‘I’ve given up a lot’: Aware’s former leader Corinna Lim on power, burnout and succession
Source: Straits Times
Article Date: 09 Feb 2026
Author: Wong Kim Hoh
Corinna Lim grew Aware from a six-person outfit into a multimillion-dollar, 30-strong force for gender equality.
On the surface, Ms Corinna Lim reads like a serial overachiever: top law student, former national squash player, tech entrepreneur who raised seven-figure funding, lawyer behind Singapore’s first domestic violence Bill, and the leader who grew Aware from a six-person outfit into a multimillion-dollar, 30-strong force for gender equality.
In person, she is less iron-lady feminist than wry, self-aware confessor who talks easily about fear, failure, burnout and the quiet toll of always having to be “on”.
Now 61, she grew up in an upper-middle-class family living off Holland Road, the middle of three daughters of parents who were both educated in England. Childhood schedules were relentless: music lessons, “five types of dance classes”, several instruments before sport decisively took over.
One afternoon, while their parents played tennis, she and her elder twin sister Serena picked up rackets and started hitting balls. By their teens, they were known as “the tennis twins”. Their rivalry was fierce enough that after one on-court clash left Ms Lim needing stitches, the sisters struck a truce.
“You take tennis, I’ll take squash,” recalls the former national squash player who believes competitive sports builds resilience and character in ways that last a lifetime.
But if sport gave her confidence, sexuality complicated her young adulthood.
Being a closeted gay woman in conservative Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s weighed heavily on her. Although professionally successful, she recalls being deeply unhappy and fantasising about emigrating to New Zealand, Canada or Australia.
It would be decades before she spoke publicly about her sexuality. Within Aware, acceptance was always there, she says, even joked about among members. However, there was caution about being open in public especially after the 2009 “Aware saga”, when conservative Christians accused the organisation of pushing a “pro-gay agenda”.
Only after the repeal of Section 377A in 2022 did she finally feel able to speak publicly. With the law gone, she argues: “If we are not going to speak up about it, then who will?”
She dreamed of studying biochemistry after her A levels but her mother put her foot down, warning: “You’re so forgetful, you’ll blow yourself up.” Instead, she steered her into law alongside her twin sister, promising to fund further studies later if the scientific itch remained.
Fortunately, Ms Lim discovered she loved law’s blend of logic and language and topped her cohort in her third year at the National University of Singapore. That unexpected first-in-class result opened doors to elite firms.
She joined Allen & Gledhill and apprenticed under top litigator and senior counsel Michael Hwang. But a crippling phobia of public speaking soon emerged. Each time she donned her court jacket, her body rebelled.
“I’d freeze. I couldn’t get the words out. I’d have to go to the ladies and stand under the hand dryer.”
When the firm started a research department, she asked to move. The switch allowed her to play to her strengths – meticulous analysis and writing – and she made partner after six years. However, she still harboured a deep sense of disquiet about the law or her own purpose.
Relief came from an unexpected direction. In 1990, a pregnant colleague asked her to take over her monthly pro bono legal clinic slot at Queenstown Community Centre, run by the Singapore Association of Women Lawyers. She was just two years into practice and had never done family law but agreed.
The experience was revelatory. Once a month, she would unlock a modest room where a queue of women were waiting, each with 30 minutes to seek advice on failed marriages, abusive husbands, maintenance and custody.
“To see hope in people’s eyes when they didn’t have it before, that was just so powerful,” she recalls. “That was the reason I was a lawyer.”
The clinic shattered her self-pity and exposed the structural injustices trapping lower-income women who had given up careers to raise children and endured violence with little legal protection. At the time, the police could do little unless there was “grievous hurt” – broken bones or worse. Bruises did not count.
Ms Lim next became a volunteer at the legal clinic of Aware, the non-governmental organisation founded in 1985 to advance gender equality and women’s rights. When founding member Kanwaljit Soin – an orthopaedic surgeon and former Nominated Member of Parliament – decided to press for Singapore’s first family violence Bill, she turned to Ms Lim for help.
Dr Soin’s Bill proposed a standalone legal framework that treated family violence as a distinct public harm, and argued for more proactive state intervention to support victims who were fearful, traumatised or unable to seek protection themselves.
The young lawyer had never drafted legislation. She assiduously hunted down foreign precedents, including Malaysia’s, and cobbled together a draft in 1995. The first attempt was rejected amid fears of “police going into people’s bedrooms”. But the Bill capped a decade of advocacy and public education, eventually contributing to landmark reforms in family violence law.
“Although the Government rejected the Bill, it shaped the 1995 Women’s Charter amendments, which, for the first time, defined family violence in law. That definition was limited as it did not explicitly include sexual, psychological and emotional violence or allow third-party involvement. This was provided for in subsequent amendments,” says Ms Lim.
The lesson was transformative, she says. Casework changed individual lives; law reform reshaped the landscape for thousands at once.
Her activism unexpectedly propelled her overseas in 1998. Fulbright officials, concerned that scholarships were going mainly to “Chinese government males”, sought more diverse candidates. Ms Lim – who had by then joined her sister at KhattarWong – fit the brief.
