Young people are capable of far more than the circumstances they are born into. This belief is where Kita begins.
We work with youths aged 15 to 25, many referred through social workers, educators and the criminal justice system. Some have dropped out of formal education. Others are navigating complex home situations or financial instability. What they share is potential that has not always had space to grow.
Singapore has a strong ecosystem of youth support and many dedicated organisations doing meaningful work. What we noticed, through our own experience on the ground, was a gap that was harder to fill: the connections between things.
Skills training worked well but left youths without a community to return to. Career exposure opened doors but did not build the confidence to walk through them. Placement support moved people forward but could not always hold them there.
Each element is valuable in itself, more powerful when woven together, and most powerful when the young person is at the centre of shaping it.
Kita (meaning "we" or "ours" in Malay, a name given to us by an alumna) is built around that insight. Not as a service provider, but as a community that walks alongside young people as they claim agency over their own lives.
Our conviction is that when young people are trusted as co-creators of their own futures and given real ownership over the process, something lasting becomes possible. That conviction is the reason Kita exists.
We have created an integrated youth development ecosystem made up of three mutually reinforcing programme modalities.
Kita Studios is the career development track. Industry-level Digital Marketing training paired with practical AI tools, portfolio development and job placement support give youths a concrete pathway forward. An AI refresher series keeps alumni from earlier cohorts competitive as the job market evolves.
Kita Labs is the experimentation platform. Low-stakes, hands-on projects give youths space to explore without the pressure of performance. In our Beat-Making Lab, participants compose music while sitting with big questions about identity and aspiration. In the $100 Project, each youth receives $100 to invest in something personally meaningful, be it a skill or a micro-venture, building agency through real decision-making.
Kita Space is where the story continues. Reserved for alumni of Labs and Studios, Space is a living community that grows alongside its members long after a programme ends. Monthly gatherings bring alumni together over community meals and peer-led sharing sessions, where members choose and facilitate their own topics.
Crucially, alumni regularly return to lead programmes, sharing their experiences with the next cohort. It’s a full-circle moment that defines Kita: our community does not close when a programme does. It keeps giving back, and the young people within it become part of what makes it work for everyone who comes after them.
Since 2019, Kita Studios was among the first programmes in Singapore to demonstrate that youths from under-resourced backgrounds could enter and thrive in digital careers.
Over a five-year period, Studios graduates earn on average SGD 84,728 (approximately USD 63,500) more than their pre-programme baseline income - a cumulative shift significant enough to move the majority out of the bottom 20% low-income bracket they started from.
Productive engagement, defined as stable employment or active participation in further education and training, rose from 28% before the programme to 91% at point of evaluation.
Our most recent milestone is [X] by Kita at Stamford Arts Centre, developed in partnership with the National Youth Council and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth.
More than a physical space, [X] is proof that young people can and should have genuine ownership over spaces designed for them, shaped weekly through gatherings and open drop-in hours.
We are also developing our Kita Youth Council, moving youths from programme participants to organisational stewards with actual decision-making power over Kita's direction.
Kita's evolution has been a series of honest reflections and iterations.
For the first six years, we ran structured careers training in Digital Marketing and UI/UX Design. Graduates entered stable employment and incomes rose. We felt we were on to something. But evaluation research with the National University of Singapore surfaced a harder truth: a standardised curriculum cannot reach young people whose circumstances require more than skills training alone. We were reaching some, but not those who needed it most.
That finding prompted a fundamental reimagination. We restructured the entire model around a central insight that, in hindsight, seems obvious: skills, exposure and placement only hold when embedded within genuine community. The result is Kita's current ecosystem, Studios, Labs and Space, each distinct and mutually reinforcing.
We also shifted from a purely programmatic model to a place-based one. [X] by Kita is our attempt at physical infrastructure for belonging, named to stay open to whatever the community decides to make of it. We are still learning what that means.
The deepest change is in how we understand our role. We do not think we have this fully figured out, but we have come to see the enormous power of putting young people as not just recipients of a model we design but as co-architects of what the organisation becomes.
Reach out at journey@withkita.sg and we will find time to talk through your context and how Kita's approach may be useful to you.
There is no single template for how this model gets adopted. The participatory approach at the heart of Kita means any adaptation should be shaped by the young people it is built for.
What we can offer is our learnings: building trust before building programmes, holding skills development and community together, and what it takes to create conditions where young people can lead.
We are happy to walk practitioners through our programme design and facilitation approach. Organisations exploring more participatory models of youth work are welcome to start a conversation as we build towards more formal knowledge-sharing with the sector. Funders and policymakers are also welcome to see what we have built and what we are still figuring out.
Learn more at withkita.sg.
