What we stand for

Liu Yan is an award-winning social entrepreneur who has been advocating the new way of working and learning since 2004. She established China’s first coworking center Xindanwei listed by Fastcompany as “The World’s Top 10 most innovative company in China”. She is part of the founding team of Xinchejian, the pioneer of Asia’s maker movement. Liu Yan is also the cofounder and chief curator of China Australian Millennium Project (C.A.M.P), a unique 100-day incubator program designed to train, mentor and empower emerging young Australian and Chinese leaders and entrepreneurs.

Haiyen has been a passionate educator, a secondary school teacher and an officer at Ministry of Education in the past 10 years. She was the Head Of Department of Craft & Technology and led curriculum and pedagogy design, Art, Design & Technology, Food & Nutrition before joining School of Gumption. Background in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with awarded ASEAN university scholarship, Haiyen's expertise and interests are among neuroscience of learning, Intrinsic motivation that drives human behaviour, multiple intelligences and how to unleash human potential and the role of emotion in human behaviour.

Steven has been with the financial services industry since 1986, in both agency sales and management roles. He started with agency leadership training with Prudential in the corporate capacity from 2009. In 2014, Steven was appointed Head of Academy of Competence and Education (ACE) in Prudential, responsible for agency training and competence standards. In 2017, he moved on to agency development work for the top producers in Prudential. Steven is currently seconded to the School of Gumption under the Career Switch Programme initiative by Prudential. His passion for the development and well-being of the youths in Singapore is evidenced by his decision to join the School of Gumption under this initiative. Steven’s vast experience in sales, training and leadership management help us to sharpen our focus on the youth programme and support the engagement of all stakeholders.

Jack Sim is a Distinguished Fellow at the GFCC and founder of the World Toilet Organization. He broke the taboo around toilets by bringing the sanitation crisis to the global media spotlight in 2001, and has since mobilized a global movement involving governments, policy makers, United Nations agencies, international civil society, thought leaders and activists to work together in addressing the global sanitation crisis. Jack also founded Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) Hub, a business-centric organization using hybrid cross-sector collaborations to alleviate poverty sustainably through creating efficient BOP marketplace for the 4 billion poor.

Having lived and worked in Asia for over 30 years, Roberto Fabbri has come to know and understand the Asian psyche. Roberto’s work has taken him around the world running various engineering and management projects.

He has worked for and collaborated with different government bodies on numerous enterprises.

Roberto has been conferred the title of Knight of the Republic of Italy twice. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (OMRI) in 2009 he was awarded the Order of the Star of Italy (OSSI).

Charleston is an alumni of the Young South East Asian Leaders' Initiative. He has represented Singapore in the ASEAN Economic Community 2025 and the Protecting the Mekong Delta Environment Conference. He has also been specially handpicked by NTUitive to be part of the Overseas Entrepreneurship Program in China. As a Psychology student with a minor in Economics, Charleston hopes to fuse these school of thoughts to alleviate and resolve social issues through entrepreneurship.

Dr. Ben Chan is our key program partner of Gumption Youth and Gumption Bootcamp. He is the director of Education Academy at United in Diversity Forum (UID), Indonesia. He is the local faculty in the MIT-IDEAS Indonesia Program. Prior to his present position in UID, he was lecturing on Entrepreneurship and Business Creation at the Singapore Management University. Ben is also the Executive Director of Singapore’s Young Entrepreneurship Center - a human-capital center where young entrepreneurs come to learn the software of commercial and social entrepreneurship.

Don is a retired IBM executive with over 30 years of global experience leading complex teams and acting as a change agent for multinational corporations. He has received many awards and accolades for ground breaking first-of-a-kind projects throughout his career; including the internet’s first secure electronic transaction (SET) implementation is Asia and, more recently, the first award of IBM Watson AI for banking.

Since retiring Don has focused his attention on independent consulting projects, advising startups and angle investing.

Known as the founding father of Society 3.0, Ronald is the co-founder of CDEF Holding BV, a Holding company with a remarkable range of ventures operating on the disruptive intersection of the Hospitality Industry and the entrepreneurial world of Internet.

CDEF incorporates ‘much discussed’, disruptive exponential formulas, like the co-working and meeting centers Seats2meet.com and the Society 3.0 Foundation.

Seats2meet.com, with over 200 locations worldwide, has become an interactive breeding ground for entrepreneurship, inspiration, innovation, cross-linking and cross-pollination through collaboration facilitated by an in-house software called ‘The Serendipity Machine’.

Majoring in International Business Economics, Linh aspires to grow up as a social entrepreneur after engaging in her community projects and social experience. Linh was one of 3 Vietnamese students to be granted Scholarship from Oslo Metropolitan University and Kulturstudier (Norway): Studying Development Studies Course with Scandinavian students in Autumn 2018. With a passion of creating innovative changes in education in Vietnam, Linh are strongly inspired by School of Gumption’s values and missions.