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.
