ASPIRE behavioural-addiction support partnership

The Addiction Support Programme for Inclusion, Recovery and Empowerment (ASPIRE) is a three-year partnership announced by the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) on 20 August 2026. It brings together 10 social-service agencies to make help for behavioural addictions more accessible through existing community counselling services. The announcement describes concerns including excessive gaming, pornography consumption, and problematic cyber or social-media use; it does not present ASPIRE as a new criminal offence, universal screening programme, or diagnosis for every heavy digital-media user (NCSS, 20 August 2026, accessed 21 August 2026).

How the partnership is organised

WE CARE Community Services provides training, clinical supervision, and mentoring to the other nine participating agencies. At least four counsellors at each partner agency are to be equipped for triage and primary intervention. WE CARE will receive referrals for complex cases, while a Community of Practice is intended to support knowledge sharing, professional development, and continuing service improvement (NCSS, 20 August 2026, accessed 21 August 2026). The participating agencies are Care Corner Counselling Centre, Counselling and Care Centre, Epworth Community Services, Fei Yue Community Services, PPIS Family Service Centre (West), REACH Community Services, SAGE Counselling Centre, Thye Hua Kwan Moral Charities, TOUCH Community Services, and WE CARE Community Services.

What ASPIRE is intended to do

The partnership is designed to test triage, primary intervention, and clearer referral pathways so that people with more complex needs can reach the appropriate assessment and service earlier. NCSS says it identified behavioural-addiction support as an emerging unmet need in 2025 after research and stakeholder engagement. In information reported by participating social-service agencies to NCSS, they saw over 520 new behavioural-addiction cases in 2020 and more than 780 in 2024. Those are agency-reported new cases, not a national prevalence rate or a count of all people experiencing problematic behaviour (NCSS, 20 August 2026, accessed 21 August 2026).

NCSS also says it conducted learning sessions for more than 350 policymakers, social-service professionals, and frontline practitioners during the preceding year and created free e-learning modules on supporting youths with problematic social-media use and gaming. ASPIRE therefore strengthens the social-service sector's counselling and referral capacity; it does not replace emergency care, psychiatric assessment, or other specialist services where those are clinically indicated (NCSS, 20 August 2026, accessed 21 August 2026; social service agencies).