Changemaker Forum Speakers

Stephanie Arrowsmith is the co-founder of Impact Hub Jakarta, a coworking innovation hub for purpose-driven individuals and entrepreneurs  in Indonesia’s capital city, which is part of a global network of 100+ cities around the world. She also curated the first ASEAN Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, fostering partnerships among countries and sectors towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals. With a background in international development, cross-sector partnerships and systems thinking, Stephanie has been active in strengthening support for social entrepreneurship in the Asia-Pacific region and is passionate about designing collaborative networks to catalyse action towards social and environmental justice. She is a proud member of changemaking communities including Impact Collective, Techstars APAC, DSIL & an Enspiral.

Cynthia Ong is creating an equitable, diversified, and circular economy in Sabah on the island of Borneo—one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth. She does this by using a new leadership style, where all voices have equal power to co-create solutions to regional problems, as competing interests of profit and conservation contend for the same pool of resources. She brings 25 years of entrepreneurship, socio-environmental justice and community activism, through her roles as founder/co-founder, board director and/or CEO of numerous organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit in South East Asia and in the U.S. 

Christy brings over 25 years of experience working in the public, private, and social innovation space. Having worked extensively in the Asia Pacific region, she brings rich experience in the areas of corporate responsibility, sustainability, and governance.

Lien Centre for Social Innovation is a space for socially conscious people and organisations to learn, ideate and collaborate, established in 2006 to advance the thinking and capability of the social sector. Their vision is to be a thought leader and catalyst for positive social change in Singapore and beyond.

Aaron Yeoh started getting involved in youth and community development work back in 2009. His current work involves advocating on more equity for visually impaired and supporting positive aging for seniors through his non profit organisations—Etch Empathy and Cycling Without Age Singapore. Concurrently, he is also providing career opportunities for visually impaired as chefs through my social enterprise Fortitude Culina.

Andre has been on an entrepreneur journey ever since 2012 in emerging Southeast Asia, as the Founder of Future City Summit (Good City Foundation), a non-profit organisation basing in Hong Kong, Jakarta, Manila and Bangkok, curating summits and development programs with city governments in Southeast Asia in domains such as urban development, food, fintech, governance and policy, building network of emerging cities in Asia and Africa through established Emerging Future Cities Network, both public and private sectors. 

Good City Foundation is currently a member of the Private Sector Committee of ASEAN Smart Cities Network and (Non-Profit) Institutional Partner of G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance. While entitled Young Leaders of Tomorrow 2019 in St. Gallen Symposium, Andre is currently Li Ka Shing Foundation Scholar in Public Policy at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in The National University of Singapore and served as a Student Fellow in Centre for Liveable Cities(CLC) of the Ministry of National Development of Singapore. He is currently also serving in the working group of IoT and Urban Transformation (Asia Action Group) in the World Economic Forum.

Shadman Sadab is Director of “Public-Private Partnership by Youth” development program at the Good City Foundation (GCF), a Hong Kong based international development organization. Founded in 2016, GCF ( previously known as Future City Summit - FCS) started as an international summit, and currently engaged in impact investing, capacity building and incubation, with portfolios in Bangkok, Bali, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila.

He is leading the foundation's signature development program"Public-Private Partnership by Youth" which works to foster discussion of matters on "Public Private Partnership" through young entrepreneurs and policy leaders, establish innovation labs and raise startup funds within the city levels of the member nations of GCF. This project got recognized by KPMG in the recent "Connected Cities" magazine as one of the active projects in the Asia Pacific Region. 

GCF has spread it's network among 30+ cities around Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. GCF has spread it's networks with representatives from World Bank IFC, World Economic Forum Global Shapers, Shark Tank, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Chicago Booth, Warner Music, ASEAN Smart Cities Network, KPMG, HKU, NUS, YY Goshti, SBYA Global, Grameen Australia, Yunus Centre, African Union, Global Tech Base, Commonwealth Youth Innovation Hub and so on. 

Dian Septiyana Anderson, is passionate about overcoming social challenges apparent today and is committed to discovering and supporting social innovations in ASEAN that are seeking to overcome these problems. Through her work at Ashoka she is building  a community and knowledge that will help support these innovations to create greater impact. Dian is focused in working with Women Social Entrepreneurs and is committed in building a  movement throughout  ASEAN  in  Advancing Women Social Entrepreneurs.

