This article first appeared in City & Country, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 13, 2025 - January 19, 2025

There is a relaxing atmosphere at PARC community hall in Taman Subang Ria, Subang Jaya, when City & Country meets up with EPIC Collective founder and CEO Oei John-Son for an interview. The serene setting, complete with a lake, provides the ideal “third space” — a welcoming environment equipped with WiFi, ample seating and several food and beverage vendors. Oei describes PARC as a public living room, where visitors can relax, work or socialise with friends.

PARC is one of the many initiatives undertaken by EPIC Collective to positively impact the public. A collaboration with Sime Darby Property Bhd (KL:SIMEPROP), EPIC Collective, under EPIC Communities, convert a run-down sports facilities into a functional community hall for all to use. Other initiatives include fundraising activities under its fundraising platform, Sedunia, and Project 100, which aims to deliver 100 homes to Orang Asli communities in a year.

With so many projects under its belt, it is interesting to note that its journey began with a simple mission by a group of university friends who came together to help an Orang Asli village in 2010. Oei and friends carried out a one-off project to build a toilet and paint houses there.

The experience impacted them profoundly and it led to the creation of EPIC Homes (now part of EPIC Collective) with the mission of bridging the urban and rural divide by building homes for Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia.

“It is not just about building homes but also about building relationships between urban and rural communities through the act of building houses. We want genuine relationships to develop and ensure that the Orang Asli are not just a subject matter in academic books. They need to be friends. They need to be human,” says Oei.

Since then, over 200 homes have been built and urbanites have forged connections with the Orang Asli community from the villages in Johor, Kelantan, Perak and Selangor.

“We’ve seen many lives impacted by our movement — volunteers and Orang Asli. That gave us the conviction to keep going and to see how far we could grow and to see how big of an impact we could create,” he says.

Furthering its cause of bringing positive change, EPIC Homes has started exploring bamboo as an alternative material to build houses more sustainably, which started during the Covid-19 pandemic. Oei cites the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as significant factors in the shift away from steel.

“The Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine War are two big events that have caused the price of steel and, subsequently, other construction materials to shoot up. We rely on steel as it makes up the main structure of our houses. If we continue to rely on steel, our movement will not be sustainable [in the long run]. That spurred our exploration of alternative materials,” he adds.

Another advantage of bamboo as a construction material is that it is able to sequester a significant amount of carbon dioxide.

“Bamboo is one of those plants that have the potential of being carbon negative. The more bamboo you harvest sustainably, the more carbon can be sequestered. A bamboo tree, when chopped properly, [is able to] absorb three to five times more carbon. This is because it needs to suck more carbon in order to produce more shoots. So, it has tremendous environmental benefits,” says Oei.

Other reason for exploring the resources is that it grows abundantly near Orang Asli villages.

“Most bamboo trees are located around Orang Asli villages and it is a material that they are used to interacting with. Therefore, if we can successfully make this transition [from steel to bamboo], the Orang Asli community can directly benefit from this supply chain. They can play an even greater role in providing homes for their fellow villagers,” he explains.

So far, two prototypes have been produced. Oei anticipates that another three to five prototypes are needed to perfect the design.

The second prototype, which is located at the far end of Taman Subang Ria, was built by EPIC Homes team and volunteers over two weekends in May last year.

The house is simple in design, just like the rest of EPIC Homes’ modular houses. Yet, its purpose is profound, as it is expected to revolutionise EPIC Homes’ existing modular homes.

The first prototype was built in 2022 to test bamboo as a structure for home building.

“After that, we fine-tuned it and attempted to build an entire house [the second prototype], but it is not [perfect yet]. While we are building a prototype, we are also learning and inspecting,” says Oei.

EPIC Homes’ efforts to further the use of bamboo as a construction material have received recognition from the Citi Foundation. In October 2024, EPIC Homes was selected as one of the 50 recipients of the Citi Foundation 2024 Global Innovation Challenge and received a RM2 million grant. The funds will be used to create liveable bamboo homes, which EPIC Homes will have to showcase in two years.

“We expect another three to five more prototypes to fine-tune the design, making sure that our Orang Asli friends like the design,” he says, adding that the house needs to be built within three days, according to the model of EPIC Homes.

Citi Foundation’s Global Innovation Challenge aims to tackle the issue of homelessness in the countries in which it operates.

EPIC Homes encounters challenges with bamboo such as perception, unfamiliarity and insufficient information. It wants to change how bamboo is used in the Orang Asli community.

“Bamboo needs a rebranding among the Orang Asli community because the way they treat bamboo results in the bamboo lasting only about two years. Therefore, their old houses, which were built using bamboo, easily break down and they have to rebuild the house. That gets very tiring,” says Oei.

EPIC Homes has set up a harvesting and treatment centre with bamboo experts — bamboo advocate and architect Low Ewe Jin and SEAD Bamboo, an impact enterprise providing building design and environmental consultancy services related to bamboo — to redefine that perception and produce refined, high-quality and durable bamboo products.

Doing so also means that the collaboration will create a new construction standard for bamboo, as Oei says there are no building codes for bamboo in the country.

EPIC Homes is also on a mission to deepen its impact among the Orang Asli communities through its EPIC Challenge programme.

The challenge consists of two levels. The first is the standard house building programme. The second is where the villagers initiate local projects that benefit them socioeconomically or help mobilise their next-door villages by implementing the same model used in the EPIC Challenge level one.

“When we enter a community, we identify which of the villagers in the Orang Asli community need houses. And for the villagers to seek houses, they would partake in EPIC Challenge level one,” says Oei.

“EPIC Challenge level one is about overcoming housing issues, whether building new houses, repairing houses or adding extensions to the existing houses. It’s all about solving the housing issues that are required by the household.”

He notes that while the EPIC team extends its services to build homes for the villagers, it also encourages the Orang Asli to participate in the building exercise.

“The whole objective of this exercise is to show the community the potential they have within their community — that if they work together, they can overcome challenges that they could not have imagined overcoming. This exercise helps them grow their teamwork and belief system [in their community] and they start to see how they can effectively work together,” he says.

Concurrently, the first level also helps the EPIC team identify the community’s hidden leaders. “Ultimately, our objective is to find the ‘EPIC’ people within the community,” says Oei.

After completing the first challenge, the EPIC Homes team will refer to a mapping exercise done before the EPIC Challenge starts. This exercise showcases the villagers’ needs and aspirations and invites them to participate in the second level, which is non-obligatory.

“We would ask who among them wanted to make a difference but didn’t have the [know-how or resources] to start,” he says, noting that these hidden leaders will take a step further and sign up for the second level.

At this level, the villagers can either start a local project or help the next village to mobilise itself by implementing the model EPIC Homes introduced.

“Whether it is fixing the water system, starting an educational programme for the children, farming for food sustainability or starting a business. Some of them say they dream of starting a microbusiness to generate income for their family and community. We then support them.”

Oei says the programme came about organically during the pandemic. “The EPIC Challenge started organically as a recovery project due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We couldn’t build any houses and many communities lost access to education, food and income opportunities at that time. So, we needed to find ways to supplement these things. We raised funds and started some [locally beneficial] projects as experiments.We realised that it had potential. Some projects have stopped and they went back to their normal life after the market opened up again. Some have continued and are doing better, while others were able to provide job opportunities to the locals as well.”

Ultimately, EPIC Homes is more than just building homes. It is also about empowering and improving the livelihood of the Orang Asli community.

“We don’t just build a house and call it a day. That is not what success is about. Success is about empowering the community and showing them how they can independently improve their livelihood and that of their neighbours,” he says.

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