Head-StART for underprivileged kids

Pusphaveni Chandran offers her painting for the auction

Children do serious work at the centre

ON a cool September evening, some 300 people gathered at a leafy suburb in Section 5, Petaling Jaya to watch 150 underprivileged children sing and dance at the launch of the StART Centre.

Dressed in their best hand-me-down clothes and slippers, the children, aged between 6 and 17, cast a spell on the audience when they delivered Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up.

Many in the audience were moved to tears when the children emerged full-strength, some on stage, some within the crowd, holding hands and singing with their hearts.

Like most kids, these children possess some artistic talent waiting to be developed. So, for the last five months, they had been coming to this rented house at least once a week to attend classes by trained teachers who honed their skills in music, singing, drama and art.

“I don’t know much about music and dance but I know about art. I can see the improvement that some of these kids have made. Their strokes are firm and their work shows some understanding of concept,” says Datuk Vincent Lee, the brain behind the project.

Lee, 55, is the group executive chairman of Foetus International, a company aligned to Omnicom, one of the world’s largest communication groups.

He was keen to develop a charity plan that would get all his staff involved. Programmed to think out of the box, the president of advertising association 4A was quite sure he would stay away from typical charity programmes that every now and then dump money into environmental projects, NGOs and charity foundations.

He wanted focus. He wanted something long-term and lasting. It must grow from nothing. It had to be relevant to his industry and, most importantly, it had to be fun for everyone involved.

Then the idea came. StART — Art for Life. It would provide a channel for underprivileged children to explore their artistic talents.

Kids from rich and middle-class families have every opportunity to further their studies in whatever field they wanted. The sky’s the limit. Their parents are encouraging and help them pursue careers that were once considered unconventional, such as designing and multimedia, starting them young with drama, music and computer classes.

On the other hand, kids from homes lack this kind of stimulation.

“Who knows? Within this group there may be a brilliant architect, an advertising wizard or another Yasmin Ahmad...” says Lee who is seated in his office, tastefully decorated with Asian art pieces, a water feature and a snooker table.

“I started looking around for a centre that reached out to talented kids from homes as a model to copy but I could not find one.”

The father of three children, aged between 25 and 21, remembers growing up with seven siblings in a shophouse in Jalan Panggung, near Petaling Street. His parents, noodle sellers, struggled to make ends meet

Although a good student who was also active in sports, Lee was not too keen on Mathematics and Science. Instead he looked forward to the weekly art periods.

And if that was not enough, he took to sketching on the walls of the toilets in Methodist Boys School, an effort which got him into trouble every now and then.

When he left school, Lee was determined to get into advertising but there was no vacancy for artists. So he took a job servicing clients and doing some marketing.

Still focused on his ambition, he signed up for a correspondence course, emerged the top student and soon found himself doing what he had always wanted to do.

“I read somewhere that it’s not about how much money you make but how much you give back and I think I’ve found a pretty good way of doing just that,” he says.

It only took him three months, from the time of conception to getting the project, fully funded by Foetus International, off the ground. For help, he roped in Joshua Lee, a former lecturer at local advertising college IACT, and currently an accounts director with Foetus International.

“Joshua is very talented. He’s a former teacher, a very good singer and he plays music. He’s also good with kids,” says Lee.

Joshua was made project director. He looked at various shelter homes and orphanages in the Klang Valley and invited interested kids for an audition.

The StART Centre opened its doors in April this year with 60 children from four homes. This number has grown to 150 children from homes such as Shelter, Ti-Ratana, Rumah Kids, Agathians, Stepping Stone and Beth Shalom as well as 50 Myanmar refugee children from a centre in Bandar Puteri Puchong.

“As with most auditions, you make some mistakes, but these kids really enjoy coming here,” says Lee. “They like it here. It’s fun. At the end of the day, there’s a sense of accomplishment and they go home feeling good about themselves.”

According to Lee, it will take about RM1m a year to run the centre. All six qualified teachers receive a nominal salary and work full-time. He’s not keen about taking on walk-in volunteers.

“Volunteers come and go. The kids get attached to them but before you know it, the volunteers stop showing up. Here we are trying to establish a long-term mentor-mentee relationship between teacher and child,” he adds.

When the kids leave school, he feels it would be easy to get colleges to sponsor them and then absorb them into the industry. The creative industry lacks talented writers and designers so it’s also his way of helping.

“If only 20 per cent make it as leaders in their own right, I would be very happy. The rest will surely find jobs — not as art directors but as designers, not as singers but as technical assistants.

“They will all be equipped with the basic aptitude in terms of art and can immediately contribute to the industry — that’s the whole idea,” says Lee, who enjoys playing golf.

Full of confidence about StART, Lee is goading his CEOs to work harder so that the group of companies can channel more money into the project. Already, he is on the lookout for a parcel of land to build a bigger centre.

“Imagine that... from nothing to something. Wouldn’t that be a great story? It’s better than building another office or another business,” he muses.

Our cover picture shows the painting titled I Am Picasso by Evon, 16, of the Ti-Ratana Welfare Society