This super useful platform is helping Southeast Asian creatives grow

Southeast Asia is flourishing with creative people and organizations. However, many lack resources or the know-how to grow. Getting to know other creatives, having the money, and having the time to continue one’s craft are three important things to creative people everywhere.

Unfortunately for the region, resources are scant and underutilized. Mereka Connect partnered with British Council to offer the services of the platform to their Southeast Asian creative hubs under the UK-SEA Creative Hubs Connect program launched in July 2022. “Mereka Connect isn’t simply a booking management tool.

It is a community building and community empowerment tool catering to the creative industry and keen learners of all ages and backgrounds looking to expand their skill set and find their creative outlet across Malaysia and beyond,” Rashvin Pal Singh, the co-founder and Group CEO of Biji-biji Initiative and Me. reka told Mashable Southeast Asia. Mereka Connect’s objective is to spur collaborations and provide the necessary infrastructure for creative hubs in the region to grow and remain sustainable.

According to the British Council, a creative hub is “a place, either physical or virtual, which brings creative people together. It is a convenor, providing space and support for networking, business development, and community engagement within the creative, cultural, and tech sectors. ” So a bookshop, a theater space, a co-working space, a creative agency, and even a solo artist can be considered a creative hub.

So long as you’re innovating, you’re a creative hub. Rashvin explained that with Mereka Connect, creative hubs will be able to upskill, reskill, gain new knowledge, and simply have fun. “It is a one-of-a-kind platform in a sense that it combines a host of resources and services under one roof – be it workshops, webinars, educational programs (we normally refer to all these as experiences), or spaces and machinery,” he added.

“Apart from booking and community management tools, we offer extended support to our Hub community by providing free resources, toolkits, and opportunities to network. ” Essentially, Mereka Connect is a tool for creative hubs to manage all of their resources and tasks easily in one place. “Mereka Connect saves our Hubs’ time and makes it more convenient to manage their services, bookings, members, and finances.

This is especially important when a Hub is run by a small team (we started out as a very small team ourselves), and the workflow should be planned strategically. ” According to Rashvin, currently Mereka Connect offers two packages: 1. Connect Package (free to use, transaction fee incurred).

99 percent of Mereka Connect users are on this package. 2. Scale Pay (access to an abundance of tools, subscription based: US$150/US$250 a month).

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