Cover Mint Lim wears a Tory Burch dress, and a Cartier Santos de
Cartier watch
Mint Lim wears a Tory Burch dress, and a Cartier Santos de Cartier watch
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For the founder of School of Concepts, and now Cartier Women’s Initiative fellow, her path to becoming a social entrepreneur was an unlikely one that began with learning the alphabet
The idiom “as easy as ABC” is not something every child can relate to—Mint Lim certainly couldn’t. She remembers spending her evenings as a kindergarten student at home with her mother, who tried to teach her to read and write the English alphabet. But the young Lim was confused: she could not see how what she had written was any different from what her mother wrote.
“I kept saying, yes, I understand, but she kept saying no,” Lim recalls. “We just kept going back and forth like that. And when somebody says something that’s very different from what you perceive, it really throws you into a realm of self‑doubt. You’re like, ‘Okay, so what is it I’m seeing now?’”
For Lim, mastering the ABCs seemed like a Herculean task. And if her experience with learning at home was already fraught with frustration, “imagine the horror in the classroom”, she says.
Read more: Cartier Women’s Initiative 2023: Meet the fellows from across Asia
“There were all these people who saw things differently from me.
“I began to marvel at how people could write better than me, and from literacy, it went on to other things like, ‘Oh, they can draw so well, they can dance so well, they can socialise so well.’”
When she saw her classmates’ abilities, Lim felt slow; she became too embarrassed to speak and had trouble making eye contact with others, developing what she describes as “a layer of shame towards learning”. That shame shadowed Lim throughout primary school—until, finally, she cracked the puzzle of the English alphabet. “In my head, I began to see each letter in a different coloured picture,” she explains. “I would break down a long word into different parts, and my comprehension of it would come out in pictures. It’s like decoding.”
This system would serve Lim well. She used it to understand the new concepts that were introduced to her as a secondary school student at Raffles Girls’ School. At that time, she also began tutoring children in her neighbourhood, which was how she discovered that the magic of her decoding method could help others. Many also happened to have dyslexia—a learning disability that affects one’s reading, writing and spelling skills—which helped the teenage Lim finally put a name to her own early learning difficulties.
“When I spoke to children with dyslexia, I knew immediately how their minds worked. I knew how they would best receive information,” says Lim. “When a dyslexic person gets the concept of things, they pick things up very easily after that. It’s just about getting them to understand the chain of thought, breaking it down, dissecting and compartmentalising it.”
Above Mint Lim on the August 2023 cover of Tatler Singapore
Mint Lim on the August 2023 cover of Tatler Singapore
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Concepts, which have so defined Lim’s journey as both a student and a teacher, also inspired the name of her enrichment centre and social enterprise School of Concepts (SOC), which she founded in 2017. By then, she was already an entrepreneur, having opened tutoring centres and an auto parts distribution business. But what she saw as her calling—to try and help as many children as possible—became too hard to ignore.
“I decided to set up a school for children from low‑income backgrounds, thinking that I could help them with my gift for teaching,” explains Lim. SOC caters to children under 12 and offers every student a “quality education”, as Lim proudly puts it, regardless of their learning needs. She calls it “a place of love”.
“I realised it’s the environment that actually helps children learn better,” says Lim, reflecting on her tutoring experiences, which shaped SOC. She also points out how a recent study by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement had shown that while Singapore students are among the most literate in the world, not many of them enjoy reading.
“A happy start [to schooling] makes so much of a difference,” says Lim. “We just have to motivate a person to want to learn more, to become a lifelong learner, and [eventually] become changemakers themselves.”
Creating a welcoming space for learning is one thing; crafting a curriculum is another. It took Lim five years to come up with the SOC Method, which uses a visual, auditory and kinaesthetic—related to one’s awareness of one’s body—approach to teaching, with an emphasis on phonics and play. She tested the method while teaching as many children as she could by spending her weeknights conducting lessons at family service centres.
“I was obsessed with making sure that [the SOC Method] is efficacious, that it will benefit every child,” says Lim, who sought the help of professors and early childhood educators to create her school’s curriculum from scratch. She felt that she could not use existing curricula and teaching programmes as they were too academic and did not prioritise a child’s learning environment. More importantly, they were catered to students who were already immersed in the English language, which she had found to be the reason many of the students she tutored were struggling at school.
“I realised that there was nothing wrong with their cognitive ability,” says Lim. “They just weren’t able to understand the medium of instruction. They didn’t know what was actually going on in school. And that’s what I experienced as a child too.”
Above Mint Lim
Mint Lim
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While Lim had sought to create the ideal school, she did not grasp the weight of her ambition until SOC opened its doors in Paya Lebar in 2017. “Onboarding students was a real challenge,” she says. “Even having them come to class was a challenge: they didn’t even have money to pay for any of these classes. And most of these kids were latchkey; they walked around the streets without their parents, so the decision maker and the child were not in the same place.”
