#15: Building where I belong
How growing up a single-parent child shaped Charles into a community leader.
Welcome to this week’s edition of SEAmplified! Your latest insights on Southeast Asian youth and youth politics in 4.2 minutes.
⌛This week in brief:
📌 How this Singaporean’s single-parent upbringing transformed him into a community leader.Charles Lee loves bringing people together.
The energetic 28-year-old - formerly Head of Operations at Singapore-based nonprofit The Young SEAkers and TEDx Tsinghua University curator - has a gift for building communities, and an even bigger passion for leveraging communities to generate social impact.
Today, he’s a regular in product management communities, and is also the co-founder of online knowledge sharing platform SAGE and digital-first impact community GoodHub SEA. Goodhub SEA has since grown into a 70-strong team comprising members from Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Besides his infectious love for people, Charles’ other superpower is his ability to keep his ears close to the ground. But these talents were cultivated not out of curiosity, but necessity: as a single-parent child, he spent his childhood looking for acceptance and a sense of belonging.
How did growing up in a single parent household shape Charles into the community leader he is today? Read on to find out more.
All images courtesy of Charles Lee.
A knack for human connections
I grew up a single-parent child.
There was always this uneasy feeling of exclusion in primary and secondary school. Those years were all about trying to find my own space, and people who could accept me for who I am.
The first people I truly felt at home with were a group of badminton hobbyists. I was the impressionable kid among experienced adults, and I remember just pouring my concerns out and getting advice from them.
These newfound friends came from all walks of life. Connecting with them on their level gave me a wider perspective of society, and that in turn made me comfortable with reaching out to different people to build communities.
Along the way, I was also lucky enough to receive guidance from many mentors. My mum could not give much practical advice later on in life, and these mentors bridged the gap for me. Some of these mentors, I believe, also made sure I stayed on the right side of life.
I appreciate the value of human connections, and I always emphasize this point in the communities I create. It puts a human face to a digital facade, and it breaks the ice between members. In communities, it also establishes mutual accountability on the projects that members collectively work on.
Creating his own luck
All things considered, I was lucky enough to bump into the right people at the right time.
Some of these guardian angels kept me on the right side of life. I fell in with some bad influences when I was younger, and they couldn’t have stepped into my life at a better time.
Others helped me to grow and see even further than I ever could on my own. There was only so much I could learn from my immediate circles, and the many mentors who shared their wisdom with me also granted me many opportunities to grow.
How many youths in Southeast Asia share my luck? Rather than leaving it to chance, I prefer to create more opportunities like these by my own means.
That, to me, is what building communities like SAGE and Goodhub SEA is about: creating sandbox environments for youths to test their skills and experiment with new ideas; easing access to mentors, and collaborating with peers who share their aspirations to drive socially impactful projects - and not leaving an opportunity to chance.
Living intentionally
I was lucky enough to gain many opportunities by chance, but there’s no denying that there were a thousand and one ways that my life could’ve gone astray.
Perhaps that’s why I choose to live my life very deliberately. Instead of letting fate play itself out, I prefer to create my own fate instead.
I once thought to myself: if I pass on tomorrow, I would much rather be remembered not for having raised sales figures for a corporation, but for something that truly mattered to me. Volunteering is one way that I get to do the things that matter most to me.
It’s why I am as deliberate about growing my communities as much as living my own life. This means picking problems we are well-equipped to tackle, and large enough to generate significant impact. It also means doubling down on delivering impact, rather than growing membership. It’s far better to have 20 members successfully shipping 5 projects than a team of 100 or more that struggles to deliver even one.
I’m also aware, however, that not everyone has as much freedom to be deliberate about choices. Take some of the Southeast Asian nonprofits we’ve worked with for example. These organizations typically can’t find solutions that are tailored to their needs. They end up paying for enterprise solutions that come with bells and whistles they don’t actually desire.
That’s one problem Goodhub SEA is setting out to solve. For me personally, I’d rather give back to society than spend my time elsewhere. Building communities is my way of giving back. It’s like planting a tree that provides shade and nourishment - as communities grow, so does the collective wisdom we all have to leverage upon and tackle bigger problems tomorrow.
Interested in building tech for good initiatives in Southeast Asia? Join the GoodHub SEA community today.
Know a Southeast Asian youth who’s working, studying, or living in another Southeast Asian country, or are you doing so and would like to share your story? Email the editors at tanzhantiam@gmail.com or tianwen.tay@seakoel.com
If you enjoyed today’s article, follow SEAmplified on Instagram and LinkedIn, hit the subscribe button below, or email the editors if you have any feedback for us!