Carrie Tan desperately wanted to get married before she turned 30. So when a man showed up in her life when she was 29 and asked for her hand after just three months, she said yes. Alas, the marriage lasted barely seven months. “There was so much tension from mismatched expectations and there were many fights. In one of those fights, he got physical,” says Ms Tan, now 35.
Then a successful headhunter, she walked out of the marriage. “I was earning my own keep and I was a strong-minded woman but walking out was so difficult. It got me thinking: ‘What if I were not educated, not earning my own money and had children?‘ she says.
The episode galvanised her into finally acting on an idea which had been percolating in her head after a sobering trip to India in 2007. Two weeks volunteering in an orphanage in Kadapa had exposed her to issues – infanticide, bride burning and sex trafficking – which jolted her out of her complacency.
In 2012, she gave up her five-figure monthly salary to found Daughters Of Tomorrow (DOT), a social enterprise to provide skills training and employment for underprivileged women in India so that they could have a livelihood.
“I noticed there was a gap in India. While there were many NGOs (non-governmental organisations) giving women training, there were not many giving them jobs. We trained 50 women and got them to make things we designed, like purses, bags, children’s dresses and other handicrafts, which we would then sell in Singapore,” she says.
Her life turned another corner when she attended a poverty roundtable conducted by Caritas, a social service arm of the Catholic Church. For the first time, she realised there was an “invisible” group of poor people in Singapore. Before long, she found herself having to give up her India project because her hands were full helping this group tackle their complex problems.
A couple of years later, DOT morphed into a charity focusing on Singapore. Not only does it help women from low-income families find jobs, but it also offers a slew of programmes, from confidence and financial literacy workshops to IT training, to prepare them for gainful and sustainable employment. It now has a team of 11 employees, including part-timers, and was made an Institution of a Public Character last year, allowing it to issue tax deductible receipts to donors.
Its good work did not go unnoticed. Funding support started coming in from organisations like the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) and the National Council of Social Service (NCSS). Today, DOT runs a whole slew of training programmes and workshops to support underprivileged women and get them ready for employment.
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Source: The Straits Times, 11 March 2018