Prayers

I am scared. Development work was easier when beneficiaries were just nameless, faceless numbers in an excel spreadsheet. I just came back from 4 days in the field, talking to farmers and travelling through the countryside. I've spoken to the farmers in the region several times before, but as we get closer to operationalising our initiative, these interactions start to take on new meaning.

The first farmer I spoke to lived high up in the mountains. I tugged at the sleeves of my flannel shirt, the cool weather I had not accounted for back in sunny Singapore raising goosebumps on my arm. He was a young man with a little boy, who came over several times during our conversation to peer curiously at my notebook. He was barely knee high, with round curious eyes and an infectious smile.

"How much cauliflower do you grow a year?'
"How long does it take to grow?"
"What inputs do you use?"

I asked his father, followed by many more questions. Each one was answered openly and freely, I neither sensed dishonesty nor suspicion, and the people I met displayed a genuine warmth that made me feel welcomed. As I moved from field to field asking questions that in another place, and another time might have been sensitive, I began to appreciate the people who tended these lands and who so generously share their experiences with me.

Development work feels different in the field, when I come face to face with the very people who are the reason why I do what I do, who will gain from my successes but also pay the price of my mistakes.

What I really wanted to ask was,

"Do you earn enough to live on?"
"If you earned more, what would you do?"
"What are your joys? What are your challenges?"

And underpining these questions that I didnt feel like i've earned the right to ask, the fundamental question I have on my mind - will what I am about to do, have the intended impact on the people who will be most affected?

Will it further their goals? Their dreams? Enable a better life?

And the scary part is, there is no way to truly know. There are a multitude of factors in an agribusiness, and no way to fully predict the many possible outcomes and externalities. I have a strategy, a best guess, built on the knowledge I've gathered and verified by the experts who have done this before.

I knew this going in, but when faced with the people whose lives we're about to affect, I feel a new type of pressure. I suddenly feel inadequate and unqualified and I pray the same prayer that I've prayed throughout my life - I hope that I leave this place better than it was before.

Musings from above the clouds

I stare out the window, the sun is just setting, casting the sky in a beautiful gradient - autumn colours on one end, winter on the other.

It is the beginning of November, with fall on one end and winter on the other.

I stare out, my need to capture this beauty satiated by the photo I have taken, and hampered by the inability to access a better angle (2 seats, and the occupying gentlemen, sit between me and the window), so all i have left to do is to enjoy and stare.

My mind starts to wonder, I think about my day. Was I the person I wanted to be today? I start thinking about the things I could have done better, the witty retort that only came to me now, the opportunity for kindness I had let slip away. Had I been determined enough? generous enough?

Is this a uniquely human condition, i wonder - the ability and inclination to see myself in third person and to pass judgment on my thoughts and actions? The sun never asks if it is bright enough, it simply is. The sky never asks if it is vast enough, it certainly is.

So who am I to judge myself and find me wanting? Then again, who am I not to?

through the looking glass

This is what being in development feels like to me. I stand on this side of reality, where lights shine bright, where there's hot water and more food than I can eat; and I stand in my comfortable hotel room (literally) looking out to the other world out there. The one where buildings have rusted roofs, and crumbling tiles and where people do the best they can given what they have.

Isn't it strange that two worlds can exist under the same blue sky?

conversations from the countryside

There is a quiet pride in the way they talk about their crops, a dignity that comes from feeding the country they love, tending the land they call home.

Work on the farm is hard, the hours are long, and income uncertain. Mother nature can be temperamental, and the weather whimsical. When your work involves being in constant conversation with nature, you don't always get to set the agenda. Yet, there is a joy in the simplicity of watching things grow and eating the food that you harvest from your own effort.

"Are you happy?"

"Yes, I am happy that I get to turn something i love into work that I can earn from."

Isn't that what we all strive for?

you are still the face I see when I listen to love songs.

Do I dare dream this big?

Of the multitude of dynamic forces that have and continue to impact my life, there have been unquestionably two key influences that have profoundly moulded me into who I am today.

The first took the shape of a long-time mentor and friend, Tong Yee, who developed in me a sense of fearlessness.

