00:00Improv is really fun.
00:04Take everything off.
00:06Everything?
00:07Including your hair.
00:08And I thought improv was a useful skill to have.
00:11Just to build my confidence.
00:13I thought that it could help me with my facilitation skills.
00:16Are you okay?
00:18It's okay, it's okay.
00:20It's just that it's a bit too tight.
00:22So, it always ends up...
00:26So in the work that I do,
00:27I have to help facilitate conversations.
00:30One of the key principles around improv
00:32is really to listen to your partner
00:34and support their ideas.
00:35Which is precisely what facilitation is about.
00:38It's to help to generate conversation.
00:43Throughout my life,
00:44I would describe myself as a curious individual.
00:47So I like to ask a lot of questions.
00:52As a society,
00:53there is still quite a long way for us to go
00:56to have a genuine conversation.
00:59So I would say that
01:01across the 10 years of my career,
01:04I've been moving across all three sectors.
01:06So half the time was spent actually working in the government.
01:09And that's where I started off.
01:11And later across the years,
01:13my role then was more about helping
01:16organisations to engage their stakeholders.
01:19Whether as citizens, private sector or NGOs.
01:23I think working in the government
01:25and actually big organisations
01:27is that the issues that you look at
01:29tend to be more complex.
01:34In Better.sg,
01:35the conversations that we have,
01:37it's a bit more at a personal level.
01:42Better.sg is a Tech for Good charity organisation.
01:46What this means is that
01:47we have about 2,000 plus volunteers
01:50who help to advance the Tech for Good agenda.
01:52We saw that there was a gap in talent and expertise
01:56in the private sector and in the social impact sector.
02:00So what we do is that then we deploy our volunteers
02:03to support their digital transformation efforts.
02:05And this could be in the form of
02:07helping them to redesign a website
02:09or to help to embed artificial intelligence, AI,
02:12into the work that they do.
02:15So I started Better.sg as a volunteer.
02:18So I helped on this project called 2BU.
02:21The idea around it is that we wanted to build
02:23a turn-based role-playing game
02:25for people to better understand
02:27the aspirations and challenges of the minorities.
02:30The idea behind the game is for you to immerse yourself
02:33and ask yourself,
02:34what would you do if you were this person?
02:37For example, you can then play as a Muslim lady in a class
02:43and then you learn about how is it like being a teacher,
02:46what are the challenges that they might face as a teacher.
02:49You get to learn about the background of the character
02:53and then you have to make certain decisions along the way.
02:57And it's really exciting because
03:00I think it's very uncommon when you see
03:03a group of volunteers coming together to build a game.
03:06And my role was to help to facilitate conversations
03:10with a group of teachers,
03:11a group of healthcare workers, for example,
03:13tease out those stories.
03:14And then we had a team of volunteers
03:16who then helped to craft the actual narrative
03:18and to build the entire game.
03:22I think like most people who start ground-up initiatives,
03:25we started because of a passion.
03:27Yeah, so GoHood is basically a movement
03:31to bring back the kampong spirit.
03:32So there are a few main features in GoHood.
03:34The first feature actually is where people can declutter stuff.
03:37The extra kicker is that
03:39people can actually give to verified beneficiaries.
03:42The other feature actually is
03:44we have a feature that allows social workers
03:47to ask for staff for their beneficiaries.
03:49But we are now doing a more advanced version of that
03:52where we're actually creating a paid-forward marketplace.
03:55It's Blanja.sg, so people can actually donate money
03:59to buy hawker meals.
04:00And it's a big step up from the pen and paper initiative
04:05that happened during COVID
04:07in that now everything is digitised.
04:10At the start, what I thought we needed was funding.
04:14But what I realised along the way is actually
04:17talent and advice is a lot more crucial.
04:21So that's why I think the role Better.sg plays
04:23in terms of bringing in skilled volunteers
04:26is very crucial to avoid a lot of the mistakes
04:29and lessons that people who start ground-up initiatives
04:32may not know.
04:33Yeah, yeah.
04:34So that's what we're trying to do in Better.sg
04:36in that we accept the full range of different types of volunteers
04:40people who are students, people who just graduated
04:44or people who have a lot of experiences.
04:46Beng Guan, I wanted to also talk to you
04:48and ask you your journey so far.
04:50You started Checkmate about two years ago, right?
04:52How has your journey been so far?
04:54The original idea came to me during COVID
04:57because during COVID, there was a lot of this vaccine-related
05:00sort of misinformation floating around WhatsApp and all that.
05:04So I was thinking, okay, why don't we just have a WhatsApp number?
05:08You can send in the messages to them
05:10instead of forwarding to your friends
05:11and then it tells you whether it can be trusted or not.
05:14I think the mission resonated with quite a lot of people.
05:18They joined in.
05:19And after that, it's really been just building the product together, the volunteers.
05:22And now we are also at a point of time where we have to think about scaling.
05:26Basically, scaling is very different from starting.
05:28It's a lot harder.
05:29And because it's so resource-intensive, it's very hard to juggle
05:32all the other kind of commitments and needs that one has when running such a project.
05:38You have a tech role to play, right?
05:40To build the actual tech product.
05:42But at the same time, like you said, there's also the HR role, right?
05:44You try to manage your team of volunteers.
05:46Yeah, correct, correct.
05:48It really resonated with me about trying to juggle different commitments.
05:51So for myself, one of the first few things that started to go off first was improv.
05:56I don't get to practice improv, but I get to apply in the work that I do.
06:01So when I speak to my volunteers
06:04or when I try to run projects and speak to other non-profits and charities,
06:09I think improv as a method of principle, as a way of life, is very useful and important.
06:15When I first started off as a volunteer,
06:18I would just contribute in whatever way I can, and that's about it.
06:22But then now as CEO, I think one of the things that's at the top of my mind
06:25is to make sure that whatever we do is also sustainable.
06:28My skill sets are more in the so-called product development,
06:31as well as the technical side, AI side, right?
06:34If I had to go and figure out all this marketing, UI, UX,
06:39I mean, it's still going to take a lot of my time, right?
06:41I'm not so efficient at doing this type of work.
06:43So by being able to tap on the volunteers
06:45and also at the same time providing them a good experience,
06:48it also helps me to, you know, let me focus my energy on where I'm most effective, I would say.
06:53There's a really pool of advisors and talent to tap on,
06:57which creates capacity for ground-up initiatives.
07:00And BetterSG has helped to attract people who are really passionate
07:04about serving and helping the community.
07:07What I really love about BetterSG is that we really bring people from all walks of life,
07:11regardless whether you're a student or a fresh graduate or a re-starter,
07:15to really come together to learn our expertise,
07:17whether you have a technical background or no technical background,
07:20to really come together to do good for Singapore.
07:27BetterSG
Comments