Her World Woman of the Year 2018: Ng Ling Ling

It was a blazing hot day at the Singapore
Sports Hub, and some 40 staff members from the Community Chest were standing on
a flight of stairs waiting for Ng Ling Ling to show up. She was due for a photo
shoot with this magazine as she had just been named Her World Woman of the Year
2018, and her staff wanted to surprise her by being part of it.

In the heat, their discomfort was obvious – their shirts were sweat-soaked, and they used whatever they could get their hands on to fan themselves. But there wasn’t a single complaint. In fact, more than one person told us: “Ling Ling is a great boss. It’s the least we can do for her.” It was, in effect, a warm goodbye to a well-loved leader who was then in the midst of prepping her transit to a new posting in the Ministry of Health.

Ling Ling, 46, may have stepped down as
managing director of the Community Chest (Comchest) in June, but her
achievements as Singapore’s chief fundraiser in the last five years are pretty
much legend. During her tenure, Comchest, which supports more than 80
charities, rallied 240 social service organisations to raise a record $800
million in donations through the Care and Share Movement (launched as part of
the nation’s SG50 celebrations). Her work also helped to increase Comchest’s
donations from an average of $40 million to $50 million annually, and she
worked relentlessly to build a culture of care and authenticity within the
Comchest team.

Beneath her warm exterior is a steely
resolve – a necessary trait, given that rejection was part of the job, but so
was getting up and trying again. What kept Ling Ling going were the words of
Comchest founder Dr Ee Peng Liang: “If you are seeking money for yourself and
begging, then maybe you should be shy about it. But if you are asking for a
cause, and the money is going to a charity to help the disadvantaged and
underprivileged, you ought to be very thick-skinned. There’s no shame in
asking.”

“I was sensitive to the brokenness in
families in the community”

Ling Ling’s desire to make people’s lives better was born out of personal circumstance. Growing up in the Punggol-Hougang area, she lived in an estate largely made up of two and three-room flats. Her mother, a homemaker, and her father, a second-hand car dealer, provided a “loving, secure and supportive” home. But even at a young age, Ling Ling was aware that others weren’t as lucky. “I was very sensitive to the brokenness I saw in the families in my immediate community due to drugs, gambling, abuse and other social problems,” she says. At the time, she felt helpless, but it would return to tug at her heartstrings in later years.

After graduating with a degree in
accountancy from Nanyang Technological University, Ling Ling – a self-professed
“practical” person – decided that her first priority was to get a job that
would improve her family’s circumstances. To her, there was no question that
their needs would always come before her own.

So, she got her first job in treasury in
DBS Finance, where she stayed for seven years. “I was in my late 20s by then,
and I felt a void. I had a lot of energy and I wondered what I could put that
energy into,” she says. She left DBS to take up a short-lived international
relations role at the Singapore International Foundation, before joining the
National Council of Social Service (NCSS) – Comchest’s parent organisation – in
2001.

The rest, you might say, is history.

“People say I have the heart to do it”

Ling Ling has always been a problem-solver. Close friend Ong Puay See, who’s known her since they were teenagers, says that Ling Ling’s “mathematical” approach probably put the head aspect into a sector that is usually all about heart. “Ling Ling brings structured thinking and meticulousness in looking at numbers, is results-oriented, and focuses on setting goals and reaching them,” she points out.

Before taking on the Comchest role in 2013, Ling Ling worked on establishing corporate governance standards for non-profits, set up the Social Service Training Institute (updated), and developed a Fund Allocation Team – a central fund administrator to streamline resources for beneficiaries, handle budgets for charities, and provide accountability to funders.  “This gave me a lot of insights into the resourcing needs of our social service charities,” she says. “By the time the opportunity came to interview for the Comchest role, I had a deep knowledge of social services, and a lot of ground experience with the charities, their management, their board and their struggles in terms of resourcing.”

