KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 12 — Unlike the typical corporate headhunter, Ahmad Emran is interested only in the homeless.

Together with his partner Norhayati Ismail, they carry out pop-up street interviews for the homeless after speaking to companies willing to employ them. 

“Conducting social projects are something that I have always loved to do, it is like making the world a better place,” Ahmad, a strategic planner at an advertising agency, said. 

He said the idea initially came when both he and Norhayati were volunteering at a soup kitchen for the homeless.

“These people needed help and I figured I could help them more if I could get them a job,” he said. 

Ahmad and Norhayati began to contact employers interested in hiring the homeless.

“We started with asking our circle of friends who are company owners,” Norhayati said, adding the one condition was the employers needed to provide transportation and lodging.

Not long after, Norhayati said other companies began to call and ask for possible hires.

Ahmad said interviews can be difficult at times and they selected individuals through various criteria.

“Through the interviews, we look for candidates who are passionate to work and have potential,” he said.

Norhayati said contacting them after interviews proved to be a challenge as many had no mobile phones. 

“We give them RM1 in coins but not all would call us back,” she said.

Now as a recipient of the RM25,000 grant awarded by Agensi Inovasi Malaysia under its Berbudi Berganda: Social Impact Innovation Challenge, Ahmad and Norhayati hope to give those they help a better chance in turning their lives around.

“We started this even before Berbudi Berganda, and in total we have gotten 15 people employed, but only 4 have kept their jobs. Most of them had trouble coping with working life after being homeless for a long time,” Ahmad said.

With the money, the duo hoped to add a training programme to better prepare candidates for working life so they would have better chance of getting off the streets.

The grant was presented to 12 social innovators yesterday, including Ahmad and Norhayati, to enable them to turn their ideas for the empowerment of youths and the less fortunate into reality. 

Another recipient of the grant, Sue Seau Yeen has been working on a project to empower single mothers to earn income from home through baking.

“I used to donate cakes to the orphanages, and it was there I realised that most of these kids come from really poor or broken families and single mothers.” she said. 

The children were kept at orphanages due to their families’ lack of income, so Sue came up with the idea of helping single mothers with providing them income through baking.

“We will provide them with the training, the ingredients and the oven to start earning,” she said.

She said single mothers passionate about baking would be selected to join her programme called “Simply Cookies”.

“They will not have to worry about anything, all they need to do is bake,” she said.

The cookies would be collected from the mothers once a week and they would be paid in cash. 

Sue hopes that in the long run, these mothers who earn less than RM1,500 a month would adopt the programme full time. 

“They can earn up to RM3,000 a month,” she said.