Elisa Kang

Elisa worked for a private bank for many years across Singapore, Switzerland and London and saw the potential for asset owners and stewards of capital to deploy their assets in a way that could align with their values and contribute to global/regional/local solutions for pressing societal and environmental problems.

A woman’s financial empowerment is something close to her heart, as she witnessed first-hand how that affected her own family’s dynamics and relationships, and the loss of freedom women around her faced. She began her involvement in gender justice and women’s empowerment in 2007, volunteering in a Microfinance consultancy in India and an NGO advocating against gender violence and the trafficking of women from Nepal across the border to India.

She returned to Singapore in 2010 and made a commitment to contribute to the empowerment of women and girls in Singapore. She joined UN Women at the time, and became a Big Sister Volunteer with Beautiful People. She also started getting to know the powerful advocacy work of AWARE, a passionate organisation dedicated to removing gender-based barriers in Singapore. AWARE’s advocacy achievements contributed to laws enhancing protection against domestic violence, harassment and marital rape, among others. She came to a personal realisation that financial and economic empowerment was not enough to achieve gender equality, if laws and societal attitudes did not change. AWARE’s approach was effective because it grounded its research and advocacy on the actual cases from its crisis services like the Women’s Helpline and the Sexual Assault Care Center.

In 2011, inspired by the Toniic network, Elisa co-founded a non-profit impact investing network called Benefiit, designed to make impact investing more accessible to ordinary professionals, by sourcing and pre-screening deal-flow. Network members formed groups to perform direct due diligence and decide on investment collectively. The network combined the pooling capabilities of an angel investor network with the educational benefits of working with a diverse and highly skilled community of professionals. She invested in female entrepreneurs and brought in women who wanted to learn more about investing their own money.

In 2014, Elisa began a Masters in Counselling and completed her counselling practicum with AWARE, SMU Student counselling centre, and a single mother support group with Yong En Care Centre.
It was around this time that she began to conduct trainings for AWARE’s corporate training arm, Catalyse Consulting. These included Managing workplace harassment, Diversity & Inclusion, and Unconscious Bias trainings. She also signed up for the Volunteer Helpliner training with AWARE and volunteered at the Women’s Helpline for 2 years. In 2020, with the increase in domestic violence calls, Elisa returned to the Helpline to provide support. She was asked to join the Board of AWARE in 2019 and is now serving her second term there.

Elisa and her husband now have 2 young children, aged 2 and 4 years old. Through the nurturing support of the Toniic community, they are just beginning to focus their time on allocating their capital, and using their influence as asset owners to raise important discussions about how capital should honour the planet and its inhabitants, advocate for rights and freedoms not yet achieved by so many, and the potential for humans to lead kinder, non-violent, flourishing lives.