The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki
in: LGBT articles

The Greenhouse

Edit

The Greenhouse SG was founded on 22 July 2019 by Alaric Tan. Located along Rowell Road, it is a community-based charitable organisation that provides peer support and substance use and addiction recovery services for sexual minorities in Singapore who find it hard to seek help out of shame or fear of discrimination. It crafts customised treatment programmes that are holistic and integrated, within a safe and supportive environment. It empowers people to understand the cause of their substance addiction in order to recover and lead the lives they were meant to live. The Greenhouse provides a safe and supportive environment with a strong sense of community where participants can learn, change and grow without fear of prejudice or judgement. Integrity is important to the organisation, and it has a strong sense of professionalism in ensuring the anonymity of the cases it handles, as well as the confidentiality of the information it is privy to. It respects diversity and believes in the importance of providing treatment that has been customised to every individual's unique needs and strengths.

Treatment programme[]

Greenhouse001

A discussion room at The Greenhouse.

Clients at The Greenhouse undergo a voluntary treatment regimen comprising a series of counselling sessions, engagement in a peer support programme, as well as group-based therapy and support groups. The clinical notes include 4 different forms: intake assessment, progress notes, case closing summary, and care plan review. These forms are completed in English by licensed counsellors. All clients who initially arrive at The Greenhouse fill in the intake assessment form. Thereafter, they can choose to attend various in-house programmes, such as group therapy, individual counselling, or peer support – whichever best suits the client’s recovery needs. The intake assessment form contains information on the client’s background, chief concerns, and a brief trauma description. Responses gathered from the chief concerns section are guided by three factors:

  • What brings you here today?
  • How can we help you?
  • What is your treatment goal?

Chief concerns data are used to uncover the themes associated with drug use motivation and client’s motivation toward recovery.

Greenhouse002

The Greenhouse's courtyard and mini-garden, maintained by one of its clients.

Further, progress notes and case closing summaries are made available only to clients who decided to attend in-house counselling programmes. Progress notes, in particular, contain information about client’s recovery struggles, recovery goals, coping strategies employed to deal with drug use temptations, and personal milestones during recovery. Besides this, case closing summaries data provide a succinct summary of the client’s recovery journey and their anticipated needs for continued clinical care. Notably, care plan review data is made available to clients who wish to review their recovery progress after completing or terminating their participation in the in-house programmes. These include post-programme information on the client’s protective and risk factors for drug use and a review of current recovery progression.

There are many different recovery programmes at The Greenhouse but they all have their ground rules which were created from both spiritual and non-spiritual systems of recovery:

  • Nobody is to be interrupted while he or she is speaking
  • One must listen with the assumption of best intentions and say “ouch” when triggered
  • One must not offer advice, only share experience
  • One must refrain from imposing one's values on others
  • One must refrain from any form of judgement

There is an actual garden at The Greenhouse and its staff take great pride and joy in it because they learn so much just by looking at it.

Funding[]

As the founder of a small organisation to help LGBT drug users overcome their addictions, Alaric Tan found fund-raising almost impossible due to the perception that such individuals were to blame for their substance use, and donations would only fund their addiction. He said: "There’s so much stigma, discrimination, misunderstanding; no one wants to give money. It’s very, very difficult."

He initially used his own savings to run The Greenhouse, which had only $10,000 left in the bank by 2021 – enough to operate the drug rehabilitation centre for another three months – when he found out about a new grant which would give him up to $150,000. Tan hesitated to apply for it because there was a catch – he would have to return the amount. However, he finally took a leap of faith which bore fruit when The Greenhouse became one of 17 charities picked to receive the Maybank Momentum Grant. Designed as a pay-it-forward model, the $3 million grant was launched in 2021 by Maybank Singapore and non-profit philanthropic organisation The Majurity Trust. Recipients were encouraged to return the grant interest-free within five years, with the money going into supporting other grant recipients.

