SINGAPORE: Club Rainbow, a charity that helps children with life-threatening diseases, has a new place to call home.

A Rainbow Family Care Centre has been built in Chinatown, aided by a S$200,000 donation from telco giant StarHub.

The new centre is where children and families of Club Rainbow can get together not only to have fun but also for tuition, counselling services and workshops for skills like web design and digital photoshop.

Gregory Vijayendran, President of Club Rainbow, says: "We hope that this will become a one-stop service and resource centre that will centralise most of our services and enable us to provide sharper and more strategic services.

"Our programmes and services are situated at ad-hoc locations and fairly disparate places in Singapore. By housing them together under one roof, we hope to make this centre one where we can conduct our talks and workshops and group tuition.

"It is also a meeting point for families to have support group meetings and counselling as there are counselling rooms where the social workers will be able to meet and counsel them in a variety of ways like marital counselling, bereavement counselling and even do group work therapy."

Homemaker Noraini Mawari's son, Muhammad Rifa'i, was born with muscular dystrophy, a condition that affects his muscle development.

She gives the new centre the thumbs-up as her son will not have to run from one place to another to have tuition.

Her only gripe is that she and her wheelchair-bound son will have to encounter a flight of steps before getting to the centre.

Club Rainbow is aware of the problem and is looking at possible solutions.

Club Rainbow says it has chosen the site at Upper Cross Street to build its Centre as it is centrally located.

Not only is it within walking distance from Chinatown MRT station, it is also accessible to the hospitals which house its satellite offices.

Club Rainbow also plans to take advantage of its location to reach out to residents, civic groups and schools to promote better understanding of children with chronic illnesses.

At the launch of the Centre, StarHub also announced its Corporate Volunteerism Programme which allows staff to take two days of paid leave every year to do voluntary work.

One staff looking forward to the Programme is Alvin Lee.

He says: "Instead of busy earning money, we should think about the people we can impact. So I'm really thankful that StarHub is giving us this chance to help the kids."

The centre plans to begin operations early next year. - CNA/so