Yee was my teacher when I was 17. He taught General Paper but his classes were really a Trojan horse for instilling civic awareness and character education. I have always had a sense of social consciousness but Yee inspired me to dream bigger and take greater responsibility.  He never allowed me to play small. When I wanted to do a documentary about HIV/AIDS for a school project, he challenged me to start a social movement. When I was 19 and looking for a summer job, he got me a role at a non-profit organisation, managing a national youth entrepreneurship programme. By the time I got to university, I was dreaming of pursuing international development and solving world poverty. So, if I’m fearless in my pursuit of big dreams, it’s because he taught me to, and showed me how.

Yee is also fearless in challenging conventions. In a workshop on the role of trust and the use-of-self as an intervention, he had no qualms dropping his pants or getting slapped to make a point, so that we not only learned on an intellectual level but also experienced it affectively. While society was obsessed with the use of data and evidence-based decision making, Yee co-founded the Thought Collective, an organisation dedicated to helping people develop socio-emotional skills and empathy. Watching his fearlessness inspires me to pursue the paths less travelled, from quitting a high flying government job to head a non-profit start-up, to standing in the middle of Orchard Road in Singapore, holding a sign that said “If I said I have AIDS, would you give me a hug?”, to challenge people’s perspectives on HIV/AIDS patients.

So Yee taught me to be fearless - that no dream was too big, no method too contrarian and no convention too inveterate to be questioned.

My second major influence was Conjunct Consulting, a not-for-profit consulting firm. Conjunct was founded to giving non-profit organisations access to consulting services without the hefty price tag. We trained talented students and paired them with experienced professionals to strengthen the capabilities of social sector organisations.

My first project was in early 2012 with a non-profit organisation called Bizlink. Their goal was to set up a social enterprise that would provide vocational training for disadvantaged persons to prepare them for open employment. My team and I poured ourselves into market research and made various recommendations on a suitable model for their social enterprise. Six months later, Bizlink Café was launched. Over the next six years, the café would train and equip over 500 disadvantaged persons with marketable skills.

The success of Bizlink Café had a powerful impact on my life. As a young person figuring out my place in the world, I felt like I could truly make a difference and create something real that was meaningful and impactful. I made it my mission to give others the opportunity to experience the same joy and fulfilment of contributing to society.

Consequently, in 2015, I took over the leadership of Conjunct at 24 years old. In the early years, we were funded mostly by grants and offered our services for free. When I took over, I grew the team and laid plans for expansion, but very quickly found it difficult to raise funding. Our initial start-up grants were once-off and at three years old, Conjunct no longer had the novelty of a fresh start-up that funders were excited to invest in. The lack of a strong business model also started to make funders question our long term viability.

Things hit rock bottom about 6 months after I had taken over – all our fundraising efforts had failed and we were two months away from winding up. I will always remember the desperation and trepidation in watching the money in our bank account dwindle. I felt like I had failed as a leader. After putting up a strong front and remaining optimistic in front of my team for so long, I walked them through our financial situation and my plan for financial sustainability which was as risky as it was promising, requiring time to implement that Conjunct did not seem to have.

A week later, I received an email from one of my executive teammates, Natalie. She proposed that in light of Conjunct’s financial situation, she wished to voluntarily defer her pay by 100% for the next six months. She strongly believed in our plan and was convinced that our targets were achievable during that time. I was moved to tears.

The rest of the team too stepped up in their own way in that period, and together we worked fervently to further develop the plan that would get us on the path of financial sustainability. The end result was something far stronger than what I had created on my own, with greater ownership and excitement from the team than before.

Experiencing the rally of support from my team completely reshaped my understanding of leadership – I was surprised to find that I didn’t need to be the flawless person at the top who had it all figured out. Not only was I allowed to be vulnerable but my acknowledgment of my incompleteness created space for the team to step up as leaders in their own right, to shine a light on their strengths and to reinvigorate their commitment to the cause.

