This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on February 25, 2016.

EXTRAORDINARY people impacting the community: this is what EPIC stands for — its dream is to see a world where serving others is a lifestyle, and it is leading by example. When EPIC Homes was founded in 2010, the vision was to build relationships between rural and urban Malaysians through building homes for underprivileged Malaysian communities, with a focus on the Orang Asli. Since then, the company has grown and its vision along with it.

Last year, EPIC succeeded in building 36 homes, compared with just 16 in 2014. Of the 36 homes that it built in 2015, 20 of them were in the flood-stricken areas of Gua Musang and Dabung in Kelantan. Although EPIC was not planning to expand into flood recovery programmes by rebuilding homes, they were repeatedly approached by people who were interested in helping those communities re-establish their living spaces.

“As a result of this emergency, we had to test ourselves. One of the things that we were focusing on in previous years was getting our systems in place, so that if an event like this were to come up again, we would be able to just multiply what we were already doing many times,” said John-Son Oei, founder and chief executive officer of EPIC Collaborative.

Last year, these systems were successfully put to the test when it worked with Prudence Foundation to build 14 houses in Kelantan, and a further three in Perak and Selangor. Working with over 600 volunteers in a single month, it managed to test its capacity and realised that they could in fact, do even more. One of EPIC’s greatest accomplishments was being able to build a staggering 15 homes over four weekends in various locations, which required the colossal task of coordinating the building of several structures simultaneously.

EPIC managed to branch out into working with needy communities as a result of the floods, thus expanding its work into communities other than those of the Orang Asli. Because the homes that it had to build last year were in flood-prone areas, EPIC’s architects were pushed to design easily fabricated double-storey homes, so that in an event of a future flood, the home’s inhabitants would be able to escape to the upper floor.

In addition, they also experimented with sustainable elements such as rainwater systems, septic tank systems and a water management system within the house, with the idea that if the area were to flood again, the house on its own would be able to sustain the family living in it.

“We reached out to create partnerships with other people in the sustainable building industry to come up with these innovative solutions, which could then be plugged into our houses. We managed to build 20 homes which used many of these features,” Oei said.

All the experiences that the EPIC team went through last year enabled them to not only discover the capability to construct double-storey homes, but also to build one within just four days. Using the same manpower to erect a smaller, single-storey home used to take them three days; so EPIC sped up its building process by further simplifying and condensing building methods, creating a highly efficient way to build a house from scratch.

“We also have in place a more robust training system now, so the training that we provide volunteers is a lot more comprehensive. When they go out there, they are more skilled and more confident. Also, the management systems that we have within the volunteer community is a lot more tried and tested … We’ve ironed out all the kinks,” Oei said.

When EPIC was founded, it was envisioned as a comprehensive initiative to encourage people to adopt serving others as a way of life. “When people come for a build, they finish it and go back to wherever they came from, and they’d experience something that’s extraordinary — working with strangers, doing something they never imagined themselves doing, trusting themselves in a very foreign area and working with a group of people that not many have been exposed to, finally achieving something that’s really epic. This experience is very mind-blowing for people, and helps them realise that this idealistic world can actually exist, instead of a world where it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Oei said.

Today, Oei and his team at EPIC are starting to move beyond just building homes. Last year, EPIC struck a deal with the ministry of youth and sports to consult in developing and operating its  international volunteering programme modelled after the Peace Corps. It’s a programme that involves deploying young people overseas and creating an impact in other countries. EPIC trained 40 individuals and sent them to Cambodia for two weeks for this pilot project, in which the EPIC construction team were involved in the designing and construction of 19 latrines for a community in Angkor Ban.

EPIC DNA, their newest brainchild, is a growth and learning company with a unique proposition — it’s tied to service experiences. It has developed a comprehensive training module for the MYCorps programme, which is the international volunteering programme for the ministry of youth and sports. The entire methodology for growth and learning within the MYCorps experience was developed by EPIC DNA, with the idea of integrating a learning process within various experiences.

In the greater scheme of things, Oei’s hope is that EPIC’s efforts in alleviating the hardships of the marginalised and vulnerable communities in Malaysia will spur people to think less about themselves and more about giving back.

“Sometimes, we see people who are rich, own many houses and drive a fancy car… and when you ask them why they are still so ruthless in business and the like, they’ll reply that they still need to eat rice. They hoard resources and stockpile things unnecessarily, destroying the forest and exploiting people because there is a fear that there is not enough for them,” Oei said.

EPIC believes that everyone wants to do good and is capable of it. He or she just needs to know that there is a better way of getting around things. EPIC’s goal is to position itself as an organisation that focuses on giving back to society, to be a charity that is commercially and financially viable.