We Won a Create4Good Award: Why "Reducing Inequality" Includes the Right to Be Heard

What Create4Good actually is

Create4Good, known as C4G to those who have surrendered the leisure for full titles, is the social-venture programme administered by the Singapore University of Technology and Design. It was the creation of the late philanthropist Mr Kwek Leng Joo, a gentleman who held the gloriously unfashionable conviction that talented young people ought to direct their gifts toward the repair of society rather than merely toward the accumulation of their own comfort.

The programme is governed by a single, steady preoccupation: the reduction of inequality, marching in deliberate step with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 10. It conducts itself as an accelerator, furnishing workshops, mentorship and the occasional panel of the sort that leaves one feeling agreeably interrogated, and it offers a reward that does wonders for the concentration. Selected teams receive up to S$50,000 in equity-free funding. Equity-free: no discreet sliding of a contract across the table in exchange for a portion of the company one has scarcely finished building. To anyone who has nurtured a young venture, "equity-free" ranks among the most quietly romantic phrases the language affords.

Admission, however, is not granted for good intentions alone. A team must contend with inequality in a manner that is considered, humane, and demonstrably more than a fashionable application wearing the borrowed costume of a charity. Which delivers us, with some inevitability, to the matter we must now account for.

Why a public-speaking company belongs in a programme about inequality

We are accustomed to picturing inequality in the currencies we can readily count: money, marks, square footage, opportunity. Yet beneath all of these sits an older and more cunning inequality, and it is the inequality of whose voice is permitted to be heard. Consider the excellent idea that expires, unspoken, in the meeting, because the person who held it could not coax it past the threshold of their own nerve. Consider the worthier candidate who yields the position to a lesser one for no reason finer than that the lesser one spoke first and spoke louder. Consider the reticent student, the trembling applicant, the individual conducting the entire ordeal in their second or third language. Each carries a full complement of sound and deserving thoughts that never survive the crossing from the privacy of the mind to the open air of the room.

That crossing, the distance between knowing a thing and being able to say it, is no permanent flaw of character to be borne with resignation. It is a deficit of skill. And deficits of skill, mercifully, may be remedied. A confident voice is not a fortunate inheritance distributed at birth among a chosen few. It is a craft. And a craft may be taught. That conviction constituted the entirety of our case before the C4G judges, and, to our considerable and faintly incredulous delight, they elected to stand behind it.

How we prevailed

I shall not affect to have read the minds of the judges, an exercise that is in any case best avoided by all parties, but several considerations appear to have weighed in our favour.

The first was that the problem we named was real and specific. "Helping people to communicate better" is the sort of sentiment one encounters embossed within a greetings card. "Closing the confidence gap that silently determines who is heard in classrooms, in interviews and in pitches" is something one may actually take up one's sleeves and build toward.

The second was durability. C4G is engagingly merciless upon this point: a noble cause that collapses the instant its funding is withdrawn is not impact but pyrotechnics, splendid for a single evening and wholly absent by morning. We arrived bearing an actual plan for keeping the lights lit, a sentence considerably duller than its importance merits.

The third, offered with all appropriate modesty, was that we demonstrated rather than described. We are, when all is said, a company concerned with the art of the pitch. To have presented ourselves at a pitching competition unable to pitch would have constituted an irony of such density that it might reasonably have collapsed into a small and embarrassed black hole.

So, what happens next?

The winning of a grant is not a finishing line. It is, rather, the moment at which one is handed a set of keys, beamed upon with great warmth, and left to discover the location of the nearest filling station entirely unaided. The S$50,000 purchases us room: room to build, room to reach a greater number of people, and room to go on demonstrating the faintly obstinate proposition that confidence upon one's feet is acquired rather than bestowed.

To SUTD, to the memory of Mr Kwek Leng Joo, and to every changemaker alongside whom we stood in this cohort: our thanks. To be chosen from a field of such quality is humbling in the proper and useful sense of that word, the sense that sends one back to work rather than merely leaving one pleased.

And to you, reading this with a perfectly sound idea lodged somewhere behind your teeth and stubbornly declining to emerge: you are precisely the person for whom pitchMe was built.

The floor, then, is yours. If you have ever watched a smoother talker carry off the opportunity that ought by rights to have borne your name, come and see what we do. The voice is already yours. We attend only to the courage required to use it.