In 2007, Melissa Kwee was named Young Woman Achiever in a women’s awards programme. She was 36 and already well known in Singapore for her work with girls, young people and migrant women. The profile that year was framed around a contrast. She was born into one of the country’s best-known property families, yet she spent her time with troubled teenagers, volunteers and construction workers.
A privileged start, and why she downplayed it
At the time, her father Kwee Liong Tek was chairman of Pontiac Land. The group’s hotels in Singapore were valued at about $1 billion, and the profile counted the Ritz-Carlton Millenia, the Conrad Centennial and the Regent among them. It also mentioned the Capella resort then planned for Sentosa, a $400-million project. Her mother’s father, George Aratani, founded Kenwood Electronics and the Mikasa chinaware business.
Kwee did not accept that this made her simply fortunate. She said she saw her abilities as gifts to be passed on, and she put people ahead of possessions. She also described a childhood lesson from her mother that nobody is better or worse than anyone else. As a teenager she and her siblings took ordinary holiday jobs, and she worked as a drugstore cashier.
From Indonesia and Nepal to Project Access
A school trip to rural Indonesia with United World College stirred her sense of purpose. At 17 she spent nearly two years in a Nepalese village as an intern and English teacher. Back in Singapore, she read to teenagers at the then Woodbridge Hospital. She did all of this before reading social anthropology at Harvard.
She returned to Singapore in 1996 and started Project Access, a leadership programme for girls. In 2002, at 28, she became president of Unifem Singapore, now known as UN Women Singapore. A 2006 award citation from World Business journal credited her with projects against the commercial sexual exploitation of women and with financial education for migrant women workers.
Beautiful People and Halogen
Kwee started Beautiful People in 2005 after noticing the rise of girl gangs and teenage pregnancies. Few programmes at the time focused on girls. The scheme paired women professionals, called “Big Sisters”, with teenage girls. They visited homes weekly, helped with schoolwork and ran camps and workshops. The sessions included talks from a gynaecologist and a makeup artist. They also introduced the girls to careers they might never have heard of, such as aerospace engineering.
The Halogen Foundation followed in 2006. It ran leadership workshops and camps in schools and reached 10,000 children that year. Through Halogen she also started One Degree Asia, a forum that brought together social innovators from across the region. In 2007 she visited India to meet its youth alumni. She also planned an online marketplace, The Kindness Exchange, to match charities with skilled pro bono volunteers.
How she funded the work
Kwee said her family did not pay her an allowance or fund her organisations. Her income came from companies that consulted her on community engagement. Her sisters sometimes raised money for Beautiful People, for instance by collecting donations from friends on a birthday, and she copied the idea. She said she saw herself as a mobiliser and catalyst who draws on other people’s talent and energy. Wealth, in her view, mattered for what it could do for others.
She was candid about what angered her. One example was a young woman trafficked into Singapore, whom she tried to help get home but who was stuck without papers. She said apathy in the face of injustice frustrated her most. She also said she was content being single, because her work gave her joy.
Where her work went next
She received the Singapore Youth Award in 2007 and the Asean Youth Award in 2008. She went on to chair the Halogen Foundation and later became the third chief executive of the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC). Tatler Asia reported on that appointment. She was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 2018, according to the Urban Land Institute Singapore.
The Singapore University of Social Sciences lists her as a member of its Board of Trustees and a director of the family’s Pontiac Land Group. The same page describes Beautiful People as a community of big and little sisters. Beautiful People started as a programme of Beyond Social Services and was co-founded by Kwee. Another profile says she has since left the NVPC chief executive post.
Her list of past board roles is long. It includes the National Arts Council, the Singapore Repertory Theatre, the ITE Board of Governors and Prison Fellowship International.