Solving problems, then stepping aside: How Weh Yeoh is rethinking social impact

After witnessing the limitations of traditional charities, Weh Yeoh is doing things differently. The social entrepreneur and author of Redundant Charities has built a career challenging conventional approaches to complex social problems. 

On his first day of school, Weh Yeoh was given an important job: helping a classmate named Roger choose the right coloured pencils.

Roger was colour-blind, and Weh’s role was to ensure he could participate alongside everyone else.

Looking back, it was an early lesson in inclusion and perhaps the first sign of the purpose-driven career Weh would go on to lead. 

But his path from Roger’s buddy to founding charities and social enterprises was far from linear. 

“It makes sense in retrospect,” smiles Weh, recalling the start of his career as a physiotherapist. 

His dream was to spend his life working in private practice in Sydney, and, if he was lucky, maybe working with the Wallabies. 

Then everything changed when, on a spur-of-the-moment decision, he packed all his belongings into storage and went to travel and volunteer overseas with no end date in mind.

“I ended up living overseas for two years and seeing poverty on a level I’d never faced before,” says Weh.

“I realised there was a lot more I could do with my life and my privilege, and that it would be a waste of my privilege not to use it to help others.”

Finding purpose and community at UNSW

Weh returned to Australia and enrolled in the Master of Development Studies at UNSW, which he completed part-time over two years. He wasn’t sure where the program would take him, but he knew that UNSW was the right place to start.

“I found my people,” says Weh, who enjoyed learning alongside fellow critical thinkers and from highly regarded academics, including Dr Linda Bartolomei, Associate Professor Eileen Pittaway and Christopher Walker, PhD.

The highlight of his degree was interning at the Centre for Refugee Studies in India, where his role was to act as an intermediary between the UN and the refugees.

“Our job was to translate refugees’ stories so the UN understood what was going on,” explains Weh, who remembers being surprised by some of the inefficiencies he witnessed in this role.

To be clear, Weh believes the world is a better place because the UN exists, but he also saw many opportunities for improvement. 

“We criticise these things because we care about them and we want them to be better,” he says.

This desire to make things better became a defining motivator for Weh, especially after he graduated from UNSW and moved to China to work for a large charity. 

“I was experiencing life as an expat. I was put up in an amazing apartment with a maid, a driver, and my own interpreter – but I realised this didn’t align with my values,” says Weh. 

“I saw a huge amount of wastage and inertia, largely because this charity had to spend so much time justifying its own existence rather than actually solving the problem and actually letting local people take the lead.” 

Disillusioned, he left this role and spent some time in Cambodia. From there, everything changed.

Creating Cambodia’s first speech therapy service 

Weh didn’t set out to become a social entrepreneur. But while living in Cambodia, he realised there was an enormous demand for speech therapy services and no speech therapists to meet this need.

“There were over 600,000 people who needed speech therapy and zero speech therapists who could provide this service,” recalls Weh.

“I genuinely can’t think of anything else in Cambodia at that time that had a greater need.”

So, Weh decided to do something about it.

“I didn’t really have any desire to run a charity or be a founder. But I realised that if I didn’t do anything, in decades to come we still wouldn’t have one Cambodian university-trained speech therapist.” 

At the time, he was in his early thirties and essentially thought: Why not?

“I thought, I’ve got the time, I’ve got the energy – I’ll give it a go,” smiles Weh, who is now feeling a little less spritely as a proud dad to a sleep-resistant toddler.

That decision would eventually lead to the creation of OIC Cambodia, an organisation dedicated to developing speech therapy services and training local speech therapists. 

Building something from nothing was difficult. Securing funding was a constant challenge, and awareness of speech therapy was limited. 

Looking back, Weh believes the reason he succeeded wasn’t that he’s smarter or more strategic than anyone else. It was because he refused to give up.

“There’s nothing really about me as a person that makes me vastly better or different from the average person. But there is one key difference, which is not giving up.” 

While many people might have walked away during the difficult periods, Weh always found a reason to keep going.

When success means stepping aside

One of Weh's proudest achievements was helping OIC Cambodia reach the point where it could thrive without him. Leadership was handed over to local staff and the organisation continues to operate independently today.

"I shouldn't be there to meddle. I should be as absent as possible," he says.

The experience crystallised something he'd been thinking about since his time in China and India.

"I discovered that a lot of charities are really set up to perpetuate their own existence rather than actually hand off power to local communities and therefore make themselves redundant."

It’s not that Weh thinks charities are bad. Far from it. But he couldn't shake the feeling that success was being measured the wrong way. What if the goal wasn't to keep the charity going forever? What if success meant solving the problem and stepping aside?

Those questions formed the foundation of his book, Redundant Charities, which challenges traditional thinking about aid, development and social impact. 

The book argues that organisations should focus less on sustaining themselves and more on creating solutions that communities can own and lead after charities and foreign influence have stepped away.

He hopes to release an updated edition of the book in the future, recognising that charitable work is a complex topic that’s constantly evolving. His own opinions continue to evolve as he gains more experience. 

"I always knew that when the book was finished, it wasn't finished," he says.

“I’ve actually changed my own opinion on how strongly I feel about certain ideas.” 

Like many of the ideas he explores, Weh sees the book not as a final answer but as a contribution to an ongoing conversation about how social impact can be improved.

Then came the next challenge 

When Weh returned to Australia, he barely had a dollar to his name. After years of building OIC Cambodia, he'd earned the right to take things a little easier. Maybe it was time to find a conventional job, build some savings and start a family.

It was a sensible plan. But, in true Weh fashion, he soon stumbled across another problem that needed solving. 

Across regional Australia, families were waiting months, and sometimes more than a year, to access speech and occupational therapy. Weh couldn’t look away. 

In 2018, he co-founded Umbo, a social enterprise that uses telehealth to connect families in regional and remote communities with speech and occupational therapists across Australia. 

Weh brought many of the lessons he'd learned from OIC Cambodia, but this time he chose a different model – social enterprise. After years of navigating the realities of grants, fundraising and donor expectations, he was curious whether a business could create impact while sustaining itself.

The challenge was also different. In Cambodia, the issue was a lack of speech therapists. In Australia, there were ample speech therapists – the challenge was distance. 

"The playing field is uneven because of the tyranny of distance. In some parts of Australia, people might have to travel 500km to find a speech therapist, and they’d have no choice over who that clinician was," says Weh.

"With Umbo, we want people to have a choice about the clinician they see and access to the best clinician possible for their age group."

Umbo follows a different model to OIC Cambodia, but it’s underpinned by the same instinct: find a gap, question the status quo and build something practical to bridge it. That instinct has shaped much of Weh's career, and he’s quick to encourage others to trust their intuition. 

"Sometimes students feel pressure to know what they're going to be doing and have a life plan," he says.

Looking back, he could never have imagined where he'd end up. But by staying curious, trusting his instincts and remaining open to opportunity, he found a path that was uniquely his own.

Making a difference where you can

These days, Weh spends less time thinking about changing the world and more time thinking about making a difference where he can.

"I'm creating a corner of the world that makes sense to me," he says.

That might mean helping a family access speech therapy in regional Australia, delivering a keynote speech about his career, or simply being fully present with his daughter. 

"When I'm with my daughter and fully present with her, everything makes sense," he smiles.

Perhaps parenting isn't so different from the kind of social impact Weh has always believed in.

You do what you can. You share what you've learned. You help build confidence and capability. Then you step back and follow their lead. 

After all, the measure of success isn't being needed forever. It's knowing you've helped someone take the next step on their own.

What Weh valued most about studying at UNSW