Stories from of the Elevate champions

Meet the ELEVATE champions who are building more accessible communities, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs with disabilities, and challenging the way we think about inclusion. Through their journeys, discover how knowledge, collaboration, and small but intentional actions can create lasting impact.

Impact Hub Network

APAC Region

Sopheak Nhoek: From learning leadership to teaching it

In Kampong Cham province, about 60 kilometres from Phnom Penh, Sopheak Nhoek raises chickens, ducks, and geese, and founded a local Organization for Persons with Disabilities (OPD).

He heard about Impact Hub Phnom Penh through the local ELEVATE program manager in 2025. He applied for the mini-grant and wasn’t selected, but joined the workshops anyway, drawn by specific speakers and topics, including a leadership session from Mr. Mey Sismith of the Phnom Penh Center for Independent Living, along with training on fundraising and social media.

Opportunities like this were rare where he lived. Most events happened in the city, and even when they were open to participants from the provinces, the added cost of accommodating them often made organizers reluctant to include them. People with disabilities in his community mostly knew only others within their own network, rarely joined larger events, and stayed quiet even when they did. Even on International Day of Persons with Disabilities, most came to listen rather than to share. What stayed with him was a sense that organizers offered a polite smile and little more.

The five ELEVATE workshops and the Open Heart Festival changed that. He traveled nearly 60 kilometers by motorcycle to reach each one and said the distance was worth it. The organizers’ commitment to accessibility, the inclusive communication, the facilitators, and the speakers who shared their own experience of disability all made him feel he belonged, and gave him the confidence to take on more of a leadership role in his community.

Leadership was something he’d only heard about before, never had the chance to learn. Now he applies it directly, helping people in his community secure disability ID cards, birth certificates, and residency documents, and coordinating with district authorities on their behalf. After the digital literacy workshop, he began teaching others to use social media responsibly, urging them to verify facts before posting complaints about authorities, since doing so carelessly can cause real harm.

“Before, I heard about leadership but didn’t truly understand it,” he says. “Now I have a clear understanding of leadership roles, stance, and community communication.”

He believes one of the biggest barriers people with disabilities face comes from within, the discouragement that can follow repeated setbacks, and as a community leader he works to counter it, encouraging people to stay persistent and believe in their own ability. He raised one point he thinks matters for any organization working with people with disabilities: accessibility support, like a wheelchair, should be arranged in advance rather than requested once someone has already arrived.

Looking ahead, he hopes more opportunities like this reach people with disabilities in rural provinces, not just the city, since distance and cost have kept many from experiences like the one he had. He’s also looking forward to more chances to keep learning and connecting with others in the disability community, like ELEVATE.

Carol Catacutan-Sam — Reimagining ATRIEV’s strength and opportunities

Carol Catacutan-Sam is a cofounder of ATRIEV, accessibility advisor to The Spark Project (TSP), and a person with visual impairment herself. ATRIEV’s expertise lies in accessibility and technology training for people with visual impairments, building out training curricula, developing technical skills among its members, and working toward international certification standards, over more than two decades of partnerships dating back to 2003. It’s the kind of technical strength the organization leans on now, given how difficult disability-specific funding alone has become.

Given their shared mission, ATRIEV and TSP collaborated on the ELEVATE project, centered on the inclusivity festival in Quezon City, an Inclusive Technology Introduction training for partners, a web audit, and development of an entrepreneurship course. What stood out to Carol wasn’t the activities themselves but how the collaboration worked.

"We present the concept and they ask us in what capacity we want to contribute," she said. "We have the freedom to propose what we think is best. Not imposed on us to do what we are told, but it's more collaborative. We don't lose our identity or focus."

In working with TSP, Carol especially appreciated being able to reimagine and recreate what ATRIEV does best, and, for the first time, putting what they already knew how to do into a documented, shareable form. Those materials now live on the Spark website as self-paced modules, and the same modules are feeding back into ATRIEV’s own trainee programs. Before this, the organization had mostly stuck to what it knew, without much room to explore how else its work might be rebuilt. What changed was learning to do new things without stepping away from its core, and without this partnership, Carol said, the modules likely wouldn’t exist yet, since other funders aren’t supporting this kind of work.

"The freedom to do what we think is best was very good."

For ATRIEV, that meant a partner willing to build on what the organization already did well, rather than asking it to start over or fit someone else’s mold.

Vindhy Ariella: Rising through creative collaboration

Vindhy Ariella is an artist and mental health activist at Bipolar Care Indonesia, a foundation she manages that supports and educates people diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She lives with bipolar disorder herself.

She came to Impact Hub Jakarta sideways, through her former psychologist, who knew someone there looking for a project and thought to connect them. Before that, her world had mostly run through her own foundation. She rarely sought out other organizations, joining occasionally for shared work like education or events, and let opportunities find her rather than searching them out herself.

What she noticed first at Impact Hub Jakarta was the absence of judgment. Staff asked about her daily life and her work with curiosity, the kind of questions people ask when they want to understand something, in this case what bipolar disorder is. Being able to answer them, to educate rather than explain herself defensively, built her trust in the organization and her own confidence in being there.

She’d come through nearly a year of a depressive episode that had left her without much activity or interest in anything. In 2026, alongside ongoing treatment, she decided to rise again, a return that happened to land at the start of the year and gave her momentum, right around when she connected with the Impact Hub Jakarta team. What followed was a return to enthusiasm: more confidence, more willingness to try things, and a new interest in becoming a counselor herself.

The collaboration that anchored this chapter for her was with House of Rasa. Through it, she picked up new friendships and practical knowledge, product development, brand development, the mechanics of calculating production materials. What stayed with her most was facilitating a workshop for Deaf participants, an experience she found meaningful and unforgettable. She also got to watch how curation and selling worked at a local market event, without the pressure of having to sell her own work.

The workshop itself was her own design, and her first time building anything like it: perfume blending woven together with art therapy, opening with journaling and questions about self-love, moving into letters participants wrote to themselves as small acts of hope, before finally turning to the blending itself alongside House of Rasa. The participants were engaged, and the conversations interesting to her.

Beyond their collaboration with Impact Hub Jakarta, Vindhy and the House of Rasa are continuing to work together, co-creating workshops that integrate scent, art, and mental health. They realized that by joining hands and collaborating across their fields, they will reach a wider audience and attract greater interest and participation.