A total of 33 charities had applied for the grant as at June 2024, with the 17 recipients eventually chosen based on the severity of the social needs they were addressing, the impact they had created, as well as their five-year growth and financial sustainability plans. The Majurity Trust would checked in with grant recipients on their progress every six months for the first two years, and once a year afterwards. Social sector observers said that while government grants were typically given to fund specific programmes, grants from private companies could be more flexible in terms of the needs they funded. R Jai Prakash, principal consultant at social change consultancy Soci.Train, said of government grants: “You have to be a lot more prudent, given the taxpayers’ donations. And generally, these funds provide funding for programmes where there are national needs that we have identified. Such funding becomes useful when social service agencies identify certain gaps that may not qualify for national funding. Some of these more innovative ways of giving through philanthropists or institutions like banks can support some of these niche needs.”

Charities also needed sources of funding that gave them more room to use the money as they saw fit. Steve Loh, executive director of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation at Singapore Management University, said donors were often less willing to pay for operational, overhead and manpower costs, wanting all their donations to go to the beneficiaries. He said: “A donor is not going to be too excited about paying the utilities bill, purchase of IT software and laptops. But everybody knows those are basic costs to run any organisation. Like any organisation, charities will need talented and committed staff, good systems, good operational expertise, execution domain expertise and professionalism. So for a funder to say you have unrestricted funding to spend as you see fit in building up the capacities of your organisation – it is exactly what charities need.” The Maybank Momentum Grant was coupled with capability-building events such as masterclasses in organisational strategy and impact measurement and communication by talenTtrust, a charity that helped non-profits build capacity with skilled volunteers.

It spurred The Greenhouse to hire a training director, communications coordinator and research team. With these resources, The Greenhouse communicated to the public that its gay members had turned to drugs because of trauma they went through, such as being cast out by religious family members for their sexual orientation. The centre helps them cope with their trauma with counselling, group support and other therapeutic programmes in their drug rehabilitation. This enabled The Greenhouse to achieve the status of a registered charity, and later of an Institution of a Public Character, within the span of three years. From 50 drug users in its first year, by June 2024, it had helped around 400 users.

OutInEpiphyte001

The Greenhouse also supplements disbursements from the grant by soliciting donations from the LGBT community via fund-raising events.

Featured on CNA's Extraordinary People[]


On Tuesday, 11 March 2025, Channel Newsasia aired an episode of its revived, beloved, iconic series from the 1990s entitled Extraordinary People[1] which featured The Greenhouse and its founder, Alaric Tan. The programme revealed that Tan, who had been grappling with drug addiction, was arrested in February 2016 and sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre for six months. He was currently in recovery from substance dependence and had been abstinent for eight years. While the period of abstinence helped him realise recovery was possible, the turning point came when he hosted a recovery meeting despite having relapsed. “I was paranoid,” the 46-year-old recalled. “I was feeling very ashamed of myself.” To his surprise, the participants reassured him that they believed he wanted to quit, that he was a good person and that he could break his 20-year addiction. “I felt so safe and happy for the first time in my life that I just never had the craving to use drugs again,” said Tan, fighting back tears.

That was in 2017, on 7 July, which became the official opening date of The Greenhouse, when he founded it the following year, in 2018. The establishment offered free and anonymous counselling, and its 12-step programme encourages clients to understand the cycle of addiction, with relapses regarded as part of the recovery process. “To come to our centre and receive care for free from strangers shows you that the world isn’t what you think it is,” Tan said. The Greenhouse had assisted over 400 clients in the previous six years and ran a counselling training programme that had even benefitted professionals from the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF). For some individuals, using past pain to heal and help others was the common thread in their lives. Tan, for example, saw himself as a wounded healer — someone who converted one’s past struggles into support for others.

With help from volunteers, The Greenhouse had seen a success rate of up to 80% for drug use recovery and abstinence, he said. The centre was also an early adopter of trauma-informed care, which focused on asking, “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?” “That then eliminates a lot of the shame that they feel,” said centre manager Shila Naidu, “because then they know that ‘I didn’t actively choose to do this harm to myself’. “With that knowledge, with new coping tools introduced, with a loving community around them, they could then make better decisions for their future.” The episode of Extraordinary People showed that at The Greenhouse, therapeutic approaches like art and horticulture were used to support healing and growth. These programmes did not just benefit its beneficiaries, they also created meaningful impact for corporate and community partners.

See also[]

References[]

Acknowledgements[]

This article was written by Roy Tan.

Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.