Khyati is the Founder of Yzer Solutions Pte Ltd, a talent development consultancy. She has over 20 years of teaching, training and consulting experience, specialising in Interpersonal Communication and Positivity-Led Performance. Khyati is a certified Time to Think Consultant, introducing individuals and organisations in Asia to the Thinking Environment which is based on the work of Nancy Kline. Khyati is also the only licensed facilitator of Shawn Achor’s Happiness Advantage-Orange Frog workshop in Hong Kong. Khyati is a Certified Thiagi Facilitator underscoring her commitment to experiential learning. Before moving into the Learning and Development industry, Khyati worked in Equity Capital Markets at Citigroup and as an Auditor with Deloitte & Touche.  She has been living in Singapore for the last 17 years and grew up in Hong Kong. 

Charlotte is the Executive Director of Playeum.  Charlotte brings to the table experience in both social work, marketing, partnership building and communications. Prior to Playeum, she has journeyed in organisations such as ACP Magazines, Singapore Press Holdings, The National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre and KKH Women & Children’s Hospital. 

She believes strongly in staying true to oneself and being authentic. She extends this belief in her work at Playeum when working with both children and adults, and seeks to empower the next generation of creators, innovators and problem-solvers. She values creating connections and building relationships, and puts it at the forefront of all the work she carries out. 

On the side, she’s a huge lover of the sea, thrives in nature and is a secret adrenaline junkie.

Imran is responsible for the visitor experience at the former Children’s Centre for Creativity in Gillman Barracks. He manages and coordinates operations, hires, training and exhibitions in the former centre. He has extensive experience in the education, entertainment, F&B and hospitality industries in the capacities of both business management, development and programming. Previous employers include JWT Kids Gym, Ready Steady Go Kids, Seb’s Bistro & The Playhouse, Pat’s Schoolhouse, APPLE Computers, SAF Yacht Club, Club Med Holidays and Esplanade, Theatres on the bay.

Marina’s work in social innovation dates back nearly 20 years to her student days when she first saw a social entrepreneur speak at Stanford University. Since then, Marina has led a systems-change effort in higher education for over a decade through co-founding and growing Ashoka U to be a global network of higher education innovators who are embedding social impact into the core DNA of campus culture, curriculum, and strategy. To date, Ashoka U has worked with 600+ institutions and graduated over a million changemakers.

Tasnim brings rich experience in structuring and managing strategic partnerships and stakeholders, advising on the development and execution of new business ventures, as well as developing and operationalising business strategies. Lien Centre for Social Innovation is a space for socially conscious people and organisations to learn, ideate and collaborate, established in 2006 to advance the thinking and capability of the social sector. Their vision is to be a thought leader and catalyst for positive social change in Singapore and beyond.

Tomo is a seasoned development professional having lived and worked in various corners of the world from the Tibetan plateau, Indian drylands, Indonesian tropics, to Japanese metropolises. He has extensive field experience working for international and local development NGOs across Asia and Africa, including Kopernik, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and the World Bank. He was formerly an Assistant Professor at the Global Leadership Program at the University of Tokyo. Tomo has a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard College, a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and was an Asia Pacific Leadership Program Fellow (2008) and Innovation Fellow (2020) at the East-West Center. In 2014 Tomo was awarded the Dalai Lama’s Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award.

Decades of conflict have left half of the population of Timor-Leste in extreme poverty. Bella founded Leublora Green School to transform Timor-Leste’s underprivileged children into green leaders who will lead the young oil-dependent country to a sustainable future. The Leublora Green Village has now grown to become a model for eco-tourism. She plans to run for the country’s 2023 presidential election. If elected, she will become the first LGBT president in Asia. She stands as a beacon of change for a wide variety of social issues.

Kathy is an internationally acclaimed poet, artist, and educator, who helped co-found Jo-Jikum alongside her cousins. She is known for her poetic performance at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2014. She has continued her artistic practice which you can learn more about at her website. She currently runs Jo-Jikum in Majuro, Marshall Islands while also serving as Climate Envoy for the Marshall Islands government.

After spending seven years as a political prisoner, Wai Wai now works tirelessly uniting divided ethnic and religious groups in the country. Her organization, Women Peace Network, runs a youth center with classes ranging from English language, social science, advocacy, to leadership training. Her mission is to build peace, justice and social equality through empowerment, education and advocacy. Wai Wai is a WEF Young Global Leader and has been recognized by the BBC and TIME Magazine for her important work.

