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Let’s hear from Zeleen, our youngest volunteer on board. In 2018, she has applied to join our team as a volunteer when she saw our advertisement as a 16-year-old. Though she was underaged, PeopleStories decided to take her in as embracing ‘inclusiveness’ means we include people who are underaged but share the same belief. Of course, Zeleen’s parents were involved in the initial journey.
Recently, PeopleStories has produced 2 scholars who passed the exam to attend a STEM school. Zeleen is very proud of them. She gushed, “I think that they are awesome! Whether they know it or not, they have become possibility-models to other students who are dreaming of achieving the same for themselves. I sincerely hope that they will be happy studying in their new schools, making close friends and special memories!” She believes that to have a meaningful learning experience, one should enjoy the process and not the destination. She revealed, “I have been single-mindedly pursuing as for most of my school years that I’ve let the other more meaningful things slip me by, such as spending more time cultivating close friendships, taking up leadership opportunities and having the courage to be myself. Instead of focusing on what I was doing in my school years, I wished I had focused more on who I am and who I can be in the future.”
Other than that, she has also been listening to audiobooks as she knits. These days she is listening to the Conversations with God series.
Since this is the month of the International Women’s Day, who is the most inspiring woman for Zeleen? She replied, “It has to be my mom! She has gone through her own set of struggles bringing the three of us sisters up. Her family is all in China, so she had few people she could rely on when we were all so young and she had so much to do. Also, she gave me life, what could be more inspiring than that?” What is Zeleen’s vision of being ‘inclusive’ for the students in rural schools? In her words, “I would like to work with them to dream up the type of education that they would like to receive, and make it happen. These include the subjects they would like to learn, the experiences that they would want to have in school, whether they want school uniforms and how they would want it to look like and also how they want their schools to look like, I want them to have a strong say in what they want their education to be like. I guess, in other words, I would like us to reform the entire education system together.” We hope that we would soon get a chance to visit the schools in rural Cambodia to make these happen. In the meantime, here’s her message for them, “I want them to believe so strongly that they totally deserve to have quality education and the ability to achieve whatever dreams they may have. I would also like to wish them so much love and strength in their lives.”
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On 2 February 2021, our Founder, Victoria, proudly announced our new ambassador, celebrated Australian actor Matt Le Nevez, joining our PeopleStories Family. Victoria shared, “We are thrilled to welcome Matt to the PeopleStories team! His love for children and his connection with Cambodia represent a strong alignment of purpose. We both similarly built wonderful careers that are purpose driven. What unites us is our drive to make a difference in the lives of the people who need it the most.”
There’s no time to lose, Matt has already jumped on board and delivered our first ever Storytelling Workshop with a group of business leaders and passionate supporters. His sharing of the secrets on film sets and also as a communication guru in some developing countries (like Africa) was overwhelmingly and positively received by the group. Have a read of what people have to say: “Just had the most amazing hour with Matt hearing his story, sharing with others, and learning about this wonderful charity PeopleStories and the work they do.” - Greg McKenna, CEO at the Police Bank “It’s 3.30am in the U.K. and I’m wide awake! I’ve just spent a wonderful hour with some amazing folk and Matt at your workshop. The work you’re all doing is incredible and I’m so pleased to be a tiny part of it.” - Jean Davis
The support of Matt as an ambassador will strengthen PeopleStories’ mission to break the cycle of poverty through empowering children with greater access to quality education. We believe his unique skills and experiences will bring new perspectives and opportunities to our family.
Matt is setting himself a target of $18K donation by June 30, 2021 and you can give him a helping hand via his campaign: http://bit.ly/MattLeNevez_Donate Interested to attend the newly-added storytelling workshop? Here is the link: https://bit.ly/PSStorytelling_P Watch Matt’s TV interview: https://bit.ly/PS_ON_TV Read Matt’s press release: https://bit.ly/PSAmbassador_Matt PeopleStories has been serving the children of Cambodia since 2017 and our work won’t be successful without the support from our corporate partners and donors. Lloyd’s Asia has been backing PeopleStories since 2018 when we were introduced to their previous CEO, Angela. Since then, we have been hosting Treats for Good charity events at their Singapore office to raise fund to help further the education of children in rural Cambodia.
Talking about the workshop experience, Wen Ya shared, “We really enjoyed it! It was definitely interesting to do something different from our day-to-day work, but more importantly it felt very rewarding to help the community in Cambodia with sewing these masks. I don’t think many of us had sewn anything previously and so we enjoyed learning a new skill. Jacquelene (our volunteer mask making trainer) and Victoria (our Founder) were very patient in teaching and guiding us through the process of making these masks which helped us in completing them.”
