By Daniel Teoh
The founder of Native Discovery, an enterprise that promotes and facilitates community-led tourism with Orang Asli partners, comes clean about his missteps during the early days of their partnership; and shares important life lessons the community partners taught him on what matters most.
“Nowadays people know the price of everything, but the value of nothing” –Oscar Wilde
Ninik Elok, the eldest trail guide in Kampung Serendah, explaining to guests the significance of the flora and fauna to his community.
After almost a decade in the field of community development, I am no stranger to the concept of the carrot and stick. It is common practice for programmes to be designed with incentives to attract and reward participation, and in the eyes of the uninitiated, there is no more compelling incentive than money.
This was my worldview when I started Native Discovery. Our founding idea was to use the monetary opportunities within the tourism industry to encourage Orang Asli communities to work on building stronger narratives on the role of indigenous peoples in the country, which they could then leverage for improved equity in Malaysian society.
Our initial pitch to communities was simple: earn more without financial risk, with only effort being required to participate. It was well received and we were quickly delivering on our word. We were paying community members up to four times their usual working hourly rates as they became part-time hosts to a growing stream of guests who were eager to explore a new perspective of travel.
Guests share a traditional Temuan meal with their Orang Asli hosts while visiting their ancestral durian orchards.
Then everything began to unravel
Customer demand for our tours were steadily growing with more frequent and larger bookings. But at almost exactly the same time, our community partners’ interest began to wane.
I was a new entrepreneur with few references outside of fast-paced startups and the traditional business world. I had started our work with the ‘best’ conventional practices with the intention of demonstrating the value of our work to both the Orang Asli and our guests. I wanted to succeed and for our work to be impactful.
So why was achieving positive business results demoralising our community partners?
In conversations, it was true our Orang Asli partners appreciated the additional income. The money earned over just a few hours of additional work a week went to children’s books, childcare, short family holidays, and other comforts I myself would buy.
These were the foundational ‘carrots’ of our work together. With our organisational tunnel vision prioritising value in the form of income, we had not paid attention to the intangible costs to our Orang Asli partners. We came to the sobering conclusion that the money was not enough.
Participants of an international exchange programme look on as Raman Bah Tuin, a respected Orang Asli cultural practitioner demonstrates the use of the sumpit (blowpipe).
A realisation
In a life changing conversation, our community partners gave me the gift of honesty. I wish to share this gift so others may be more considerate than I had been.
As we grew from a once-a-fortnight activity to a multiple-times-a-week operation, our Orang Asli partners found themselves burning out. Our pool of hosts were small at the time, so we relied on a few key individuals to deliver our programmes–-most of whom also had part-time or full-time work elsewhere.
They began needing to choose between earning an additional income or attending to personal life events. To paraphrase one of them: “I need time to live my life too. If not, what good is an income?” They valued free time and they felt it was not worth trading away more of it than needed.
One might then wonder: “Why didn’t they just leave their other jobs and work with you full-time? They could earn the same amount of money in a quarter of the time, while building assets they could own.” I asked the same question.
Given the turbulence that comes with living on the margins, stability is a precious thing. They valued a smaller but steadier daily income, over our offering of a larger payday that came with uncertainty. They wanted to feel safe and we were perceived as a risk.
Growth is not always empowering
Our very first community partner found himself thrust into leadership as our venture quickly gained traction and more people became involved. This meant he was looked to by the community as a mediator and protector of their interests when working with us. This weighed heavily on him and reshaped his relationships within the community in ways he did not like. He shared that doing business with me had also affected our friendship, and he felt the day would come where he had to disappoint either me or his community. He valued peace, and no longer wished to be a figurehead in the community even if it meant more power or reward. The cost of participation had become too high.
Lastly, I learned that purpose and intimacy are difficult to scale.
With our early groups, our Orang Asli partners enjoyed genuine interactions with guests and found it a refreshing change in dynamics where outsiders were curious about their culture. They felt in control of the narrative and found deeper meaning in the work.
This was the natural state when we had small groups with no agendas and flexible tour itineraries that depended on the circumstances of the day. As we took on more complex clientele with bigger headcounts and stricter requirements, our community partners began to feel constrained. The relationships felt transactional, and the narratives became standardised for the sake of efficiency and consistency of experience for our customers.
We had painted them this picture of a greater livelihood fuelled by meaningful work. However, our early community partners felt we had lost the plot as we emphasised their earnings as the singular metric of success.
This had the side effect of changing the type of community partner we attracted. Where our initial partners embodied a spirit of helping their community thrive, the late joiners were more mercenary–-they negotiated every cent, and were more hostile to the idea of shared prosperity. Eventually, the division in the values of the early and later groups led to the dissolution of our team.
Native hosts working together with ‘Co-hosts’—individuals outside the Orang Asli community onboarded by Native Discovery, to deliver programmes that model equitable partnerships between indigenous and non-indigenous people
A new way of valuing
We eventually reconciled with our partners after great effort. However, our renewed operation together came to an abrupt halt with the arrival of Covid, and the long pause from tourism saw us say goodbye to our very first venture.
It has been many years since. By expanding our understanding of what is valued, we have learned to do better with the communities that came after. An important nuance I would add is that it is not just every community that is unique, it is also every individual within a community.
Hence, it will always be a challenge to walk the fine line that reconciles the differences between value systems at all levels: individual, communal, and societal—but this is what we must do if we wish to create meaningful change in the world.
I sometimes look back on my early understanding of entrepreneurship and how it has evolved as I walked down this path with our community partners; it is best illustrated below:
In the conventional business world, a ‘squeeze’ implies the application of pressure to extract value from a particular party. It was and still is common for us and our community partners to ‘squeeze’ each other. Except we now do this in good spirit to express our perspectives and represent our interests as individuals with different worldviews, instead of preserving a negative peace.
I value this practice, and remind myself that a hug is also a type of squeeze.
Ayah Inde, the lead trail guide and a community leader at Kampung Serendah with Daniel and a guest during a programme.