The Matcha Initiative
Join us
I am Vandana Khialani, the founder of Happy Universe LLP (established in 2017). Since then, I have achieved a transformative impact across Singapore and Southeast Asia. This extensive outreach highlights my unwavering commitment to fostering environmental awareness and sustainable practices among younger generations, thereby shaping a more environmentally conscious and responsible future.
As a buddy, I would focus on experience sharing — helping users navigate challenges with practical insights and lessons from my own sustainability journey. I would guide users through integrating traditional knowledge with modern solutions, share strategies to overcome common barriers like funding and partnership building, and advise on engaging diverse stakeholders, especially in community-led projects.
Additionally, I am happy to share tools to track progress and measure impact in ways that resonate with both funders and communities. Ultimately, I want to help others build the confidence to lead with both heart and mind, knowing that sustainability work is a long-term commitment requiring persistence, creativity and collaborative spirit.
I would also love to discuss the importance of bringing joy, creativity and cultural relevance into sustainability work. Environmental narratives too often focus on guilt or fear. At Happy Universe, we’ve found that people are more likely to act — and sustain that action over time — when they feel seen, inspired, and hopeful.
My journey into sustainability began with a deep respect for nature, and a desire to create lasting change in the communities around me. Growing up, I was constantly drawn to the ways that people interacted with their environment — how culture, tradition, and daily life are intertwined with nature.
Over time, I saw how environmental degradation was not just a scientific or ecological issue, but a social one — impacting the most vulnerable communities first. This realisation motivated me to found Happy Universe LLP in 2017, allowing me to merge traditional knowledge, innovative practices and commmunity empowerment to create locally rooted, scalable sustainability solutions.
At Happy Universe LLP, I lead sustainability initiatives focused on building environmental awareness and shifting mindsets, particularly among young people. We design and deliver experiential workshops on topics such as composting, food waste, and sustainable living — not as ends in themselves, but as entry points to spark deeper conversations about our relationship with the environment. I have also developed educational modules integrating storytelling, cultural knowledge, and systems thinking to encourage long-term behavioural change.
Internally, I advocate for low-carbon operations and zero-waste principles across our projects. All of our work is grounded in community engagement and tracked through meaningful KPIs to ensure we are learning and evolving with impact.
Two of the biggest challenges I have encountered are securing sustained funding and building aligned partnerships. Our work at Happy Universe LLP focuses on long-term mindset shifts, which can be harder to quantify in the short term. To address this, I invested time in developing clear KPIs and storytelling methods making our impact more visible to funders and partners. This helped build confidence in our approach and opened the door to deeper collaborations.
Another key challenge has been building trust — with communities, collaborators and institutions. While I was familiar with the cultural contexts we worked in, trust still had to be earned through consistency, transparency and genuine engagement. I focused on showing up, listening carefully, and ensuring our initiatives were co-created and relevant. Over time, these relationships became a foundation for our most successful sustainability work.
What I’m most proud of is seeing the young people we’ve worked with step up to lead change in their own communities. Many of them started out attending our workshops or school programmes. Today they’re running their own initiatives, influencing their peers, and even shaping local policy conversations. It’s incredibly fulfilling to know that our work has helped spark that sense of agency and confidence. To me, that’s the most powerful indicator of long-term impact — when the next generation doesn’t just absorb knowledge, but actively drives the movement forward.