But beyond the practical qualifications
needed to get the job done, Ling Ling really wanted to make a difference. “Most
people said I had the heart to do it. They say that when I share about a need,
I’m very authentic and passionate because I’m just speaking from my heart,” she
says. It also helped, adds Comchest chairman Phillip Tan, that she had a knack
for spotting a gap within the charity sector and matching it to a donor’s
aspirations. He says: “We can strategise, but Ling, as the field commander, had
to be able to implement [our strategies] and keep donors happy."

Take Singtel. It had, for the past two
decades, raised between $2 million and $3 million each year for children with
special education needs. Ling Ling noticed that most programmes catered to
those up to the age of 18, which made her wonder how to convince people that
more had to be done for young adults with special needs. “There were just too
few options,” she says.

At that time, Comchest was trying to raise
funds to help start the Enabling Village – a pioneering space to provide
community support and employment to young adults with special needs. Ling Ling
spotted an opportunity and went for it. She says: “I stretched Singtel’s
imagination to where their aspirations were. I said, ‘You know these children
whom you’ve been investing in these last two decades? They’re growing up and
they need that support, that booster, to transit into adulthood’. It took
months, but in the end, we got an additional donation of $1 million from
Singtel for the Enabling Village.” The approach was typical of Ling Ling’s
belief in simply having the facts at hand, then speaking from the heart.

“You either let your environment overwhelm
you, or you adapt”

As a student, Ling Ling didn’t have the money to buy gifts for friends. So she got creative and made unique gifts like teddy bears dressed in clothes she’d sewn herself. Puay See recalls: “She would always make little gifts for us, and when we did project work, she would be the one working with her hands, using very few resources to make new and amazing stuff. I think she actually brings a lot of that to her current work.” Ling Ling’s ethos has always been that you can either let your environment overwhelm you, or you adapt and thrive in it.

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You see that can-do attitude in how she shaped her introspective personality to be more extroverted (“Because the job really requires it”), and boldly reshaped the culture at Comchest so the team could be more effective. “I really didn’t know how to fundraise. But because of my banking background, I’d always appreciated the relationship management approach of account servicing. In a lot of relationships, if it’s just transactional, people are put off,” she says. “But if you care about the involvement that you’re putting people through, you want to build an understanding with them, and you want to follow through. 

This translated into the creation of a team
of relationship and engagement officers who, rather than simply canvassing
donations to hit a target, would dive deeper to understand the causes that
resonate with donors, build stronger relationships with them, and get them more
involved with the beneficiaries – for example, through volunteerism. The
giving, she says, would naturally follow.

“Get to know what special needs children go
through during their education. Get to know low-income seniors in rental flats
– how do we engage them in senior activity centres to prevent social isolation?
Young adults with disabilities – how do we empower them to do vocational jobs?
When people know what’s at the heart of it, the giving of treasures becomes
much more meaningful and sustainable,” she adds.

Her hypothesis eventually paid off. “The
first year was tough. I didn’t meet my target,” she admits. “But I felt we were
on to something and I saw my team members being more motivated. And then the
results came.”

"Volunteering is important because
people begin to think beyond themselves”

It’s clear that Ling Ling has always been
all about taking action – particularly in the social services sector, where
manpower constraints pose challenges. It’s why she’s such an advocate of
volunteerism. “I feel the challenge is how to rally people to volunteer more in
such a time-strapped economy and society. I find volunteering so important
because people begin to think beyond themselves. You’re helping others with a
simple action that is real and practical – being present,” she says.

At Comchest, she led by example. Ling Ling started an eight-week programme for the staff to volunteer at Rainbow Centre – a school for children with special needs. For two hours a week, they assisted the teachers with classroom activities. “Sustainable, regular volunteerism is very important – not only for making the volunteerism experience meaningful, but for real change and sowing of your love and heart. I felt I needed to lead my very busy Comchest staff to believe it could be done,” she says. That vision paid off, and helped her staff realise it was possible to engage busy corporates in sustained volunteer programmes.

