Role of
the Board
Our Board
Board
Committees

Board

Role of the Board

AWARE’s Board is committed to maintaining high standards of corporate governance and accountability to its stakeholders. Our stakeholders include the regulators, the clients we serve, our supporters (donors, members and volunteers), our partners, staff and the community at large.

The Board decides on the major strategic directions of AWARE, allocates financial resources, provides legal and financial oversight, reviews the performance of management, and ensures that the organisation serves its mission in accordance with its values. The Board meets every month to carry out its functions.

No Board members are remunerated for their Board services.

Read more 2022 Board Information here.

Our Board

Ong Soh Chin

President

Ong Soh Chin is an editorial and PR consultant. Previously, she was Southeast Asia PR Director at Netflix, overseeing Publicity and Communications for Southeast Asia. Soh Chin has also served as Deputy Director, External Relations and Strategic Planning at the Institute of Policy Studies, as well as Asia-Pacific Editor and Speechwriter with the global editorial team at Shell. A veteran journalist and editor who has covered the arts, entertainment, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, politics and current affairs in her career, she worked on different desks at The Straits Times, where she wrote regularly about women’s rights and gender equality. She is currently pursuing a part-time postgraduate diploma in Counselling Psychology.

Penelope Shone

1st Vice-President

Penelope Shone was born in New Zealand. She has been a resident of Singapore since 1985, and an AWARE member for 20 years. Her career has unfolded in both the public and private sectors. Most recently, she led international public affairs and communications for General Electric across 150 countries. Prior to that, she was a managing director at Citigroup for 12 years, leading the company’s public affairs, communications and citizenship strategies across Asia Pacific. This included the supervision of 20,000 volunteers and $18 million in annual grants to NGOs.

Elisa Kang

2nd Vice-President

Elisa Kang spent 13 years in wealth management advising clients on asset allocation and impact investments, before pursuing a Master’s in Counselling at Monash University in 2014. From 2016-18, Elisa worked as a part-time counsellor at Singapore Management University. She began her involvement in gender justice in 2007, volunteering in a microfinance consultancy in India and an NGO fighting violence against women and trafficking in Nepal. Elisa has been involved with AWARE since 2016: as a trainer with Catalyse, a counsellor, a volunteer Helpliner and a project manager for the Women’s Helpline expansion.

Aarathi Arumugam

Treasurer
Aarathi Arumugam is an entrepreneur whose career trajectory has taken her along different paths, from corporations to volunteer organisations to start-ups. Since becoming a member in 2009, Aarathi has volunteered with AWARE as a trainer, educating and raising awareness about workplace sexual harassment and comprehensive sexuality education. In 2019, she also conceptualised and executed a series of events called Kitchen Movements, to raise awareness and funds for a women’s charity in Singapore. Aarathi also currently serves as Daughters Of Tomorrow’s Financial Controller.

Kathy Park

Assistant Treasurer
Kathy Park is President at CooperVision, spearheading Asia-Pacific business for the optical company. She has worked for various companies, such as Essilor and Johnson & Johnson, with a mission of improving people’s lives by improving their vision. She has played an active role in organising and advocating for women leadership at the workplace. With her experience leading a global company and serving on corporate boards, she is excited to be part of bigger changes to come in the landscape of gender equality.

Teo You Yenn

Secretary

Teo You Yenn has been a member and volunteer at AWARE since 2004. She is a sociologist whose research and teaching focus on poverty and inequality, governance and state-society dynamics, gender and class. She is the author of Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How family policies make state and society (Routledge, 2011) and This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). She is one of the founding editors of AcademiaSG, a platform that promotes scholarship on Singapore and publicly engaged research.

Fikri Alkhatib

Board Member
Fikri Alkhatib has been an AWARE member since 2012 and has volunteered on a number of advocacy and research initiatives, including the We Can! campaign to end violence against women and the Women’s Action website for SG50. She has a Masters in Sociology from Columbia University and is a former Public Service Commission scholar. Fikri recently left the civil service for a career in the non-profit sector.

Ho Shyn Yee

Board Member
Ho Shyn Yee has been a volunteer and fundraiser for AWARE since 2015, including active participation in the Annual Fundraising Ball Committee and Fundraising Board Sub-Committee. With more than 20 years of experience in the technology, travel/hospitality and advisory sectors, Shyn Yee lends her commercial acumen, agile management approaches and strategic thinking capabilities to AWARE. A strong advocate for gender equality, she has led corporate women’s chapters, championing gender parity in the workplace and in leadership. Shyn Yee is also a fellow with the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Center and Alumni Advisory Member at her alma mater Singapore Management University.

Laavanya Kathiravelu

Board Member

Laavanya Kathiravelu is Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University. Her research sits at the intersections of international migration, race and ethnic studies and contemporary urban diversity, particularly in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her first book was Migrant Dubai (2016), which interrogated the experiences of low-wage migrant workers in the emirate of Dubai. She has also published widely on issues of race, inequality and migration in Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She was also a Fung Fellow at Princeton University between 2015-16. Laavanya is a board member of migrant welfare organisation HOME. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar based at the City University of New York.

Zheng Huifen

Board Member
Zheng Huifen has been an AWARE member since 2009 and is now a life member. She has volunteered with AWARE in various capacities, such as the legal clinic and the Fundraising Board Committee. Huifen first served on the AWARE Board as Assistant Treasurer during the 2020 – 2022 term. Apart from AWARE, Huifen was a committee member of the Humanist Society (Singapore) between 2012 and 2017. At HSS, she helped to create a safe space for people identifying as atheist, agnostic, freethinking or secular. By day Huifen is a corporate lawyer with a technology and payments focus.

Margaret Thomas

Immediate Past President

Margaret Thomas held senior editing positions at The Business Times, The Singapore Monitor and TODAY, and was in the founding team of AsiaOne, over her nearly three decades in the media. In 1984/85, Margaret was a founder member of AWARE. Over the last three decades, she has served on many of its committees, and has been a member of its board since 2009. In 2003 she was a founder member of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2).

Board Committees

Board Committees serve as an extension of the Board and oversee specific aspects of AWARE’s work. They act as a resource for the management team, and help to ensure that all activities are aligned with AWARE’s vision, mission, strategies and goals.

There are eight Board Committees. Four oversee AWARE’s public-facing activities: Advocacy & Research, CARE, Catalyse and Fundraising. The other four oversee matters related to AWARE’s organisational strength: Audit, HR, Board Recruitment, Leadership & Governance.

Advocacy & Research

Chair:
Zheng Huifen

Members:
Fikri Alkhatib
Teo You Yenn

Audit

Chair:
Zeng Lihui

Members:
Aarathi Arumugam
Soh Eng Kiau
Ying Wu

Board Recruitment

Chair:
Jasmine Ng

Members:
Fikri Alkhatib

CARE

Chair:
Elisa Kang

Members:
Grace Cheong
Ruth Chua
Cindy Ng

Catalyse

Chair:
Kathy Park

Members:
Laavanya Kathiravelu

Fundraising

Chair:
Ho Shyn Yee

Members:
Esther Chang
Zheng Huifen

Human Resources

Chair:
Jean Fung

Members:
Jean Low
Penelope Shone
Jacqueline Wong
Lillian Wong

Leadership & Governance

Chair:
Penelope Shone

Members:
Elisa Kang
Winifred Loh
Ong Soh Chin
Margaret Thomas