Social Change 2.0

An intimate encounter with social entrepreneurs face to face, to be inspired by heroic stories of courage, perseverance, success and miracles the human spirit is capable of. Unlock your passion and discover how people just like you are making a big impact. Watch the recorded talks here.

Join us for dinner at 6pm followed by 3 hours of inspiring talks.

TEDx KRP (as in Kent Ridge Park, Singapore) is a celebration of Social Change through Local Innovation and Global Entrepreneurship. Through 4 inspiring hours of short talks, speakers from around the world showcase successful disruptive initiatives leading the way for innovation and change around the world to an audience of innovators, investors, academic and public decision makers. TEDxKRP is organised by the Grameen Creative Lab@NUS and sponsored by the National University of Singapore Entrepreneurship Centre.

National University of Singapore
Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium
Singapore, 138608
Singapore

Nicholas Leong

Nicholas Leong used to be a professional photographer. About 5 years ago, he had an idea that all those Kenyans who were winning marathons everywhere in the world would be terrific if they were given bicycles. So he went to Kenya with only an idea, and a very rudimentary plan. Kenyan Riders is building the first all-Black professional cycling team in Kenya, in the home of Kenyan marathon champions. Eventually, we want to race in the biggest bicycle races in the world.

Pamela Yeo

What do you think about when war & poverty comes to mind? Often we find the idea of peace and eliminating poverty very unattainable and out of reach. Discover together how the power of the individual in community can create impact - by tapping on the simple idea of creating opportunities for people to get connected for peace-building - an idea that is in the process of discovery, and put in motion through Saught's social business model. Pamela graduated from the Law Faculty of the National University of Singapore in 2011. As a law student, she had a primary interest in human rights and interned with the Access to Justice Asia LLP, non-profit, non-partisan social network for human rights practitioners based in Cambodia. In 2011 together with her 2 co-founders Ng Sookzhen and Adeline Heng, they started Saught

Veerappan Swaminathan

We live in a time in which rejection of mass consumerism, a growing awareness of sustainable lifestyles, increased accessibility to tools that aid personal creativity, and massive growth in internet access have resulted in a quiet but growing maker culture around the world. Much of this is centered around hobbyist interests such as cosplay and electronics tinkering. In this presentation, Veera will share how SL2 is attempting to present a more purposeful way of expressing this maker culture, by nurturing the kampung spirit of innovation to build more resilient and innovative communities. Veerappan Swaminathan is the co-founder and Kampung Tinkerer of the Sustainable Living Lab (SL2). A self-starter and inventor by nature, Veera believes that ground-up innovators need to be whatever the situation demands them to be.

Koh Seng Choon

Koh Seng Choon is the Executive Director of Dignity Kitchen, Singapore's first hawker training school for the disabled and disadvantaged people. In this talks he shares about the small innovations to adapt training processes at the Dignity Kitchen, developed based on the needs of the challenged.

Fairoz Ahmad

Ours is a generation striving to find a meaning and purpose greater than ourselves. In recent years, one of the ways we have channeled our intellectual and creative energies in the quest to do good is through social entrepreneurship. What deviant qualities do we need to get a social innovation program running in rural areas? What commonly frowned-upon characteristics are required to solve tough global problems? And why are these qualities needed? Fairoz Ahmad is a Director of Nusantara Development Initiatives (NDI), an organization he co-founded when he was a post-graduate student at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He believes that energy poverty can be solved by empowering women to overcome the problem of access to light sources.

Andreas Bimik

Gamification is the application of game design thinking to address business and social impact challenges. As indicated by a number of articles in Forbes, TIME and in scholarly journals, gamification is rapidly becoming a mainstream phenomenon. In addition, a recent gamification course on Coursera has attracted over 70000 students from more than 150 countries indicating strong interest around the world. In this TEDxKRP talk, Andreas Birnik discusses the phenomenon of gamification and illustrates how CarbonStory is applying different gamification and storytelling concepts in order to engage users and encourage them to sponsor projects that mitigate climate change. Dr. Andreas is co-founder of CarbonStory, a social enterprise that enables people to reverse the effect of climate change by supporting projects that offset personal or household carbon footprints. At NUS Business School, he teaches sustainability, strategy and Asia Pacific Business on MBA and executive education programs.

OJG (Performance)

This band performance is an offshoot from a project called Beyond the Border, Behind the Men (BTBBTM). BTBBTM is a labour of love of three friends and their migrant worker friends which culminated in a short-film and photo essay. Anonymous and invisible in Singapore, these Bangladeshi migrant men are often nameless faces in the crowd. Beyond stale stereotypes such as the construction or shipyard worker, the cleaner, the Bangla, surely there must be more to this one-dimensional representation. But what? Going to Bangladesh to collect their stories, the creators found how richly-textured their lives are.This project pays tribute to these "builders" of Singapore and those they leave behind. BTBBTM hopes "to celebrate their resilience, spread stories of cheer and inspiration, and pay tribute to the human spirit. Like us, they are fathers, sons, husbands, story-tellers and dreamers too. And on a more fundamental and human level, we are all equals."