With the full support of the leadership team, the battle was only half won. We were planning to institute a fee for our consulting services and faced tremendous push-back from our volunteers. They did not see why the organisation should be paid if they were giving their time for free, and were worried about meeting the increased expectations that such a change would bring. In April that year, I was devastated to receive a call from my Chairman telling me that a group of about 50 volunteers had met with him to express their concerns about the direction of the organisation.

Their criticisms hurt me deeply, but I was convinced that the team’s plan was sound. I realised that it was not enough to have a good plan. I had underestimated the fears that the volunteers had in moving towards this new model, and while I had focused on facts and figures, I should be focusing on their emotions instead. As such, we held a series of townhalls where I fought hard to win the trust of our members by truly listening to them and ensuring that they felt heard.

The townhalls worked. The volunteers came around, the organisation rallied and we pivoted successfully. The fees enabled us to strengthen the quality of our services and continue doing impactful work. It increased the implementation rates of our solutions, clients reported higher satisfaction scores and began offering to pay more to get priority in our consulting cycles.

While Yee gave me the gift of fearlessness, the years at Conjunct was a baptism of fire, shaping my view and practice of leadership for life. The experience smashed through any rose-tinted glasses I had about doing socially impactful work, taught me resilience in the face of adversity and conviction in the face of overwhelming criticism. It taught me that a team is greater than any one leader and the importance of listening and empathy. It opened my eyes to the price of leadership, but also the joy in doing good work alongside passionate, likeminded people.

I dream of a world led by givers, where people view the social sector with the level of enthusiasm, opportunity and promise that is often reserved for the technology sector, where venture capital flows as readily into solving third world problems as it does first world problems.

The conventional thought is that the non-profit sector is not as innovative as the public or private sectors, but over the years, I have learnt how untrue this is. In 2017, I met with Joon Kiat, a leader of an organisation in the eldercare sector who shared his vision of revolutionising homebased eldercare through telehealth, using technology to provide a seamless coordination of treatment, physiotherapy and medical consults - a ‘Smarthome’ for elders. I was awed by his vision - it was truly the future of ageing.

Yet Joon Kiat faced incredible challenges getting funding to run test pilots as the initiative was too risky for typical social sector funders, and being non-profit made his organisation unattractive to commercial investors.

Joon Kiat is just one example of the multitude of leaders with audacious, ambitious visions for a better world, but see their visions get curtailed by the lack of patient, flexible funding for innovative projects. In contrast, earlier this year the papers announced that Zimplistic, the start-up company that made Rotimatic (an automated flatbread making machine), had raised US$30 million, all of which will go towards selling more Rotimatic machines.

In witnessing the disparity between the two cases, and reflecting on my own experience in trying to raise funding and building a financially sustainable social business, I realised that if I could build a social venture fund and a network of diverse experts who can support these leaders in bringing their visions to life, I would have lived out my life’s calling.

Given the magnitude of my vision, I know that idealism is not enough, I need to be worthy of my dreams. Stanford will provide both the invaluable networks and further my thinking on international development, while the Knight-Hennessy Programme will give me a multidisciplinary community and develop my leadership. One of my fondest memories in university was in freshmen year when I jumped in on an intense debate on religion between a philosophy major and a marine biologist. At the end of the discussion, I turned to them and said, “Hi, I’m Samantha” and walked away with new friends and a deeper understanding of religion. It is precisely this kind of unstructured, almost serendipitous, learning that I would like to embrace in the Knight-Hennessy programme.

If given the chance, I look forward to growing within a community of change agents from a diverse range of backgrounds that will support me, motivate me, and hold me accountable for achieving my goals even when the odds of success seem likely against me.

On hope and dreams.

I would like to thank everyone for being here with us, and while it pours outside, I hope you have found ways to stay dry and warm in this season.

As many of you would know by now, I will be stepping back from the role of President of Conjunct to pursue a career in international development. Nonetheless, Conjunct will always be close to my heart. We like to joke that Conjunct comes with a lifetime membership in that you can never leave; I'm sure it will be the same for me, so you'll probably still be seeing me around. We have spent the last few years building the team to ensure that we continuously challenge ourselves to do better for our partners, and to build our own capacity to serve. I feel secure in my leaving in large part also due to the fact that I have full faith in the team to carry on in our mission and to continue driving impact. In the meantime, Jia Chuan (Chairman of the Board) will be stepping in to lead the organisation until the new President comes in and I will continue to play an informal advisory role to ensure that things continue with no disruption.

