The long work of showing up
For more than 20 years, Alvin Liew has been part of Habitat for Humanity Singapore’s story: first as a volunteer, then as a board member, and now as acting board chair and treasurer. What has kept him there is the conviction that a home can restore far more than shelter.
Alvin Liew’s Habitat story started in the aftermath of a disaster.
It was 2004. The Indian Ocean tsunami had just torn through the region, leaving families without homes, belongings, or any sense of what came next. Like many watching the devastation unfold, Alvin wanted to help. But writing a check and hoping it did some good wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to be there.
Habitat for Humanity gave him that chance. He traveled to Sri Lanka and Indonesia to help rebuild homes in two of the worst-hit areas.
“It was an in-person experience where you could see, touch and be part of the outcome,” he says. “That was very compelling to me.”
He wasn’t ready for how hard the physical work would be. He laughs about that now. But what has stuck with him was the experience of working side by side with the homeowner.
What the family could not afford in money, they gave in labor. They showed up with their own sweat, hours, whatever strength they had left, building the very house they would go on to live in.
Alvin had shown up thinking he was there to build a house. He left understanding that the work was much more than that.
“We were helping them recover, restoring a home and dignity for a family,” he says.
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What keeps someone coming back
Over the next two decades, Alvin’s relationship with Habitat Singapore deepened. He continued as a volunteer, served on the board, and today is the organization’s acting board chair and treasurer. In his professional life, he is senior economist at United Overseas Bank Limited, dealing with data, markets, systems and policy. At Habitat, he found the human consequences behind them.
On paper, the connection makes sense: an economist keeping the books for a nonprofit. But what’s kept him is something he learned early as a volunteer, that a house is never just four walls and a roof.
Ask him what a home really is and he’ll tell you: safety, sanitation, dignity, belonging. It is the foundation everything else gets built on: education, health, opportunity, a shot at stability.
“Seeing families receive or improve their homes really reframed my understanding of how fundamental housing is to human potential,” he says.
Habitat Singapore’s board chair Alvin Liew with fellow volunteer Marly Bacaron at a May 2026 build on Batam, Indonesia. A Habitat volunteer for over two decades, Alvin believes home is the foundation on which we build our lives.
The housing problem you don’t see
That belief changed how he saw the housing need in Singapore too.
In a country with one of the highest home ownership rates in the world, it is easy to assume that housing hardship happens only in disaster zones, villages, and where poverty is easy to spot. Project HomeWorks, Habitat Singapore’s local home rehabilitation program that helps vulnerable individuals and families maintain safer, cleaner living conditions, put a dent in that assumption.
It showed him that housing challenges exist even in a developed society like Singapore. They may be less visible, tucked behind the doors of rental flats and aging homes, carried by lower-income families, residents who are older adults and people already living with other forms of vulnerability.
The invisible work
That’s part of why Alvin cares so much about staying power. He believes showing up, again and again, is what moves things. Volunteering gave him a close-up view of the work. Leadership meant he could help decide where the organization was headed, and stick around long enough to see it through.
It also showed him the hard work behind the scenes.
Most people see the finished house, the ribbon-cutting, the headline number of families helped. Almost nobody sees what it took to get there: the fundraising calls, the volunteer schedules stitched together, the partnerships built slowly, the governance nobody thanks you for, and the sheer discipline of keeping a mission alive.
“The builds and events are the visible outcomes of a very dedicated and hardworking team of people in Habitat Singapore, doing their best day in and day out,” he says. “I am very grateful and proud to be working with them.”
The next door
After more than 20 years, what gives Alvin hope is the next generation of volunteers. Younger volunteers, he says, are paying closer attention to housing and inequality, at home and abroad. They show up with energy, ideas and a sense of purpose.
For Habitat Singapore, he hopes the next chapter will be about deepening its role as a connector: bringing together communities, corporates and individuals to take on housing challenges together.
Expanded impact, new partnerships, a real commitment to the people still falling through the cracks — that’s the door he wants to see opened next.