Arief Rabik is the director of Indonesia’s Environmental Bamboo Foundation and the founder of the 1000 Bamboo Villages project, which aims to create economic viability for the use of bamboo agroforestry to sequester CO2 and restore degraded tropical forest lands in dozens of countries.  Arief is a second-generation bamboo specialist who is as capable and comfortable getting his hands dirty helping local producers on the ground as he is working with corporate leaders in the boardroom and politicians in national capitals to bargain for scalable policy and financial support to turn his vision into reality.  Arief has already piloted his model and the first group of villages in Indonesia are already producing bamboo with purchasing agreements in place to sell value-added products to large global brands.

Gwen Yi is the founder of Tribeless, an empathy training company that transforms empathy into a tangible, sustainable practice for individuals and organizations around the world. They are the proud creators of The Empathy Box© and #EmpathyCircles®, their proprietary methodology that is used and loved by 6,000+ people across 30+ countries.

Gwen first got her start as a youth camp facilitator in 2013. Since then, she has gone on to speak, train, and facilitate hundreds of programs across Asia, Europe and America. Her honest, playful, interactive approach has been described as “generous”, “supportive” and “endlessly inspiring”.

Gwen’s past work has received recognition from TED, One Young World, The Obama Foundation, The Royal Commonwealth Society, and The World Economic Forum. 

Ara Kusuma started her journey as a changemaker at the age of ten with Moo’s Project, a social initiative that integrates local farmers to develop the resources a cow has in a more sustainable way. In the four years that followed, her team brought together 150 farmers, testing the new approaches and spreading what worked for the benefit of all. She was elected as a Young Changemaker by Ashoka and featured on Kompas as a Young Pioneer in 2008. Following her vision of Mulya Sesarengan (for the welfare of all), she founded her second and third venture, TeenChanger and URTravelearner, which take teenagers through the stages of changemaking in a three-to-seven-day experience to launch their own solutions for social change. The effort continued as she co-leads the Everyone a Changemaker Movement with Ashoka by enabling young people to find their power in creating changes they wish to see in the world. Today, she is also focusing her work in supporting underprivileged children to get access to creative and quality education at home during this Covid-19 pandemic with Aha! Project. So far, the initiative has reached more than 2200 children in 35 villages across 13 provinces in Indonesia and continues to grow as Ara joined the National Geographic community as a Young Explorer 2020.

Ron is a highly regarded facilitator who is passionate about expanding and enriching perspectives in leaders. His facilitation style seeks to explore the interaction of values, cognition and action to assist leaders navigation through rapid change and complexity

Ron’s clients describe him as a “highly-experienced, capable facilitator and educator”; having “enormous strengths as a large-group facilitator, small-group leader and individual coach”; being “passionate, competent, and professional” and doing this with “great openness, warmth and humor, which makes working with him both fun and expansive” others say “he's able to see patterns out of complex data, sense into subtle relationship dynamics, and synthesize it all into practical action.”

One of his signature programs is called We R One World; a real-life simulation experience of global connectedness in which up to 120 participants are immersed in a highly interactive face-to-face gameplay. The simulation was inspired by Buckminster Fuller's World Game and has been played around the world.

Zhihan is the co-founder and Group CEO of BagoSphere, a human skills development platform that accelerates career readiness and career growth. Zhihan worked at a medical-tech start-up in Stockholm before venturing into rural India to work with a social enterprise involved in rural IT outsourcing. Graduating from the National University of Singapore's Engineering Science Program, he studied entrepreneurship at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship & The Royal Institute of Technology. For his work at BagoSphere, he was named as a Global Good Fund Fellow in 2016 and an Ashoka Fellow in 2018. 

Shuling Yong is a Singaporean documentary filmmaker, DP and Location Sound Recordist with over a decade of experience.

She has worked on films like Becoming (Netflix, 2020, dir. Nadia Hallgren), The Feeling of Being Watched (Tribeca, 2018, dir. Assia Boundaoui), And She Could Be Next (Tribeca, 2020, dir. Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia) and America To Me (Sundance, 2018, dir. Steve James).

