Expatpreneur Awards 2018: How Grace Clapham And Solonia Teodros Harnessed Their Own Life Experiences To Create A "Lifelong Learning Institute" In Singapore

For Indonesia-born, Australian Grace and American-born, Taiwanese-Ethiopian Solonia, Singapore has always been “home”, having each lived here, on and off, for about two decades. After setting up multiple ventures separately around the world, the friends found themselves back on the Red Dot at pivotal moments in both of their lives. The shared experience inspired them to found “lifelong learning institute” The Change School in 2013.

“We started with a month-long retreat in Bali called Change Ventures with 17 participants,” explains the duo. “It was for people who wanted to leave their corporate lives and launch a social venture.” The co-founders have since evolved the business to offer non-boring career workshops and team programmes, immersive online courses and more, and have worked with 1,000 “humans of change”.

Lest you think they’ve got it all figured out, Grace admits she’s struggled to “find the space” in her first year of being a parent, while Solonia acknowledges, self-care is a “constant learning journey”. And what happens if the pair of travel-lovers decide to move away from SG again? “I don’t think we should be limited to a location to have a business, not in this current world we live in,” says Grace. “Agree!” Solonia concurs.

About The Finder Expatpreneur Awards
In 2017, The Finder debuted its first-ever Expatpreneur Awards to honour foreign-born entrepreneurs running successful expat-owned businesses in or from Singapore. This 2018, a new batch of 23 Expatpreneur Awardees have been unveiled! All of them have one thing in common: Their brands help people “live well in Singapore” – The Finder’s core mission. (Find out more about the Expatpreneur Awards judge who coined the term “expat-preneur” in 2015 while you’re here!)

By Sushmita Mohapatra and Savitha Venugopal, The Finder Issue 292

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