A Year as Leo Club Secretary: Minutes, Proposals, and 5.45am
In 2025 I was made secretary of the NP Leo Club. On paper that means minutes and paperwork. In practice it meant a year of engaging with 700+ Leos and thousands of beneficiaries, from children to elderly.
What we actually did
With Heartwarmers, bi-monthly, we ran grocery support for families who fall through the gaps in government aid — the ones who earn slightly too much to qualify for help and nowhere near enough to be fine. Families pay 50% of their grocery bill. Last year that reached 500+ families and saved them over $25,000.
Project Sunset Cleanshores put all seven of NP's Community Service Clubs on the same beach. Our AGM had Leos walking a runway in cardboard Mario karts my team spent three-plus weeks designing and cutting.
Across the academic year we drew almost 400 unique participants into our projects. None of them came for the mechanical labour. They came because the thing meant something, and it was our job to make sure that meaning survived contact with the logistics.
The writing
Every month: a two-hour committee meeting, then minutes — concise, structured, submitted upward to Lions International Singapore.
Over AY25/26 I drafted 50+ event proposals, every one of them school-approved. A proposal is not a persuasive essay. It is a document that has to make a timeline, a logistics plan, and an objective legible enough for someone in the school to say yes without a follow-up email.
That is the discipline I did not expect to get from a volunteering role. Good writing is not saying more. It is saying the right things, in the order the reader needs them, and then stopping.
5.45am
I woke at 5.45 on Saturdays. Not for the event — for the hour before it, when the venue is not confirmed yet, the volunteers do not know what they are doing, and there is still time to fix both.
Working with seven other committee members for a year was not easy, and I do not want to write it as though it was. What carried it was two unglamorous things: acknowledgement and feedback. Say you heard someone. Tell them what you actually think. Most of what looks like a leadership problem in a student committee is one of those two things missing for three weeks.
The footnote I keep writing
I spend a lot of my time giving back by helping people through volunteering. I also learn a lot from failing at it and reflecting afterwards.
But there is a part of me that wants something the events do not quite give: the cycle of just talking to people, listening, and absorbing their experiences. Not to fix anything. That is where empathy actually comes from, as opposed to where I claim it comes from in an application form.
And I still struggle to communicate under pressure. The need to compress everything I know into a few sentences is, at times, palpable. I am working on it. Slowly.
Also — and this is the reframe I got much later — I had been measuring myself on output metrics. Events run, participants counted. The better question is the input one: do I actually know the venues by name, what each is used for, how a member experiences the day from the inside? That shift changed how I plan.