Ryan Patrick Hanley
 | Gouri Mirpuri is the founder of the award-winning social enterprise, The Learning Farm (TLF), Indonesia. TLF offers a residential learning experience to vulnerable youth in Indonesia, teaching them regenerative agriculture and providing livelihood training. Founded twenty years ago, the farm combines Gouri’s passion for youth empowerment, food security and environmental sustainability. Her experience in setting up TLF later led her to establish Impact Hub Singapore in 2011, the first co-working space for social entrepreneurs in the country. Gouri serves on several global boards, including the Bhutan Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. She has published books and articles on a wide range of topics and is also a TEDx speaker. Having lived in various countries over the past three decades, she is now happily based in Singapore. |
Gouri Mirpuri, the Singapore founder of The Learning Farm, will share how she started and sustained a programme that has been helping to break the poverty cycle for rural youth for over two decades. This ground-up initiative outside Jakarta has been giving vulnerable youth, street children and refugees a second chance in life — a way out of their poverty trap by becoming smarter farmers than their parents. How did this programme of personal change not merely survive, but thrive, for so long? What are the key learnings along the journey that have helped pivot the programme with each cohort to adapt to change and create the greatest impact? Gouri will share her personal nuggets of wisdom on a farm that has lifted thousands of rural and vulnerable youth, teaching them how to rely on themselves and to work with the abundance of nature.