Koh’s Project Dignity
Social entrepreneur Koh Seng Choon has shown that restoring a person’s dignity starts with having a job, and being part of a community
Job creation that enables people to be valued is the motivating force behind this social enterprise.
In the early hours of a cold morning in 1985, Koh Seng Choon sat in a large delivery truck as its driver steered the heavy load along the dark roads of South Yorkshire, home to the region’s famous coal mines. These mines had employed generations of men over hundreds of years. On board the truck was a pile of heavy steel railway tracks headed for one of the mines that had laid off a large part of its mining workforce.
The sun was just rising as they pulled up outside the gates of the col liery, where large groups of unemployed protesting coal miners had been camped outside for months. England was in the midst of an angr y coalminers’ st r ike that raged for a year from March 1984-March 1985. Their loud cries of protest over the lost jobs rang out across the valley. Over the noise, he looked up to the top of the valley to the anxious wives, mothers and children looking down at their protesting men.
For 24-year- old Koh from Singapore, the job at William Cook had been his big break. It would help fund the degree in mechanical
engineering that he’d started the previous year at the University of Sheffield. With little financial support, he also worked part-time at a cemetery and local cinema to suppor t himsel f. Like many self-funding students, money was tight. Over that period, he slept in his girlfriend’s car at night, eating and showering in the company’s workers’ quarters during the day. After finishing his first degree, Koh worked at William Cook as a trainee manager to fund a Masters degree.
While he understood the financial difficulties the coal miners were going through, what hit him most about the protesters’ struggles were their fami lies. “When a person loses his job, he’s fighting for his own digni t y, but also the dignity of his family,” he says. “That had a big impact on me.”
IN 1994, KOH returned to Singapore and straight into a steady job with a global management firm. But he could not forget the despair he witnessed back in Sheffield and was determined to do something for others facing employment uncertainty. Starting small, Koh decided to set aside one day a month to do social good. In his diary and calendar, it became known as ‘ Dignity Day’. “The first ‘Dignity Day’ was easy,” he explains. “I approached some elderly folk who were sitting around idle in the void deck areas of the ground floor of the Spottiswoode Park Estate public housing.”
With his parents’ assistance, he befriended many of the elderly residents, and later organised visits to food factories and other places that interested his new friends. What started with just eight people soon grew to two busloads ferrying around 80 people once the community came to know and trust Koh.
These regular ‘Dignity Days’ cont inued for another six years, before Koh moved out of the estate and started to widen his volunteering to include prisons and drug rehabilitation centres. During these visits, Koh would teach and give talks on life- ski l ls and personal decision-making, topics that would help encourage them to make a success of their lives after leaving prison.
Over time, he met more people living on the fringe of society and gradually the prisoners began to confide in him. Their biggest worry was the difficulty they faced getting jobs after their sentences were served. “I
“AT ITS HEART, PROJECT DIGNITY IS A JOB CREATOR AND HAVING A JOB GIVES A PERSON DIGNITY”
have to do something bigger,” he told himself, and with the knowledge and experience he’d learned from years of volunteering, in 2006, Koh launched Project Dignity.
The project provides training in food stall management to Singapore’s marginalised, including the disabled and mentally disadvantaged. After completing training, the participants are given Project Dignity- owned food stalls to manage and earn an income of their own.
The social enterprise concept was still very new in 2006, but his experiences living on a tight budget as a student, and his professional management skills, certainly helped.
KOH’S ENGINEERING BACKGROUND has also helped him to solve unexpected problems. Such as the time he had a trainee who wanted to learn and manage a noodle shop, but because of cerebral palsy, could only use one hand. “I did a method study and analysed the work steps involved in producing a bowl of noodles,” he explains. “I then figured out the only complicated part of the process is the blanching of the noodles.” So Koh went searching for a machine to do the blanching and found one at an exhibition in Taiwan, which was designed for blanching Japanese udon (rice noodles).
But at US$8000, it was out of his budget. Undeterred, Koh presented his problem to a food machinery engineering company in Malacca, Malaysia. He carefully described what he needed, and the machine was delivered to him in four weeks for less than S$2000.
Like any startup, Koh struggled with funding. He initially raised S$ 200,000 by remortgag i ng a property. When the number of trainees grew and he needed a bigger place, he borrowed again. He borrowed S$500,000 but it was still not enough. With no more property left to re-mortgage, nor banks or friends to loan from, he used his mother’s money. “It was the saddest moment,” says Koh. “On one hand to carry on and on the other hand to use the bequest of my late mother – I cried at her epitaph.”
As well as looking at the broader picture, Koh also focuses on individual participants. After a training orientation, one mentally challenged
trainee started hugging and licking the trainers and the elderly who were attending their charity lunch. “Initially it was not worrying but when he started hugging and licking complete strangers, I quickly became concerned,” he says.
Koh called the boy’s school. The boy’s teacher explained that he did it out of affection and insecurity in being in an unfamiliar place a nd mee t i n g strangers. “Eventual ly we compromised; he was not allowed to hug or lick anyone but he can lean his head on their shoulder,” said Koh.
IN THE FUTURE, Koh hopes Project Dignity will eventually be owned by the people, for the people. He believes the best way for this to happen is by offering the social enterprise as an Initial Public Offering. Expansion is also taking place, with a Dignity Kitchen set up in Hong Kong in 2019. Dignity Kitchen Hong Kong offers culinary courses and delivers tasty hawker meals for the elderly and the disadvantaged.
Koh hopes to set up Projects in Thailand to help prostitutes, in Indonesia to help orphans, and in Malaysia to ease poverty, in Britain to help the homeless and also in the United States to help war veterans. “Then there is India and China,” he says, with a smile.
“At its heart, Project Dignity is a job creator and having a job gives a person dignity, and this is the solution for every country’s disabled and disadvantaged people.”