Fellow’s Tea with Ms Aileen Ong

Tembusu College Fellow’s Tea

Ms Aileen Ong

Chairperson of Solutions to End Poverty (STEP)

6.00pm, Tuesday

11th Feb 2014

Master’s Common Lounge,

Level 3, Residential Block

Refreshments will be served.

Only 30 seats available!

Please register at tembusu.nus.edu.sg

There will be an optional workshop for solution generation after the session that might span from 7 to 9 p.m.

Aileen fundraised for charity works for 6 years for various charity organizations but she found that fundraising alone is not enough to truly care for the people. She decided to start by volunteering to feed the malnourinshed children in the Philippines, for the Gawad Kalinga (“Give Care”), a movement in poverty eradication and community development. There, she met Tony Meloto, founder of GK who showed her the face of dire poverty in Philippines in 2007. Through her experience with the poor in the Philippines, she felt that this was her calling. In 14 February 2007, former President S.R.Nathan launched her Mission 4 Nutrition.

Upon realising that the solution to eradicate poverty is relationship building and investing in the poor as partners, she began to share these values and awareness to students through service immersion and Overseas Community Involvement Programmes (OCIPs). Seeing its success, she co-founded GK Hope initiative to share this awareness to Asia. GK eventually pills out of the effort in order to focus its efforts on their home country, Philippines. This led to the birth of Solutions to End Poverty (STEP).

STEP adapts and develops solutions in community development with partners in Asia while at the same time sharing the successful approaches in Philippines to transform slums. The pilot project that is currently underway is the SMILE Village in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for over 300 people in partnership with Pour un Sourire d’Enfant(PSE) which currently educates more than 7000 children.