The Lloyd’s Asia team are always keen to give back to the community where possible and committed to supporting charitable causes. Participating in the ‘Mask for Good’ workshop and doing a charitable activity together was very meaningful to them. They felt it was gratifying to be able to help the children in Cambodia with handmade masks from them! Wen Ya further reflected on Lloyd’s journey with PeopleStories, “We have been working with PeopleStories for quite some time now doing Treats For Good and we can see all the good and real work that PeopleStories has done. PeopleStories’ mission is to transform lives in rural Cambodia through education and that is also something that we believe will enable rural communities to break out of poverty.”
After months of working from home, many people are feeling a bit lack of human connection or connectedness. This workshop not only bring people closer but also offers some new skills plus a chance to give to the less fortunate. Victoria shared, “I personally didn’t know how to sew, but Jacquelene taught me so well and now I am wearing my own hand-sewn masks!!!” Would your organisation like to have a doing good team building workshop for your people? Do contact us at [email protected]for more details. After a visit to a STEM school with Victoria and Oliver that is 12 hours away from home, Teacher Sarith, who is a volunteer with PeopleStories, dreamt of getting his students to study in this school to have a brighter future. Sarith recalled, “After the visit, I saw incredible possibilities and couldn’t stop sharing with my students about the opportunity to study at this school. First step is to take the entrance exam at this STEM school.” The students were very interested in the school system in the STEM school described by Teacher Sarith and asked many important questions including “what job can we get after studying STEM?”.
A dream catcher protects the sleeping individual from negative dreams while letting positive dreams pass through. Teacher Sarith is certainly an encouraging dream catcher for his students.
Click on https://bit.ly/PS100Dreams202021 to see how you can be a dream catcher for these students too! Let’s hear from Mike Kershner, our volunteer who has been helping to make the dream of completing school come true for our students since 2018.
Mike and his wife visited Chea Smonn with Vic and Olli in April 2018 to see the community, meet many of the students, teachers, and parents. They also participated in the School for Life ceremony where they awarded scholarships and bicycles to several students. They were blown away by the hospitality and warmth they received from the community. The most inspiring moment for Mike on that trip was making a student home visit, one of the School for Life scholarship recipients from Chea Smonn. Mike was especially touched by how she continued her studies outside of the classroom and how she shared what she learnt with her sister. He recalled, “She showed us a whiteboard where she and her sister practised her lessons every day. It’s a tiny detail, but we loved that she had written on the whiteboard the day of the week so that she knew what lesson she had learnt that day!”
For anyone considering whether or not to join a charitable effort, here’s what Mike has to say, “I would say just jump in and do it. My only regret is I didn’t do it earlier. I always thought of this as something I should do, but then came up with a million excuses why I was too busy to get involved.”
He added, “However, even a small percentage of our time can make a big difference for some communities and people who benefit from that support. The personal sense of gratitude I get in helping others who face steeper challenges than me is the payoff. There isn’t a material asset, or bigger number in the bank account, or any nonsense like that that could even come close to the satisfaction and deeper understanding of people I gain from working to support someone along life’s journey.” Want to empower underprivileged students to complete school and help them uplift themselves from the poverty cycle? You can support them by donating to this new school year scholarships - 100 Dreams for 100 students. Hello Students, My name is Nika Bin and I am your school principal of Chea Smonn Secondary School.
All the teachers including myself are working hard to help you, to motivate and encourage you to learn both at school and at home. Education is important and we also encourage all parents to help and push their children learn at home. Even with the time constraints of distance learning, we provide exercises and lessons to all of you. We clean our school environment every day, we have masks, temperature checking tool and soaps. We even received masks and hand sanitizers from PeopleStories Charity for daily use. At the same time, we are working closely with authorities in the community to help with this work.
My name is Bok Hoon and I recently joined PeopleStories Team as an ongoing volunteer. While donating my time and skill for a good cause, I explored my motivation to help others and more importantly the purpose I personally serve in education. I didn’t have to look much further than the history of my family and in particular the story my grandpa that I would love to share with you...
He would lift the rickshaw with his bare hands and ran barefooted under the scorching hot sun or the incessant rain to the destination of his passengers. After a hard day’s work, he would meet all his fellow villagers from his hometown. Most of his fellow villagers were illiterate and needed help with reading and writing letters. He continued to learn how to read and write from the newspapers and his fellow villagers. While life was a struggle, he not only helped his fellow villagers to read and write letters, but also to write the addresses whenever they needed to send parcels home. All of this was done for free.
