Why an NPO?

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by

Little U

We will incorporate Little U as an NPO in 2025 and build it as a charity for the advancement of education in society. Would you like to grow with us?

For the betterment of all. 

Our vision to “equip families for success” means we start with families and students who need us, and with whom we can build a successful journey with. This includes families and children who may usually feel excluded from the mainstream fare of high priced “premium” education services – low income families, single parent families, families of special needs children. One family that has benefitted from our Little U (Preschool) is single mum Sarah Thomas, who shared about the impact we made in her and her daughter’s life: 

My desire is to see more Sarahs come to us, and who will feel safe growing their family education with us.

All children should have access to great education. 

Great education begins in the family. It is centred around people care. Within education are two big areas: learning and teaching. So there is the learner and there is the teacher. Great education is taking into consideration the needs of both the learner and the teacher in every context of education – at home, work or play.

In the things I do, learning and teaching are customised to the individual who is an involved collaborator of that process. The process of great education is slow, careful, useful, beautiful. Like a skilled craftsman at work, great education brings forth wisdom, the highest form of lifelong learning. It leaves no person behind. It is ever mindful of a journey that takes patience, courage and love to develop.

Great education is not profit making.

“Patience, courage and love” are words that sit well with a mindful, child sensitive educator. These are qualities that are difficult to price but are highly prized in all work to do with children and learning. This is because the human child takes about 18-25 years to fully develop his or her life skills into the labour market. 

The approach of making Great Education at Little U is based on an apprenticeship model that takes a long term view of growth and transformation. We believe this is the most ethical way to conduct education. That means, not only do we not want to leave any child or parent behind, we also want to develop their skills in a slow and deep manner so that they can master the life skills required for the future. We will never forfeit the child’s rights to quality learning for the sake of making money, but we aim to make Little U sustainable for the people whose lives are invested into making it work. 

An NPO is the best fit legality for Little U to grow into. 

Little U was created as the teaching arm of the Homeschool Singapore community in 2018. Like-minded homeschooling families offered modules to another in the comfort and safety of their homes.

In 2021, Little U was incorporated as an LLP to legally run paid courses run by families and small events. We learnt at that time, even though we were doing work from the ground up, ACRA required a legal entity for monetary transactions. The incorporation led us to look outside of the homeschooling community.

In 2023, Little U formally moved to serve the public with a robust, structured program to include more families – schooling and homeschooling – who desired an alternative learning community based on our unique approach to education. 

In 2025, we hope to join the voices of the 2000+ NPOs1 in Singapore to bring about better changes to education. We believe a time is coming in Singapore where education should be hybridised for all families to design their own education pathways. 

In the words of Laurence Lien2, “NPOs can be a rich source of innovation and experimentation, as they can take risks that the Government cannot take … Being in touch with the ground, NPOs may also be better able to identify opportunities for innovative intervention. The public sector should hence welcome and even encourage the proliferation of new ideas from the nonprofit sector: competition can lead to better approaches and models for Singapore.”

An NPO would strengthen our reputation of working for the common good. 

An NPO is a long term vision. It requires an infrastructure of governance for accountability and growth. We are ready to do it at Little U. And those who invest in Little U, now and for the future, are assured that any money spent is directed towards the common good, a great education for all who come to us. 

I suppose I would like the founding community at Homeschool Singapore and the current families of Little U to remember that not only did they help to build a safe foundation for homeschooling children, their contributions will leave Little U in better shape than when we first started for the children of the nation. 

Well known NPO leaders have also shared that the work they do is special because it is not part of the rat race. It is a “moral obligation to make the world a better place, especially when we look into the eyes of our own children and think about the world we are leaving behind for them to inherit”.3 

Little U brings a unique solution to the table.

Having studied the works of great educators from antiquity to present day, I have found them to say the same thing: that children ought to be trained up with life skills, practically relevant to their experience, relevant to the workforce that they will enter, and with intelligent instructions, kindness and compassion from the adults who look after them. 

The best educators have always been fierce advocates for children’s rights. They have put themselves on the line (see Janusz Korczak as the most outstanding example) to ensure children’s voices are heard. This work is important and incomplete. All of us who work with children and believe in their rights to great education will need to invest our hearts and minds to train them up in safe learning environments. And if there are none, we will build these environments. We will share how we do them with others who want them. 

In a 1983 conversation with the Ralph Tyler, he mentioned these glaring problems with American education: 

  • It struggles to reach all the children of the population, especially of the minority groups. Children brought up in single parent homes lack familial security and support, and are disadvantaged as a result.
  • Youths are not adequately prepared for the adult world because they lack opportunities to take responsibility and take consequences for real life mistakes.
  • Children experience disruptive changes in the homes due to dual working parents and technology (TV).  Rebuilding the educational environment for children is important because “the demands for education are far greater than can be met in the limited time available in school”. 

What Tyler mentioned in the 80s are evergreen problems across the world. We will always need labourers in the harvest field for the work of educating:

  • children, 
  • responsible adult parents and 
  • progressive educators. 

Our work is not just founded on contractual workers with good ideas, but with committed families who stay, teach and learn, and grow together. How precious this structure is. With an improved legal structure and fundraising capacity as an NPO, our programs reaching preschoolers to adult caregivers can only increase in strength and clarity. 

Let me end off my sharing with a quote from Sarah Thomas, the single mum whom I mentioned at the beginning, who was impacted by our work (and is now a dear friend to some of us) : “[Little U] aided more change in my life in the season I most needed it, not by fantastic over the top things, but by simply being relevant and consistent even when I couldn’t … I’ve learnt that each one of us could multiply what we have, given the right space to do it from.”

  1.  Singapore, with a five million population, has a vibrant charitable sector with over 2000 registered charities attracting approximately USD$2.18 billion in annual donations. source
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  2.  Laurence Lien is the Chairman of Lien Foundation, the CEO of the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre and the Acting CEO of the Community Foundation of Singapore. He is also the President of the Centre for Non-Profit Leadership, the Deputy Chairman of the Caritas Singapore Community Council, and a board member of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation at the Singapore Management University. Before his full-time involvement with the non-profit sector, he served in the Singapore Administrative Service for 14 years. source
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  3.  The full context of the quote is meaningful. “Our work allows us to come to terms with our moral obligation to make the world a better place, especially when we look into the eyes of our own children and think about the world we are leaving behind for them to inherit. We are able to achieve alignment of our personal vision, organisation’s vision and a higher purpose. This is unlike unhappy workplaces where employees only care about their paycheck. Working in this sector is very different from a rat race. It is far from a race to just get rich. You get a lot of happiness and emotional fulfilment that is missing in many other industries. The human factor is also more prominent than other industries. Human resource shapes much of the work, be it through your colleagues, volunteers or beneficiaries. There is an invigorating, start-up-like culture prominent in non-profits. Teams are often leaner than other sectors, with each member resourcefully synthesising multiple domains in order to contribute to the cause. Like-minded people come together for a mission, fueled by passion, not money. Anyone can donate to nonprofits, but it is special to be able to leave the charity in better shape than when you first started.”source
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Written by Little U CEO/Founder, Dawn Fung. First shared 3rd May 2023 with the core leadership.