RAISING Hope

Mint Lim is on a mission to educate children around the world, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. But 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  

- Pameyla Cambe

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. “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.’”