One Sneak Peek Into Musings of a Young Values Educator

At a entrepreneurs’ networking event, a fellow attendee said,

“We are the minority. Most youths today are not interested in building companies.”

And he is right.

Even rarer would be to find young founders that create businesses focusing mainly on social impact.

Meet Sri, founder of Jalan Journey, a local social enterprise that aims to educate students on social issues through the usage of a gamified digital platform.

(Jalan means “walk” in Malay.)

He is an engineering student from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, and has a lot of experience giving talks on societal issues before founding his company.

What’s notable would be that his team managed to clinch $51,000 in funding from the National Youth Council to build the company!

As a founder dabbling in such an unique space, I reckoned Sri has loads for our readers to learn from.

So we had a brief chat together. And these are what I learnt:

1. Team building is crucial

“I always aim to support my facilitators in any way I can so that they can do their job better. And when guiding them, it is really about the way you carry yourself and how you would put things across.

During the early days of Jalan Journey, it was just me and my co-founder (doing everything). But soon there was a transition period where things started happening.

More people took initiative to do sales, to help out… The team really bonded over our transition into a social enterprise, even those who did not found the company with us. I find this really rewarding.”

2. Understanding the target market

As a social enterprise who mainly targets Singaporean youths, Jalan Journey imparts values education not through boring and long lectures, but through a immersive gamified digital platform, a conduit that is not unfamiliar to the students of today.

“We don’t want to bore them using powerpoint slides, but rather we aim to let them role-play as characters in our platform to encourage empathy towards the disadvantaged.”

3. Adaptability of main product

“We started off teaching the topic of homelessness, before moving on to poverty, and now to sustainability and waste management. Our platform can be modified to teach a variety of social issues, and I feel that is what our value proposition is.”

Connect with Sri here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sricharanbala/

And that is it for today’s One Sneak Peek Into.

Stay tuned for more insights from our interview series as we continue to explore the stories of trailblazers breaking barriers and redefining success.