2023 Emerging Trail Leaders

Emerging Trail Leader Scholarship Recipient

Foo Chuen Yong

Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

Formal and sustainable trail building skills and expertise is a rarity in Asia and in particular Malaysia. This is because we do not have great institutions like American Trails and PTBA to champion sustainable trail building skills and offer proper education program for it. Hence to acquire such skills is very expensive for us. I would say almost unattainable. Trail building has not achieved the level of commercialisation as in the US and Europe yet. So many of us run either very small set ups or volunteer our own time to build sustainable trails in Malaysia. My aim is to promote proper and sustainable trail designs and building techniques in Malaysia and start a movement to develop trail building in Malaysia as a thriving business. My trail building set up called MyChangkul is a very small one man Social Enterprise in Malaysia, our 50% of our profits are poureed back into the running of the enterprise and the other 50% is donated . We do not retain any profits for profit sharing or dividends payout. So by getting a sholarship to attend this conference will go a long way to help us reduce our operating cost. By attending this conference I am hopeful that we will learn from others and in turn practice what we learn back home. In attending this conference I hope to bring to he event some diversity where I can share trail building efforts and stories in the Malaysian cultural, geopolitical and tropical rainforest settings.