This award is for my Autistic & Neurodivergent community.
I am honoured to have been awarded the Skills Future Fellowship 2026, alongside 13 other professionals from different sectors.
Thank you, Skills Future, for this award and recognition of proudly Autistic professionalism and lifelong learning. I hope our country will see more and more openly Autistic professionals standing up in all platforms and fields of practice.
Grateful thanks to the judging / selection panel who, despite my unusual profile for a mainstream professional award such as this one, decided in my favour.
Thank You, Alicia Teng, National Gallery Singapore, for supporting my application.
A big Thank You to Peter Sau, my friend and closest professional collaborator, for always being there to support me and helping me navigate the sensory-social environment.
As Mr. President, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, congratulated me onstage, he remarked that I am “coming in from left of field”. This remark made me smile. Indeed, I am fully aware that I am a highly unlikely awardee. I am therefore yet more glad to have been given this chance. I even brought Lucy Plushie onstage in honour of her central position in my professional work. I told Mr. President that Lucy is the nexus of my work. (I am sure it was quite a strange sight to witness at an event such as this – was this the reason all the official photographers seemed to avoid me? *cheeky wink*)
Here are my own photos:
And our Instagram Reel with a bit of my original music accompanying, if you are on Instagram.
Lucy Like-a-Charm is indeed the inspiration and driving force behind my work and life. She was Singapore’s first Ambassador Assistance Dog, blazing the way for assistance dogs for persons with disabilities other than Guide Dogs for the Blind, long before I co-founded K9 Assistance.
I remember our past President, Madam Halimah Yacob, kindly asking after Lucy during the Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards in 2021 at the Istana — and I explained to her that I did not bring Lucy to greet her because I had retired Lucy from public duty. (A decision I have regretted ever since.) Lucy deserves to share in every one of my achievements, worldly and otherwise.
I am thankful for the opportunity to make a humble but firm stand across industries for proudly, openly Autistic persons to be recognised as an important part of Singapore’s professional network of lifelong learning, and not just existing in silos, separated from the rest of our vibrant, dynamic society.
Autistic persons worldwide have the most difficulty in mainstream employment, even during “inclusive hiring”. We are at the bottom of the disability hierarchy. The are many reasons, and one of them is our difference in social communication, which make us “unlikeable”, “too quirky”, “too difficult to accommodate”, “strange” etc (there are now published studies on this).
I myself am Self Employed. I am deeply grateful that I have been well supported throughout my journey, not every Autistic is, and this is why I make it a point to prioritise hiring Autistic and Neurodivergent professionals for my various projects.
My current Lucy Like-a-Charm memoir-fantasy project’s Video, the foundational component of this soon to be expanding work, boasts a Neurodivergent Production Team.
Autistic persons can be great at our professions, if we are well supported in the right ways. I encourage employers to find out how to create a mutually beneficial, vibrant relationship with Autistic employees in every field and level of practice.
And since I have not been invited to speak on my perspective for this award, I will share it here myself, pro-actively:
I am Autistic, and my lifelong learning journey has been challenging, but I am blessed with people who believe in me, and Lucy Like-a-Charm, my adopted Greyhound, the force behind my research and practice. I endeavour to pay it forward. My raison d’être is this: It is not my purpose to fix what is broken, but to empower Beauty in the vulnerable and unnoticed.
POST SCRIPT:
Every day is an adventure for me. I even managed to leave little Lucy Felty behind, because I became overwhelmed by the bright lights and developed a throbbing headache, and so left in hurry right after the President took his leave. Thank you so much, Michelle Cheah, of SWDA, for sending her back to me this morning!
