Seaon Shin
39
“When you’re passionate about something it isn’t work anymore!”
Seaon Shin Seaon Shin may look like any normal teenager from the outside; bubbly, talkative and full of life. But not every regular teenager is recognised as one of the top eight young social entrepreneurs worldwide. At the age of 19, while most of us are at university with what to wear to the prom or completing an assignment being our biggest dilemmas, Seaon is looking at how she can incubate a community and supportive network of young change-makers in Dubai to contribute solutions to solve the world’s problems. The on8one met with her to talk about her Global Youth Empowering Movement Centre, being taken seriously as a teen and what it’s like to be a CEO. You started out with an environmental project in school called Ecubed. Tell us something about that and how all this started? Basically, I started an environmental organisation in 2007. The whole point of that was to get some people together so that we could start a group for a school project. And then we got our own recycling system, we got sponsors, we visited recycling factories and things like that. Slowly it started expanding to other schools around Dubai and Abu Dhabi. However, the program isn’t running in my school any more because once I entered into the international baccalaureat programme, I had to stop that project since it was too much work to handle. I think that played a big part in me starting GYEM, and it made me realise that I wanted to do this kind of work.
So tell us something about GYEM. How does it work and what are you planning to achieve with it? Ahh, that’s pretty complicated. There are a lot of elements to GYEM actually. There is the GYEM movement, the GYEM program, which involves workshops, and there’s the GYEM centre, which is the actual physical platform for being together. And then there’s the involvement with Dubai Festival City, who are our sponsors, so they have a lot of say in the things we do at the centre. The biggest thing we do is our GYEM workshops which are divided into three parts—Know it, Dig it and Act it. So it’s all about discovering the world, discovering who you are and what’s your purpose in life, as well as knowing what is service and how to serve using your passions to give back to the community.
“When you’re passionate about something it isn’t work anymore!”
Seaon Shin Seaon Shin may look like any normal teenager from the outside; bubbly, talkative and full of life. But not every regular teenager is recognised as one of the top eight young social entrepreneurs worldwide. At the age of 19, while most of us are at university with what to wear to the prom or completing an assignment being our biggest dilemmas, Seaon is looking at how she can incubate a community and supportive network of young change-makers in Dubai to contribute solutions to solve the world’s problems. The on8one met with her to talk about her Global Youth Empowering Movement Centre, being taken seriously as a teen and what it’s like to be a CEO. You started out with an environmental project in school called Ecubed. Tell us something about that and how all this started? Basically, I started an environmental organisation in 2007. The whole point of that was to get some people together so that we could start a group for a school project. And then we got our own recycling system, we got sponsors, we visited recycling factories and things like that. Slowly it started expanding to other schools around Dubai and Abu Dhabi. However, the program isn’t running in my school any more because once I entered into the international baccalaureat programme, I had to stop that project since it was too much work to handle. I think that played a big part in me starting GYEM, and it made me realise that I wanted to do this kind of work.
So tell us something about GYEM. How does it work and what are you planning to achieve with it? Ahh, that’s pretty complicated. There are a lot of elements to GYEM actually. There is the GYEM movement, the GYEM program, which involves workshops, and there’s the GYEM centre, which is the actual physical platform for being together. And then there’s the involvement with Dubai Festival City, who are our sponsors, so they have a lot of say in the things we do at the centre. The biggest thing we do is our GYEM workshops which are divided into three parts—Know it, Dig it and Act it. So it’s all about discovering the world, discovering who you are and what’s your purpose in life, as well as knowing what is service and how to serve using your passions to give back to the community.