It's been 6 years and what a journey it's been! I started out as a student consultant, before going on to head the NUS chapter, contributing as a professional volunteer when I was at MTI, and finally stepping up as President full time in early 2015. 

I want to take this chance to thank everyone who has made this experience such a meaningful and fulfilling one. To the student consultants, you are the reason why I do this. In early 2012, I led Conjunct's first project, helping a non-profit organisation set up an F&B social enterprise that would provide jobs and vocational training for people with disabilities, leading to its launch 6 months later. That experience had a transformative effect on me. As a young person, it was a defining moment in how I saw the world and the kind of real and sustainable impact that I could create. In deciding to take up Presidency, I remember what it felt like to be in school and struggling to find my place in society. I wanted to give more youth the chance to experience what I did, and to chart their own impact journeys. One of the highlights of every year for me is going for the infosessions at the university chapters and hearing the sharing by consultants on how working on the projects have given them the conviction to keep serving and giving back, and to see how they have grown to become advocates for others to do the same. It is also heartening to see alumni go on to start their own social enterprises, become social sector professionals, develop innovative social policies and drive CSR programmes in their companies. It is our hope that wherever you go, you will continue to create positive social impact grounded in humility and a passion to serve. 

Professional volunteers, there is no amount of thanks that I can give you that will be enough. It takes tremendous commitment to juggle various demands, from work to family to friends to living a full life. So thank you for giving your time, talents and expertise to working with us to strengthen the social sector. Thank you also for being such great role models for the consultants, simultaneously mentoring them in their growth and pushing them to deliver more so that our non-profit partners will get the best possible outcomes. We could not have come so far without you. You were also the inspiration and driving force for our corporate engagements. We first branched out into working with corporates in 2014 because our professional volunteers have shown us how much potential there is in bringing the private and people sector together. Till today, our professional volunteers continue to be huge advocates and testimonies for our corporate engagements and we hope to continue to deepen our work in this area so that the two sectors can leverage each others strengths to build a stronger society. 

Last but most importantly, to our social sector partners - you are a constant inspiration. The conventional thought is that the non-profit sector is not as progressive or as innovative as the public or private sectors. But over the years, working with an array of non-profit leaders, I have learnt how untrue that is. It has been humbling and soul-enriching to be part of this sector, and to learn from the very best. I have met non-profit leaders who are working to revolutionise the eldercare sector, leveraging technology to help the elderly obtain medical treatment more efficiently; who are striving to provide a continuum of care for youth-at-risk and families to address the complexity of such issues; and others who are doing amazing work in changing the way society views disability so that we never look at them as lesser than. These are just a few examples of the multitude of leaders with audacious, ambitious visions for a better world, driven by the needs of the people they serve. On the days when I struggle with self-doubt and uncertainty, your stories and camaraderie have kept me going. It has been a real privilege to serve alongside you and to do what we can to help you achieve your dreams. 

Singapore will always be home to me and I remain committed to seeing it thrive and grow in a way where everyone, especially the disadvantaged and marginalised, is enabled to live fulfilling and dignified lives. We have come so far in the last 50 years, growing rapidly from third world to first. We have put in place many of the key infrastructure that is the foundation of any well-functioning society - a world class education system, housing, amenities, economy, transport - something that many countries around the world still struggle to do. The question now is, what's next?

The next 50 years and beyond will depend on us, the dreams we have for the future and what we do to make it happen. Let not uncertainty constrain our imagination or undermine our courage in venturing into uncharted territories. Let our conviction be grounded in the stories and the lives of everyday people, in an empathetic understanding of their needs and in a objective evaluation of what is most effective in meeting them. The future is truly ours to create, and in the spirit of ownership and possibility, I challenge the social sector to lead the charge in creating a brave new world, and a better society for us all.

Thank you.