Yale-NUS alumni making an impact through entrepreneurship

At Yale-NUS College, we encourage our students to pursue their interests and explore opportunities to make a positive impact on the community. We catch up with three alumni, Shanice Nicole Stanislaus (Class of 2017), Liam Rahman (Class of 2017) and Joshua Tay (Class of 2021) to find out how their experiences at Yale-NUS have influenced their paths to become successful entrepreneurs and how they hope to contribute meaningfully through their chosen field.

Shanice is the co-founder and director of Creatives Inspirit, a creative arts company which seeks to empower and nurture a community of socially responsible thinkers, artists, problem-solvers and creative changemakers regardless of their sickness, disability or lack of performance experience.

“The inspiration behind Creatives Inspirit came from my final year capstone project, ‘The Drunken Butterfly’,” Shanice explained. ‘The Drunken Butterfly’ was a clown and dance theatre performance that was created to enable audiences to better understand the struggles of illness and caregiving. “Creating that work was inspired by many stories of students on campus who were dealing with similar experiences. That performance was a hit!” she remarked.

The restaging of ‘The Drunken Butterfly’ during the Gateway Arts Festival 2019. Image provided by Shanice Nicole Stanislaus.

Over the past five years, Creatives Inspirit has created many impactful projects, such as the ‘AnyBody Can Dance’, ‘Play through Movement’, and the ‘Why Should I Care’ programme series. “These programmes were done in collaboration with multiple artists who worked with us so that we could offer more inclusive programmes for diverse communities including those who experience illness, caregiving or disabilities,” explained Shanice. Through dance and play, the programmes helped to serve as a tool of respite and empowerment to individuals from all walks of life.

Seniors participating in Creatives Inspirit’s intergenerational dance programmes (top) and participants at the ‘Play through Movement’ workshop (bottom) during Got To Move 2019. Images provided by Shanice Nicole Stanislaus.

Creatives Inspirit has carried on its work and partnered with organisations and events such as 3 Pumpkins and Got To Move Singapore to continue bringing “dance and fun” to various communities like children and elderly. Some activities included creating a workshop which taught children how to clown and intergenerational virtual dance parties for community members.

Shanice filming a virtual programme, ‘Who’s our next clown?’, as part of the collaboration with 3 Pumpkins for their Kids Stay Home series in 2020. Image provided by Shanice Nicole Stanislaus.

While Shanice created Creatives Inspirit after leaving Yale-NUS, some alumni like Liam started their entrepreneurship journey even before joining the College. Liam created Equal Education Partners – a Welsh recruitment company which seeks to provide high quality staff to schools and resources for teaching and learning to students – with his mother, a teacher, in 2011, two years prior to attending Yale-NUS. He was motivated by the necessity to improve the education recruitment sector in Wales, his homeland, and was inspired to promote fair pay and professional learning among teachers.

Liam (third person from the right) with Equal Education Partners’ management team in early November 2021. Image provided by Liam Rahman.

With the COVID-19 pandemic presenting a range of challenges as a result of school closures, Liam, who is now Managing Director of Equal Education Partners, led his team to administer government-backed financial support, ongoing training opportunities and provided support to over 100 teaching professionals who were unable to work due to school closures.

Liam was awarded the St David’s Award (International category) by First Minister at the Welsh Parliament (Senedd) in 2019, for expanding access of world class education to pupils across Wales. Image provided by Liam Rahman.

Liam credits his Yale-NUS experience for helping him to develop his company. “The liberal arts and sciences education at Yale-NUS honed my ability to learn quickly and to operate across diverse disciplines,” he said. Additionally, with his college experiences working across a range of sectors, like energy shipping and investment banking, he realised that it was “possible to heighten [his] ambition for Equal Education” and that he “could take the company further in the years that followed.”

Joshua (second person from the right) speaking on a panel on at-risk youth development. Images provided by Joshua Tay.

Similar to Liam’s goal of positively supporting youth, Joshua is the co-founder of Impart, a social service non-profit organisation that empowers youths-facing-adversity by providing development opportunities like one-on-one tutoring, passion development, and mental health interventions. Impart was inspired by Joshua’s experiences working in rehabilitative institutions in Singapore where he realised that youths facing adversity in the community were functionally cut off from care and resources.

Hence, together with a small group of friends from Yale-NUS, Impart was started to bridge this gap in the community in 2017. At Yale-NUS, he found that his education trained him “to engage with complex problems from diverse angles” and “surrounded [him] with a community of people who were crucial to the substances, sinews, and bones of Impart.”

“We didn’t want to start by creating an organisation, and then corral participants. We wanted youths facing adversity and their social workers [to] actually experience significant support. We believed that if our methods were right, the demand was bound to follow, and it did. It was only then that we scaled up and formally registered the organisation in 2019,” Joshua said.

Since then, Impart has significantly grown, supporting more than 200 youths every week. “Beyond numerical scale, I see Impart’s growth largely in the way that volunteers are increasingly empowered to play a significant role in the social impact sector –– we’re not maximising volunteer potential just yet, but we’re headed in the right direction,” Joshua added.

Besides shaping the education sector in Singapore through Impact, Joshua was recently appointed as a member of the National Committee on Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Recidivism’s Youth Advisory Group. Though COVID-19 has slowed down operations within the group, Joshua plans to utilise his Impart experiences and engage with key government stakeholders to explore how youths facing adversity can be better supported.