Lim initially introduced a “pay what you want” model, funding SOC with the money from her other profitable businesses. But over time, she discovered that parents simply were not paying. SOC was also becoming more than a school. “For many children, [SOC] became their after‑school home,” says Lim. “We were feeding them. Parents would leave their very young children with me until two in the morning. I’d lock up everything with the kids in the space with me. It was so strange.”
Although Lim realised that SOC’s existing business model was not sustainable, she refused to ask for donations; she wanted it to remain a sustainable social enterprise. Having noticed that many of her students’ parents were smokers, she finally decided to peg the school fees to what she knew those from low‑income backgrounds could afford: the price of a pack of cigarettes. She also tweaked her business model to let students enrol at a discounted fee for a limited time, before being charged the full fee. It worked.
“If people are willing to pay the full fee after that discounted period, that means your programme is commercially viable,” says Lim. But her measure of success lies less in the school’s business model or curriculum, and more in the lives that she changes.
Lim recalls teaching a Primary One student whose father was struggling with debt. The young girl’s parents also had a strained relationship with each other. She did not speak a word of English, but she possessed a vast vocabulary of Hokkien vulgarities; she was also prone to throwing things around the classroom. Lim resorted to giving the child one‑to‑one lessons. “I started to teach her a lot more and tell her what’s right or wrong,” Lim says, “but I couldn’t be there for her all the time, because she wasn’t going to come in every day. I figured that the only way to really help her was to help her find herself.”
Above Lim wears a Tory Burch shirt, skirt, and her own ring
Lim wears a Tory Burch shirt, skirt, and her own ring
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Over time, the student’s behaviour and her academic performance radically improved. She received Edusave awards at ceremonies that her father proudly attended. He separated from his wife and eventually paid off his debt. He also started a food stall selling prawn mee—his daughter now helps him out with his F&B venture at the weekend. And the family now pays the full fees for SOC, deciding that they no longer need subsidies.
SOC is built on stories like this one, where children from troubled backgrounds eventually take charge of their lives. Although the school began with just eight students, it eventually grew via word of mouth. Many parents whose children had enrolled and flourished in their studies became advocates for SOC. Lim sees literacy as the key to uplifting families and communities. “That’s why I say children are changemakers,” she says. “They keep me going, every single day. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that the vicious cycle was going to repeat for a child.”
It was this passion that stood out to Cuili Ng, the regional head of corporate communications at Cartier, when she saw Lim speak at the Inaugural RaiSE Conference in 2022, which gathered social entrepreneurs and business leaders with a focus on social impact. “She’s really very tireless in how she champions SOC. It’s not just about herself; she’s got a bigger mission in mind,” says Ng. “In Singapore, everyone goes through this amazing education system, but there are still people who are left behind, or those with different learning needs. And Mint actually spotlights certain needs that might be invisible to most of us, so I think it’s important to tell stories like hers.”
Above Lim wears a Boss jacket,
Miu Miu shirt and a
Cartier Santos
de Carier watch
Lim wears a Boss jacket, Miu Miu shirt and a Cartier Santos de Carier watch
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Ng recommended that Lim apply to the Cartier Women’s Initiative (CWI), an annual international entrepreneurship programme that aims to drive change by empowering female impact entrepreneurs. Lim, who had just come out of confinement after giving birth to her first child, was unsure. “I was still trying to figure out my life as a new mother,” she recalls. “I didn’t really know if I could do it; I didn’t have the confidence. But in the spirit of empowerment, and what the CWI set out to be, Cuili said, ‘Don’t worry, let’s go through this journey together.’”
That journey took Lim all the way to Paris for the 2023 Cartier Women’s Initiative awards ceremony in May, where she was named the first Singaporean fellow of the programme since it was established in 2006. She was awarded a US$30,000 grant, as well as coaching, mentoring and networking opportunities, and education courses from the business school Insead.
“It felt so humbling and magical, like a dream come true,” says Lim. “The CWI didn’t just give me affirmation; it didn’t just validate [SOC] and our impact; it gave us a global stage beyond Singapore. And it helped me meet so many other inspiring female entrepreneurs and widen my horizons.”
With Cartier’s support, Lim now has her sights set on helping one million children acquire basic English literacy through SOC’s efforts by 2025. The school has another branch in Tampines, with more openings in the pipeline, and Lim is also looking beyond Singapore.
“I want to work with children from other countries who are really left behind,” she says, having been moved after her friends introduced her to children living in Thailand’s sea gypsy communities, and having explored orphanages in Penang, Malaysia. SOC has recently made its learning resources available through an augmented‑reality mobile app called Alphabet Explorer, which, as SOC’s website puts it, is designed to “transform how kids learn their ABCs”. Thanks to Lim’s story, we know how much of a difference that will make.
Credits
Photography: Munster Cheong
Art Direction: Charlene Lee
Styling: Daryll Alexius Yeo
Photography Assistant: Jovan Teo
Hair: Grego using Keune Haircosmetics
Make-Up: Grego using Chanel Beauty
Pameyla Cambe is the Assistant Digital Editor of Tatler Singapore. She handles the Fashion section of the website, where she reports on trends, the hottest fashion launches and what your favourite Asian celebrities are wearing.
