Lawyer Opens Mod Kopi & Toast Hawker Stall, Part Of Her Earnings Go To Refugees
The 27-year-old juggles lawyering with being a hawker & do-gooder.
BY JOEL TAN 22 NOV 2020 12:17 UPDATED 26 AUG 2021 10:39
Month-old modern coffee and toast stall Mad Roaster at Amoy Street Food Centre looks like your typical millennial business with its trendy lamps and a pink espresso machine. Except this is a small social enterprise, and its owner, Madeline Chan, 27, a part-time lawyer at a mid-sized local firm. She juggles a day job with baking and barista duties here, working overtime to generate income for displaced refugees in Thailand. She does almost everything herself — from baking loaves of brioche daily, to frothing lattes for her assorted coffee drinks.
It helps that she has a very understanding boss who allows her to work out of the office — so during lull periods at the hawker centre, she whips out her laptop to work.
Madeline, a Singaporean, graduated from the London School of Economics, and used to be employed at a big corporate law firm in Singapore. But a combination of personal and professional upheavals over a year ago forced her to reconsider her calling in life. “We were doing commercial litigation, so it was just multi-million dollar companies suing people over some contract, it wasn’t exactly general justice,” Madeline says. Around the same time, she saw the troubling news of displaced Rohingya people in Myanmar on TV and things clicked into place for her. “This was happening right in our backyard, and if anyone needed a lawyer it was these people.” So in early 2019, Madeline quit her job and moved to Bangkok to work with a legal clinic called Centre for Asylum Protection, offering legal services to refugees passing through Thailand.
There was a significant pay cut: “[I earned] about the wage of a Hai Di Lao waiter,” says Madeline, and the work — processing endless asylum appeals — was tough. Midway through her stint, Madeline wanted to find a more tangible way to help these refugees. “We’d work really hard on their appeal, and when they finally got their refugee status, they’d go ‘oh great, what do we get now?’ and the answer was nothing, all you get is a card that says you’re recognised, but you don’t get an education or medical benefits, or anything like that.” Madeline realised that what these refugees really needed was a steady income to help them get on their feet.
Madeline says existing programmes that help refugees make income, usually through the sale of hand-made traditional products like bags and embroidery, tend not to have a high enough demand. “I thought, what’s regular, what’s repeatable, consumable, something that people will buy again and again? Coffee in the CBD”. And so late last year, she started dreaming up a business back home in Singapore where she could find a way to channel income to refugees through a small coffee business. She returned to Singapore earlier this year and got a lease for the stall in August, sinking about $30,000 of her own cash into the project.
The income-generating feature here is the little stickers that come on the packaging. The stickers are printed in Thailand and sent to the homes of the resettled refugees to be coloured in and decorated. They get paid about SGD $0.50 per sticker and, with a monthly quota of roughly 200 stickers, Madeline says the income helps them to pay their rent. At the moment, the scale of the business is so small that she’s only supporting three people, but her hope is to start helping more families as the business grows. In the long term, Madeline says she still sees herself straddling both commercial law and social enterprise. “I think the humanitarian and commercial perspective have to go together. Having a foot in both worlds helps me ensure I don’t float too far away from either reality.”
It’s a costly model for Madeline, which is why she’s still working part-time as a lawyer to help cover the overheads. “I’ve got a very understanding boss,” she shares. “It’s been a year of juggling two, three jobs, and I’m so tired,” she says between pulling shots of coffee, though her smiling, bubbly demeanour gives none of that away. Part of what keeps her going is her Christian faith, says Madeline, citing passages of the bible that refer to seeking justice in the world. “And I’m a lawyer, so if anyone is supposed to know what justice is, we’re technically the ones,” she says.
