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Project Description
Student teams worked on a sustainability communication challenge for Helping Hands Penan, a social enterprise supporting the Penan community in Sarawak, Malaysia, through education and sustainable livelihood opportunities connected to rattan handicrafts. A central communication task was to make the value chain and cultural meaning of Penan handwoven rattan more legible to external stakeholders, while clearly linking purchases to community benefit, for example, the message that rattan product sales directly support education for children and youths. Teams approached this as both a storytelling problem on how to respectfully represent people, place, and practice, and a channel-design problem on how to package the story into usable materials that sponsors and partners can act on.
Project Outcomes
The class adopted an applied, iterative workflow that moved from understanding the context to developing and refining communication outputs, with different teams contributing complementary angles and creative executions. The strongest common thread was grounding recommendations in the lived reality of the community and production process, then translating those insights into concrete, audience-facing assets. For example, one team structured a narrative journey from village setting to rattan harvesting, processing, weaving, and downstream impact on families and children. The decision-making process emphasised matching message to audience and medium, such as proposing partnership-oriented collaterals aimed at hospitality decision-makers alongside educational story elements that reinforce authenticity, sustainability, and cultural continuity.
The class outputs can be presented as a unified, multi-format communication package for Helping Hands Penan that makes the rattan craft journey visible and actionable for partners. Deliverables evidenced in the materials include a campaign webpage, a tri-fold brochure tailored to partnership outreach, and a set of postcards that carry consistent place-based storytelling, while highlighting rattan harvesting, processing, and weaving as an all-natural process and product. Taken together, these outcomes demonstrate how students translated sustainability and cultural heritage into practical communication tools usable for awareness-building, partnership development, and beneficiary-centered storytelling.
Student's reflection instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTNJFsKCRGf/?igsh=MXBrdTU3NnJkZ3c5OQ==
Feedback from Partner
This class enabled students to apply sustainability communication frameworks to a real-world challenge, moving from context immersion to concrete audience-facing outputs. A highlight was the field experience: we travelled deep into Sarawak via a long overland journey on rough logging roads, lived alongside a small village community, and undertook river-boat travel and forest exploration to understand rattan harvesting, processing, and weaving in situ. For Singaporean students, this was a rare cultural experience that gave them new perspective to communicate sustainability with humility, specificity, and stakeholder awareness. – Associate Professor Sonny Rosenthal, College of Integrative Studies
Partner: Helping Hands Penan
Company Type: Non-profit organisations
Empowering Penan Weavers Through Sustainability Communication
Theme(s):
Growth in Asia, Sustainable Living
Instructor:
Associate Professor Sonny Rosenthal
School:
College of Integrative Studies
Course:
Sustainability Communication in Asia