I started Sarang Foundation because of my belief that my access to good quality education and ability to earn a comfortable living is only possible due to a greater global community.
In particular, in Singapore where I spent 10 years, I was able to raise my children and have a corporate career supported by my then-home helper, the caring and dedicated Lin.
Lin is now based in her hometown in the Philippines and is the Director of Project Tuon.
Project Tuon and Sarang started with a casual morning chat with Lin about her old elementary school, Anecito Panolino Elementary School, located in a remote area in Iloilo, Philippines, where Lin’s sister is a teacher.
The school had been hit by Typhoon Yolanda and never fully recovered. The roof of the school had been blown away together with books, pencils, and notebooks – everything that more fortunate schoolchildren take for granted.
We started by collecting stationary lying around the house and sending them to Lin’s sister at school. Friends and neighbors kindly started contributing their items and we sent these off too.
We relied as much as possible on recycled goods to fill school needs; however, we also ended up donating a playground, sports equipment, installing a drinking water facility, toilets, a handwashing station, and more.
I acutely felt the far-reaching impact of the dollars I was earning in the developed part of the world, on the developing part of the world. For the cost of a couple of nice meals out at a restaurant in Singapore, I was able to build an entire sink facility for the school which finally allowed the children to wash their hands and brush their teeth.
However, I realized that school needs are constant and cyclical, especially in a typhoon zone. As a salaried worker, I started to wonder how I could scale and sustain my efforts.
I eventually decided that I wanted to grow funds for support in a manner that would not only provide sustainable returns to use for the school but which could also help grow small businesses with strong social purposes.
I wanted to be a catalyst and facilitator in the process of creating what I hoped would eventually be a self-sustaining community where commercial proceeds directly fund community development and the education of children, with little mediation or administration.
I found my first collaboration partner, WoonHung, based in Singapore, through hours of Google research. Yvonne and her sister and business partner Vivienne had built a brand that was not only aesthetically beautiful but also based on the philosophies of sustainability and the cottage industry.
I pitched to Yvonne out of the blue. After a number of meetings with Yvonne and Vivienne, WoonHung Mia Series was born. Over the years, my collaboration with Yvonne and Vivienne grew, and their beautiful gift and lifestyle store Ship of Time became a depository for office workers in the neighborhood to drop off stationery for the school.
In working with WoonHung I have enjoyed watching and learning from the growth of a small business with an ethos I believe in.
Support for Project Tuon has come from the proceeds of WoonHung Mia Series and our collaboration. I have also truly enjoyed spending time with Yvonne and Vivienne, who are hard-working, talented, and dedicated individuals who truly embody the word “giving.”
The biggest learning for me is that it does not take massive amounts of money or time to enable others “to be capable of good,” just a bit of care and initiative. You, too, can help others so even the difficult can be “masarangan”!
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