Serve, Learn & Lead with Raymond Tay

Social Entrepreneurship

I am grateful that AIESEC has organized a Public Forum on ”Social Entrepreneurship in Singapore” in my university. It was another inspiring & fulfilling sharing session by passionated Social Entrepreneurs. There were a total of 4 speakers (Mr. Alvin Lim from Bizlink Centre, Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin from School of Thought, Mr. Alvin Lee from Castle Beach and Rev Sam Kuna from Teen Challenge).

Associate Prof. Albert Teo, moderator for the discussion, started the forum by understanding the meaning of social entrepreneurship. According to MCYS, social enterprises are businesses with a social mission. They aim to make the world a better place, and they harness the forces of the marketplace to carry out their social mission. Prof. Albert also shared with us some of the International Organizations that focus on Social Entrepreneurship (SE). If you are interested to learn more about SE, can visit Ashoka, Echoing Green and Schwab Foundation.

Rev Sam Kuna is involving in helping ex-offenders to re-enter & re-integrate into the community. His personal belief is even if they fail to do so, every offender deserves to be given many “second chances” to pick themselves up.

After listening to Mr. Alvin Lee’s sharing, I am very impressed by his down-to-earth, humorous and determined character. As his social enterprise’s aim to promote community, family and children’s well being through the activities of sandcastle building, he began by saying everything is free (free sand, free sea and free sun to use) so must come down to East Coast Park to start building castles. He is a engineer in training, general manager in practice and busybody in natural. Trying to run a profitable enterprise for a non-profit organization. To him, he looks like a illegal hawker operating at the beach with no license.  His advice for youth is “Everything begins with the customer, beneficiary.” In other words, it means knowing the needs of the people. When he recruit volunteers or employees, he doesn’t look for people who want to change the world or help people but want people who are happy to share the joy. There are two types of person: Assets or Liabilities. “What are you?” he asked.

When Alvin Lee was invited to conduct a team-building session for ex-offenders, he was thinking what was the purpose? They were from gang (knowing exactly what is team-building) and some of them were even gang leaders (already possess the quality of leadership). All of us in the audience were laughing almost non-stop. Of course, he had conducted the program for them. After all the ex-offenders learnt how to build sandcastles, Alvin invited their families to join them on a day where they could teach their parents & siblings how to build. When he complimented some of them in front of their families, the parents were very thankful to him as almost no one has ever say any good things about their children. By the end of the entire program, the ex-offenders have found a sense of purpose and achievement. This really touched Alvin’s heart.

Nowadays, he thinks there is a Finger Generation where people or youths are only using their fingers in typing and also living in a virtual world. He want youths to do & be in the REAL WORLD. Feeling & touching the real sands and water, getting dirty at the ground. Lastly, he ended off by making this statement, “If there is no joy, don’t do it!!”

Additionally, there are five learning points that he discovered in his entrepreneurship journey:

1. Find self, understand self.
2. Look after self, build profession.
3. Look for purpose beyond self.
4. Do something, get started.
5. Set own rules, created own path.