Her feature-length debut, Unteachable, a documentary following a young woman on a mission to bring empathy and the joy of learning back into classrooms where students are struggling in the mainstream system, was the first local film to win the Audience Choice Award at the 30th Singapore International Film Festival in 2019. It was selected for Good Pitch2 Southeast Asia, the Tribeca Film Institute Network Market and was awarded “Best Pitch” at the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum. Shuling’s debut short film, Growing Roots, premiered on the Discovery Channel in 2015.

Shuling is a Kartemquin Films Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow, a participant in the Doc Society Queer Impact Producers Lab, an honoree for DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” List 2019, and was selected for the Newcity Film 50 Chicago Screen Gems List 2020.

Hoi Leong is a changemaker with passion in technology and lifelong learning. Believing in empowering children to create their own future and a better world, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of VIVITA, a creativity accelerator for children, in Singapore. VIVITA runs VIVISTOP Orchard, a creative learning environment and makerspace for children and youth, where there are no curriculum and children a free to imagine and create.

Hoi Leong is concurrently a member of Mistletoe, a collective impact community of innovators and entrepreneurs in making positive social impact. With his interest in learning and education, he works with education technology startups in various countries in exploring how to create better learning environments and update learning.

Hoi Leong received his Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) and Master of Interdisciplinary Information Studies from the University of Tokyo. Prior to his current roles, he had about 10 years of career in the Singapore Public Service involved in enterprise development and international operations.

Ludovic Odier is an experiential learning educator and founder and CEO of OIA Pte Ltd, a successful “Travel and Learn” consultancy operating from Singapore since 2001. Based in Paris, Singapore and Jakarta, OIA has built a reputation for managing major multi-talented educational and complex programming educational workshops for corporations and learning institutions. Calm and methodical, Ludovic can grasp the core and essential value and power of any learning intervention or new educational technology. Ludovic is also presently senior consultant for the Asian expansion of the  French EdTech EvidenceB.

Dr. Daniel Cordaro is the Founder and CEO of the Contentment Foundation. An Edmund Hillary Fellow and former faculty member at Yale University, Dr. Cordaro led three of the largest cross-cultural studies on human emotion ever conducted in the field of psychology, which are featured in the textbook Understanding Emotions. Dr. Cordaro has spent the last decade of his career studying what it means to live a flourishing life and sharing the findings with schools around the world. His research teams have studied over a dozen cultures across the globe, including making first contact with an isolated community in remote Eastern Bhutan.

Dr. Cordaro earned his Ph.D. in Psychology and M.S. in Organic Chemistry from UC Berkeley, and later spent two years as the Director of Wellbeing at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. 

Dr. Cordaro is a lover of truth, wisdom, and indestructible wellbeing. Daniel’s personal audacious goal is to significantly improve the lives of one billion children and one billion adults - 25% of earth’s population - within his lifetime.

Dr. Meixi is a Hokchiu learning scientist, former teacher at Shuqun secondary and at Northlight school. Her experiences growing up across Singapore and northern Thailand with the Lahu tribe drive her to design education systems that are healing for families and communities, rather than being sources of stress and trauma. For the past 10 years, she has engaged in community-based and participatory designs with young people, families, and schools to uncover stories, uphold Indigenous and family-based knowledge systems, and build learning collectives that advance more just and sustainable ways of living in Singapore, Thailand, U.S., and Mexico. Especially in a rapidly changing world, through pandemics and the challenges of our times, Meixi's work centrally re-thinks the purposes and ethics of schooling. She is intent on designing learning that is more restorative and generative for humans and the rest of the living world. To these ends, Meixi focuses on transforming schools through land-based and family-based teacher education and shifting top-down relationships of power among teachers and students/school and families through a practice called Tutoría. Drawing from her extensive work in schools around the world, earned her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Human Development from the University of Washington and is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral fellow in American Indian Studies and Global Indigenous studies at the University of Minnesota. 

Felix Tan is a student entrepreneur with an aim to create positive social impact through what he does. He is deeply passionate about empowering people to achieve their best in life and building tightly knit communities.

Coming from a low-income family, he found strong support networks from my teachers and friends in school, helped him to get through difficult times growing up. Being deeply appreciative of this help, he has found a deep, personal passion witgin the training and development space.

He founded Skilio, an AI-powered soft skills development platform. Skillio empowers education institutions to capture & track soft skills development of their students in school activities. Felix is a strong believer that every individual should be given a chance to lead a purposeful life regardless of his or her circumstances and that strong communities can effect positive social change in our world!