Home Grown Projek57 Embodies Malaysia’s Vision

Projek57, a unity project and social enterprise with a bold vision to restore Malaysia to its founding values of 1957, was officially launched on Saturday by Tunku Dato’ Paduka Khadijah Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-haj, daughter of Tunku Abdul Rahman, at Atria Shopping Gallery.

Also present at the official launch were Malaysian football legends Datuk “Taukeh” Soh Chin Aun, Datuk Santokh Singh, hockey legends from the 1975 World Cup Malaysian Semifinalist team Datuk N. Sri Shanmuganathan, Wong Choon Hin and R. Pathmarajah, and the cast of the local blockbuster film, Ola Bola. The ceremony saw these legends sharing their experiences of living and being a part of Malaysia’s ‘Golden Era’ of sports.

Projek57 hopes to create a movement of 1 million nation-builders through the sales of tee-shirts, merchandising and community events.  The tee-shirts are premium quality, 100 percent made-in-Malaysia cotton tee-shirts that showcase fresh and relevant home-grown designs along with positive and meaningful messages about Malaysia.  

Projek 57 Ola Bola

As a non-political and non-partisan social enterprise, Projek57 is building a network of distributors consisting single mothers and underprivileged youths, who receive RM5 for every tee-shirt sold. Furthermore, Projek57 will put aside 40 percent of the remaining profits to organise empowerment programmes and training in entrepreneurship skills to this group of people. Upon reaching its mission of selling 1 million tee-shirts, Projek57 would will have raised RM5 million, all channelled to helping the single mothers and underprivileged youths.

Speaking at the official launch, Collin Swee, co-founder of Projek57 said that through this initiative, he hopes to sow patriotism and unity across Malaysia. “We share the same vision as our late founding minister and first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, that of tolerance, diversity, progressiveness, and above all, unity – the building blocks of our nation.” he said.

Syed Sadiq Albar, the other co-founder of Projek57 reiterates, “Collin and I have been friends and business partners for over 10 years, working successfully together based on trust and respect. Having grown up in a multiracial and multicultural environment, we want that positive experience to trickle down to our children, and to empower them to be able to play and grow up together without regard to race and colour. As experienced entrepreneurs, we are able to apply our knowledge and experience to make it a truly impactful project.”

The official launch event was also a celebration of all things enterprising and empowering as Projek57 collaborated with Malaysia’s most influential community of entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Malaysia to showcase Step Engage Marketplace, a collaboration between the EO Malaysia, Cybercare Youth Organisation and Accenture to empower 40 underprivileged teens from 5 homes towards employment and entrepreneurship. Over a span of 10 weeks, the youths attended learning workshops where they were challenged to create viable business plans to be pitched to judges for seed capital. The launch event of Projek57 also featured booths for these youths to engage the public with their projects, with all proceeds raised going to their homes. 

In addition to that, the event also featured the Social Enterprise Showcase, where interactive booths and displays showcased four of Malaysia’s best Social Enterprise projects Foodabox, GOLD, Uniworco and Biji-biji.

“Although unity is a crucial pillar of our nation, we believe that caring is an equally important pillar as well. This means that, as able-bodied and privileged citizens, we must step in and give our underprivileged and underserved communities the much-needed stepping stones they need for them to work with us in realizing Tunku Abdul Rahman’s dreams of building a united Malaysia. This is the vision we have - a movement of hope for all Malaysians,” Sadiq concluded.