About: The KFUC comprises of 35 University Cooperatives and 144 thousand individual members. They are established by its members – Students, faculties and staff to make their life in campus better.
Aim: KFUC aims to benefit its members by providing services such as education, joint business, government and international relations.
They now have University Cooperatives running businesses such as canteen business, bookstore, café & vending machine etc. You must be wondering… Vending machine? They actually sell drinks!
We have Su Jin on the left, representing KFUC, visiting and understanding more about SNCF before we bring her on a tour to our Campus Co-operatives & Coop Clubs. She even mentioned she felt so inspired after watching our SNCF Corporate video 🙂
As you can see, she is putting in a lot of effort listening and taking down notes as her objective here is to learn and understand more about Singapore Co-operatives, and hopefully bring back some ideas for KFUC when she goes back to Korea!
(Su Jin, left and Jed, right)
Fact: Campus Co-operatives are a regulated social enterprise, whereas Coop Clubs are not.
Campus Co-operatives’ aim is to increase the welfare of members, inculcate co-operative values and to provide a platform to hone entrepreneurship skills among students. A Coop Club is more like a Co-Curricular Activity(CCA) for students to be trained and learn basic marketing & finance skills etc.
Our first stop, Co-op@NTU!
Mr Kee Sing, one of the teachers in charge of Co-op@NTU, introducing and explaining Co-op@NTU Café and Shop.
Fact: Co-op@NTU is a campus co-op, they are run by students with the support of teachers. Their aim is to serve the NTU community by providing affordable products and services. The queue @ Co-op@NTU Café can get quite long during lunch time!
Halfway through discussion, we decided to order lunch!!!
Starring the Tom Yum Pasta at the bottom-middle, it is sooooooo good! If you are a spicy person, please do visit their café located @ The Hive, you’ll fall in love!
P.S Apparently Su Jin was overwhelmed by the spiciness and Jed finished it all on top of his Crispy Chicken Dijonnaise. Hmm.. :p
After lunch, Mr Kee Sing went on to introduce Su Jin the range of products they are selling in Co-op@NTU Shop. They include NTU merchandises and also Social Enterprise merchandises!
T-shirts, adorable tote bags, umbrellas, cups…
Stationary, notebooks etc.
Even Real Potted Plants!
End of Co-op@NTU Tour! Thank you Mr Kee Sing for being so hospitable, we appreciate it so much.
Next up, Su Jin mentioned that she likes flowers and arts. Since we had spare time before the next stop @ 4:30pm, we brought her to Gardens By The Bay and National Gallery Singapore!
“For all discrimination to end. Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia…”
Last stop for the day, Anglican High School
We were so warmly greeted by Mr Patrick and Ms Audrey with the variety of food, thank you so much!
Next we have Mr Patrick & Ms Audrey sharing about their coop club and how they are moving towards STEM-based.
For those who do not know, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Basically Anglican High School is starting on 3D printing whereby students get to print and sell! Not only that, they are also thinking of starting an online business, exploring online payment and integrating Micro:bits as part of MakerSpace@AHS next year!
It’s finally the end of Day 1 tour with KFUC, it has been a long day for Su Jin and us but we’re glad that she is happy with the tour!
Stay tune for the next post to follow us on the tour!
*For overseas cooperatives who are interested to visit us for tours and understanding more about Singapore cooperatives, feel free to reach out to us! We are more than happy to welcome you 🙂