Kids were not left out of Ling Ling’s plan
to create a kinder, more empathetic Singapore. In 2015, Comchest persuaded the
Ministry of Education to reintroduce Sharity the elephant into the school
curriculum for younger children, to help inculcate the importance of caring for
and sharing with the disadvantaged from a young age. Sharity now has a website
with resources for parents and kids – like songs, classroom activities an
animated episodes.

“I protected the time to get to know my
team”

For Ling Ling, the little things mattered
when it came to her team. “I evolved over the years. I was a lot more
task-oriented when I started leading teams, but I realised that people make all
the difference. I’ve learnt how precious people’s experiences are in getting
things done,” she says. Among the hardest but most valuable lessons she has
learnt is to let go and trust other people, and to forgive herself and them
when the results are not perfect. “It just opens up more possibilities,” she
adds.

It’s why she deliberately carved time out of her busy schedule for informal chats with her staff. Every member of her team has had an hour-long one-on-one session with her. “I protected the time for getting to know them as individuals – what inspired them, what disappointed them, what was important to them, and what spurred them on. I used a combination of those insights to lift them up,” she says.

She fostered a more nurturing work
environment and took the time to learn about her team’s personal circumstances
(whether they had a parent with dementia or a child with special needs), to see
how they could be supported. “I have seen many such cases where you engage them
at a personal level and affirm them, and you see amazing results,” she says.

Beyond encouraging ideas and innovation,
she’s all about the big picture. “I like to paint a compelling vision of where
we are going, and why we are doing this. Then I’ll paint an aspiration that’s
quite a stretch from today’s situation. But I’ll allow a lot of space for
people to express their interpretation, their way of seeing how that can be
done, and I’ll work alongside them.”

In fact, so close was Ling Ling to her team
that when she left Comchest, she gave each of them a fragrance-infused keychain
engraved with their initials, because “they have been the fragrance in my life
for over five years here and made it sweeter”.

“Mum, if you don’t do it, who will?”

Ling Ling is married to data scientist Ian
Lo, 44, and the couple have a 10-year-old son. She adds that her husband’s and
son’s support was a big reason why she was able to excel at work.

She recalls grappling with “really bad”
hours when starting out at Comchest, with back-to-back fundraising events on
weekdays and weekends. Knowing that Ian would take over at home gave her
much-needed peace of mind. “My husband’s support is tremendously important for
me to feel like I’m doing the right thing,” she says. “He wanted me to fulfil
all my potential, and released me to carry out my roles. He was very
understanding and not demanding of my time.”

For Ian, it was a no-brainer. He says that although Ling Ling may not have been in frontline work like what social workers or the voluntary welfare organisations do, she played a big role in providing the resources they needed to be successful. “I’m very proud of her for doing that. Despite the obstacles, she soldiered on. Even when she was discouraged, she found the strength again to continue,” he says. “I truly believe that it’s my role as a husband to help her succeed. And I was just doing what I promised to do when we got married – to help her along the way.” 

One particular incident stands out for Ling
Ling. She recalls getting home around 10pm one night, just past her son’s
bedtime. He was still up and waiting for her, so they had a conversation – one
that addressed her punishing work schedule and her guilt about not being able
to spend as much time with him as she would like. “I asked if he thought I was
doing the right thing, and he said ‘Mummy, you know I really miss you, but if
you don’t do it, who will?’. That one childlike comment just released me,” she
says.

Ling Ling has always lived her life by the
values her parents taught her – to be resourceful, resilient, and above all,
creative about generating possibilities. She takes that can-do spirit with her
wherever she goes. Just like when she was a kid and had a little badge pinned to
her backpack with the words: “If you cannot do big things, just do small things
in a big way.”

And that’s exactly what she intends to keep
doing.

Before taking on the Comchest role in 2013, Ling Ling worked on establishing corporate governance standards for non-profits, worked with the core team at the Social Service Training Institute, and developed a Fund Allocation Team – a central fund administrator to streamline resources for beneficiaries, handle budgets for charities, and provide accountability to funders.