About a year ago, I came across PeopleStories when I attended their first annual charity dinner as a guest. I had gone to that dinner a year ago expecting nothing more than a lovely evening with like-minded friends who were contributing to a good cause. Little did I know that that dinner was the beginning of a wonderful year ahead of positive changes together with PeopleStories. Following that, I quickly got involved in promoting PeopleStories at my place of work, embarked on a travel volunteer trip to Siem Reap where I witnessed first hand the huge opportunity that lay in front of the children, if only they had access to the right tools which financial support could bring.
You could say that all our efforts will have culminated in the annual charity dinner. Our objective was to raise enough funds to provide education to 100 kids for the next school year. The annual charity dinner aptly named 100 Dreams, was a wonderful display of humanity at its best, pooling together time, efforts, and resources, in the name of a cause outside of ourselves.
As I write this, we are 80% to our target and have 8 more days to go to reach our goal.
Because of this experience,I have a newfound appreciation for the value of a dollar at the same time I understand that a contribution worth any amount is a good amount to start with. Join me and the movement of PeopleStories by sparing $1 a day to help a child complete school: https://chuffed.org/fundraiser/S4L201920-Bernice Have a look at the photos of our fun and meaningful dinner - suprise! http://bit.ly/PeopleStoriesDinner2019 Most organisations are now looking to constantly evolve and disrupt. Tech start-ups play an important role in bottom up innovation but reality is that 90% of them fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t take risk in pursuing our vision and dreams? Of course not! Dreams are some of the most powerful drivers of human behavior and we should always look to successful role models or, even better, use them to dream even bigger! This not only applies to start-ups but also to individuals including students in school. During my recent visit to the capital city of Cambodia - Phnom Penh, I had the privilege to meet and work with a number of high school and university students at a ‘Hackathon’. Experiencing their energy, maturity and kind hearts was absolutely amazing!  This clearly does not happen by accident but their personas are the result of thoughtful and focused education over the years. After seeing first-hand some of the leading STEM and New Generation schools there, it just confirmed my belief in the power of mentoring.
I learned so much from student Kret who came from one of the provinces where her family could not provide her with a better education. She has been living and studying at an NGO school for almost 8 years. Not only she surprised me with her sound English and excellent general knowledge but her dream and outlook for her future is just astonishing! In fact, she even invited us to visit her school and gave us an incredible tour there. When I worked with these amazing young students it gave me a lot of encouragement. What I saw was one of the positive and better futures for the students we support! Changing schools let alone the whole school system is hard (we’re trying though!) but to support deserving and talented students is comparatively easy. All we need to do is enable these students to pursue their dreams. Our new intake of 100 scholarship students is the future! I can’t wait to see them all realize their full potential in a few years! You can also make some real and direct impact with PeopleStories. Give us a helping hand today: https://chuffed.org/fundraiser/S4L201920-Olli  Looking back it was like yesterday when we first dreamed about Peoplestories. Everything started from a causal conversation with Victoria and Oliver, a few months prior to the official establishment of Peoplestories. I can still remember how much I was inspired by the passion and insight of this couple who were so determined to make real impact to the kids in rural Siem Reap.
We started everything from scratch, from thinking of a name, a mission and the scope, thinking about what we could and what we should do. To cut down on cost, we designed our first logo ourselves and that was when an amateur like me became the acting graphic designer for the team! We conducted countless conversations with our friends about Peoplestories and its values. We worked hard on our fundraising. We recruited, interviewed and expanded our team of Change Makers. We put tremendous effort into this but also had a lot of fun. I can't believe it has been two years already. My role, as the Lead of Ethics and Governance Function, is slightly different from most of the other functions which would have more direct contact and impact to our beneficiaries and a team to work with. I focus more on the backend work, such as setting internal policies, guidelines on ethics, ensuring integrity and alignment with our values of our members and programmes. As a clinician who has been working in the social service sector for years, I have witnessed a lot of good and also bad practices among charities and the helping profession. Peoplestories stands out because of its belief in the spirit of empowerment and changes that uplift, and more importantly a group of compassionate Change Markers who share and firmly stick to the same belief. I took my role to ensure Peoplestories keeps running as such. It is amazing to see Peoplestories grow, from only a few of us to such a big group of likeminded Change Makers (volunteers), from an idea to concrete programmes benefiting hundreds and counting. If you ask me what would be worth of celebrating at our 2nd birthday, I would say it is the Change Makers that we have. I have witnessed their wholehearted contributions and sacrifices despite their struggle on various commitments in their lives. They come here for nothing but to actualize what they believe and make a difference. Peoplestories is all about people. As much as I want you to find out more about the kids in our programmes and also our Change Makers, I also want to know more about you. Reach out to us if you are interested. Perhaps you could be the next Change Maker. |
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