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Together with the kind people of Gumtree, I was honoured to be part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) project, “The Giving Tree”. 

We spent a lovely afternoon connecting with the children in Children’s Aid Society’s Melrose Home, and it was an afternoon well spent interacting with the lovely kids. Here we are!

About Gumtree Singapore

Gumtree was founded in 2000 as a community site in London to help Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans find a job, a place to stay and everything else needed to settle in, including furniture and new friends. The Gumtree spirit remains cheerfully local and filled with passion. The power of the platform is the ability to fulfill the core need of finding immediate value across a range of categories, especially in housing, jobs, goods and services. It’s now the leading classifieds site in the U.K, Australia, South Africa and Singapore, with a high-profile presence also in Hong Kong, New Zealand and Poland.

In Singapore, Gumtree has over 600,000 unique visitors and over 10 million page views every 

month, about 170,000 live listings and over 6,000 new listings per day. Globally, the website attracts 14 million unique visitors every month, boasting 4.5 million live listings, more than 200,000 new listings per day – a triple-digit year-on-year growth, and close to 1.5 billion page views per month. 

For more details, please visit http://www.gumtree.com.sg/ 

Through this project, Gumtree hopes to encourage the spirit of volunteering and giving back to the society that we care about and I was glad to create some beautiful memories together with the children. 

The Children’s Aid Society’s Melrose Home will be organizing a Fund-Raising Dinner on the 25th July 2014, 7pm at Mandarin Orchard. If you are from an organization or am able to gather a group to host one table (up to 10 pax), priced at $3000 each, I would strongly encourage you to come forward and support this charitable cause.   The form can be downloaded HERE. For more enquiries, pls contact Melrose Home at 64665758

Other forms of donations are also much appreciated and you can find out how over HERE

Alright let's move on to the 1st activity of the day- Paint Your Own Flowerpot! 

Each child was given a set of Paint Your Own Flowerpot kit that consists of a clay pot, a packet of seeds and instructions, a brush and palette, and a mini shovel. We, as facilitators distributed the colors for the children and just mingled with them.

**( To protect the privacy of the children, their faces were not captured, hence you will only see the volunteers' faces. All photos courtesy of the kind PR folks, many thanks.)

Here are the completed products! Pretty flower pots by the lovely kiddos~

Next we had 2 telematches with the kids. They were split into 3 groups led by me,Yvonne and Smith. Actually we had a simple task, the kids were the ones dashing and we hoped they had fun, releasing their stored energy~~ :)

 First match- SNOW MAN ! A plate of baking flour with a number of hidden Polo sweets were hidden. Each kid is dashed to pick out the hidden Polo sweets,(without using their hands) and ran back to his/her teammates~ :D

 My team won the first game!

2nd game- FILLED THE BOTTLE. At the end of the opposite side, there will be a pail of water. Each child is required to take a punctured plastic cup and ran to the pail of water to collect water in the cup.

They then ran to their leader, Yours Sincerely here, and poured into my huge empty bottle.

Our last activity for the day was to let the kids filled up their painted pots with soil and seeds.

Time for makan!! Happy Meal for the children + cup corn ( the healthier choice of course)

The time spent with the kids was short and though we might not have made much of an impact for them, I hope sincerely they had some fun times with us. I hope we can have the chance to return and not end off with just a one time off volunteering. It's definitely not an easy task for the principal to run the home everyday and the children can be a handful to handle. Not all kids are an angel and to cope with their ever bursting energies, is definitely not an easy task. Giving my salute to the staff and volunteers working with Melrose Home. They deserve our utmost respect for their commitment. 

I am really thankful for the opportunity to be with Melrose home and thanks to Gumtree and PR company for the warm invitation. It's the smallest I can to contribute. 

Here's a pic with the awesome people I met.
( ** With no use of selfie-stick. Awesome skills by Smith. Gotta learn this ^^)
Once again, The Children’s Aid Society’s Melrose Home will be organizing a Fund-Raising Dinner on the 25th July 2014, 7pm at Mandarin Orchard. If you are from an organization or am able to gather a group to host one table (up to 10 pax), priced at $3000 each, please support them and you can download the form HERE. For more enquiries, pls contact Melrose Home at 64665758

Have a lovely Sunday ^_^