Tan also hopes to expand the organisation’s capabilities and services to help more children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, for instance.

The father of two sons aged 23 and 21 took a pay cut in accepting his new role, but he said the new position felt like a “natural progression” from his previous job.

“NTUC Enterprises was a very good transition into that space, and I feel like in my next career phase, a social service organisation like Minds would be so much more purposeful and meaningful,” he added.

Mr Tan spent seven-and-a-half years at NTUC Link, helping to build its Plus! customer rewards programme, which serves about 90 per cent of the households here.

Before that, he was with multinational corporation Procter & Gamble and American healthcare company Bausch & Lomb Corp.

Given that Minds is a large organisation offering a wide range of services, he hopes that his leadership experience in complex organisations, as well as his management skills in working with stakeholders such as government agencies and corporations, will come in useful.

Minds employs about 700 people and serves some 2,400 clients aged seven to 70 years old.

Under its umbrella are special education schools, employment development centres, training and development centres, and a caregivers support centre, among others.

During Mr Keh’s time, Minds set up more day-activity centres and a community group home in Bukit Merah, where some of its more independent clients are able to live in public housing flats.