About Us
My First Journey
We often think of beginnings as a single moment in time — the birth of our child, someone embracing a new faith, or the turning of a page after a difficult chapter. But what if our first journeys are not confined to just one starting point? What if they unfold throughout our lives, each time we choose to change, to heal, or to start all over again?
Taking place from 1 to 17 August 2025, the sixth edition of My Community Festival invites you to explore how communities across Singapore experience, honour and celebrate life’s beginnings. From postpartum rituals and confinement meals to spiritual renewal and emotional recovery, the festival features an extensive line-up of guided tours, experiences and discussions thoughtfully curated around the theme “My First Journey”.
In walking these journeys with others, the MCF2025 team hopes that you will uncover a deeper appreciation for the present moment and cherish the people, places and moments that give life its meaning.
Be the support behind every new beginning
Birth is a universal experience, but never a uniform one. Birth is often understood as a beginning—the first breath, the first cry, the entry point into life. Yet in many traditions, it is not just a biological event. It is a sacred passage. From the moment a child arrives, communities gather to name, bless, feed, and protect. These rituals are gestures of love that illustrate: you belong here, you are not alone, we will walk with you. Birth is, in essence, a welcome.
But not all beginnings happen at the start of life. We are born many times across our lifetime—sometimes through faith, sometimes through loss, sometimes by choosing to leave behind what no longer serves us. It is the woman who overcomes cancer and learns to live again. The man who walks again with a new limb. The former offender who is given a second chance. The convert who whispers their first prayer. These are all first journeys, even if they come long after the day we are born.
In honouring how life starts, we are invited to see the world not through endings, but through beginnings. Curated based on the theme ‘My First Journey’, My Community Festival 2025 is inspired by this transformative power of beginnings, those quiet yet profound instances when life takes root or when something new begins to unfold.
In addition to the more popular programmes from the previous editions including ‘After Hours @ My Community’, MCF2025’s repertoire includes several newly conceptualised series which not only
We begin the festival with ‘My Breakfast Club’ where we are filled with the comfort of childhood and taste of home from the first meal of the day. In ‘What’s for My Dinner?’, we return to the deeply intimate act of care through food where our hosts share traditional confinement dishes that were once lovingly prepared for them by their mothers and grandmothers.
One of the ground-breaking programme series ‘My Births and Rebirths’ takes participants to halfway houses, rehabilitation clinics and a prosthetic centre where we meet ex-offenders, substance abusers and amputees rebuilding their lives with patience and dignity. ‘MY SG’ explores neighbouring Malaysian towns where we source our fresh fish, fruits and vegetables.
How do Muslim and Jewish families welcome their sons into faith through the rite of circumcision? What are the prayers, symbols and promises that shape a Catholic baptism? For the very first time, we will experience birth and coming-of-age ceremonies of all the ten official religions in Singapore through ‘My Prayers and Practices’. Whether wrapping a mother’s abdomen with a bengkung or turning a baby’s first haircut into a taimaobi keepsake, participants will have the unique opportunity at ‘Meet My Craftsman’ to learn from skilled artisans who produce treasured keepsakes in our first journeys.
Together, these programmes remind us that to begin is an act of faith—and to walk alongside someone at the start of their journey is a gift. At My Community Festival 2025, we invite you to bear witness to these beginnings. To open your heart to stories not just of arrival, but of becoming. And to ask yourself: how can we, as a community, create space for others to be born and reborn—with dignity, compassion, and hope?
A year ago, I sat by the bedside of a friend who had just given birth. The room was still and dim, save for the soft cooing of the newborn. I watched as the mother reached out—tired, trembling, but smiling. That simple moment brought tears to my eyes.
A year earlier, I had nearly lost my life to a cardiac arrest. I remembered how fragile everything had felt then—how quickly life could be taken away. And now, standing in that hospital room, I was witnessing life at its most sacred: not the end, but a beginning. A first breath. A heartbeat full of possibility.
Birth is a beautiful and sacred thing. It is the first step we all take, and yet we rarely pause to think about what it means—not just to be born, but to begin again. Across cultures in Singapore, every community has found its own way to welcome life—with rituals, prayers, music, herbs, and food. These celebrations are filled with love: not loud, performative love, but quiet, enduring love—the kind that holds you as you enter the world, whether as a baby, a new believer, or a person starting over.
This year’s theme, My First Journey, invites us to honour not just the moment we are born, but the many times we are reborn—through pain, through faith, through choice. I have met a man who lost his leg in an accident and is now learning to walk again with his new prosthetic limb. I have also spoken to an ex-offender who, after years behind bars, is running a community gallery to give others the second chance he was once given. Their first journeys did not happen in a delivery ward. They happened long after they thought their lives were over.
To live is to live with hope. I have come to see that more clearly now. Hope is what carries a new mother through pain. Hope is what allows someone to rebuild after loss. Hope is what stirs in the heart when we choose to begin again, even when the future is uncertain.
It is a privilege for us at My Community Festival to be invited into these deeply intimate moments—when someone shares a confinement recipe passed down from their grandmother, or opens their place of worship to strangers witnessing a spiritual rebirth. These are not just performances. These are acts of trust.
We hope this year’s festival reminds you of how we all began—fragile, held, and loved. And may it inspire you to hold space for others as they begin their own first journeys, wherever and whenever they come.
With gratitude,
Kwek Li Yong
Festival Director
My Community Festival 2025
2024 Edition
My Last Journey
2023 Edition
Love My Neighbour
2022 Edition
My Home Sweet Home
2021 Edition
Everyday Places, Everyday Faces
2020 Edition
Many Stories, One Community
About My Community
My Community is a non-profit organisation which works to capture and preserve community stories, reconnect people to places and social networks, and deepen heritage appreciation and expression across the country. We also advocate for greater community involvement in cultural management and urban governance. Since its inception in 2010, My Community has spurred the growth and development of a common-man approach to heritage where everyday experiences and Singaporeans are chronicled and celebrated.
Today, My Community is supported by an army of over 1,200 volunteers who work with a nimble team of staff to organise guided tours, exhibitions, festivals and other placemaking programmes in Queenstown, Bukit Merah, Kallang-Whampoa and Clementi.