She chose Columbia University in New York, enrolling in a Master’s in Public Administration with a self-designed focus on social entrepreneurship. It was the height of the dot.com boom, and at Columbia Business School she encountered teenage founders raising millions for exhilarating, if dubious, ideas.
Back in Singapore, encouraged by her father, who told her, “If you don’t do it, you’ll always wonder ‘what if’,” Ms Lim co-founded legal Bizibody Technology in 2000 with her twin and a few friends, its name inspired by the moniker her mother once gave her. The platform offered practical information for people keen to do business in Asia. Bank of Singapore Ventures invested $1 million, bluntly telling the founders they were backing the team more than the idea.
Then the bubble burst and two male partners left. The sisters and their sole remaining female partner pivoted to legal tech, supplying software to a profession Ms Lim describes as “tech dinosaurs”. Bizibody survived.
By 2005, Ms Lim was burned out. She wanted to shut down the company but her sister said: “These lawyers bought our technology. You can’t let them down.” She took over leadership and still runs the company today, freeing Ms Lim to step away.
The Aware saga
She returned to legal practice, co-managing a small law firm and later joining property developers KOP in-house. Then the “Aware saga” erupted in 2009.
A group of conservative Christians had quietly mounted a takeover of Aware’s executive committee. Ms Lim’s initial reaction was disbelief. “You’re joking. Someone wants to take over Aware? Why? We’re so messy, we don’t have a lot of money; it’s more liability than asset.”
But Ms Constance Singam, Aware’s then president, was distraught and Ms Lim felt a deep sense of obligation. An Easter church sermon about doing the right thing, not the easy thing, crystallised her decision to fight back.
The May 2, 2009 EOGM at Suntec City is now civil-society lore. Halfway through, as speech after speech swung the mood, Ms Lim realised they might beat the interlopers. They did.
The saga changed her life. She agreed to return to the board in the chaotic aftermath and, after a consultant told them the first three items on Aware’s to-do list were to “get an executive director, get an executive director, get an executive director”, she realised a secret, long-buried desire – to run Aware – had surfaced.
In 2010, she became Aware’s first full-time ED, stepping into a role that would define the next 16 years of her life. Aware then had six staff and $500,000 in reserves.
She hired an advocacy director and researcher, created a fundraising function and went “out to friends, the lawyers who are rights-based” to raise money. Over time, she developed distinct pillars: support services; research; advocacy; corporate training through Catalyse Consulting; and later, community engagement through the SPACE (support, partner and act through commuity engagement) department.
Under her leadership, Aware’s annual budget grew to around $4 million, its headcount to more than 30, and its reserves to roughly $8 million, a healthy one to two years of operating costs, the benchmark she set so the charity would never be one bad year away from crisis.
She also introduced a distinctive way of working with government, neither confrontational nor compliant, but strategically candid. Her method was simple: ministries received advance copies of reports, points of contention were spelled out in footnotes, and no one was ever blindsided. The result? Officials stayed engaged, and Aware’s credibility remained intact.
Ms Lim and her team were closely involved in pushing for the Protection from Harassment Act (2014), which she credits to then Law Minister K. Shanmugam’s willingness to listen. After an Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) conference that gathered groups working on workplace harassment, school bullying and cyber abuse, all the panellists – including Ms Lim – independently called for a substantive harassment law instead of relying on a minor provision in the Miscellaneous Offences Act.
Mr Shanmugam initially told the participants he did not intend to legislate, but returned in the evening to say he would proceed with a new Protection from Harassment Act. Later, when her team pointed out gaps – like the lack of employer duties and the fact that breaching a protection order was not arrestable – the Ministry of Law agreed to review the law within five years, and passed the ball on workplace issues to the Manpower Ministry, which eventually developed tripartite guidelines.
Ms Lim also pressed successfully for the repeal of an archaic Evidence Act provision that allowed a rape complainant’s sexual history to be raised in court as “relevant” evidence. Armed with an intern’s research, she secured a meeting with Mr Shanmugam, by then Law Minister, walked him through the section and watched him scan it and say: “We don’t need it. It’s really old-fashioned.” He not only scrapped it but insisted on publicly acknowledging Aware’s role.
Meanwhile, Aware’s Sexual Assault Care Centre – which started as a simple “sexual assault befriender service” on the helpline in 2011 – has grown into Singapore’s leading specialised service for survivors of sexual violence, handling around 700 cases a year.
Her teams have also spearheaded research and advocacy on single mothers’ access to public housing, low-income women’s employment barriers, and caregivers of the elderly, leading to improved housing rules and greater support for vulnerable families.
Her feminism is rooted in pragmatism: unapologetic about structural change, yet attuned to Singapore’s political realities. Younger activists at times bristle at what they call Aware’s “NGO complex”, seeing it as overly moderate and consultative; they would rather bang down the door.
Candidly, she lets on that tensions have surfaced inside Aware. In 2015, a proposed constitutional change to allow men onto the board failed by just a few votes, with some members arguing that “we live in a men’s world, can we not have one board where men are not on top?”
Ms Lim says: “To be fair, that happened 10 years ago. Just like me, Aware has also evolved and now see involving men as an important part of the solution.”
She took the lesson to heart. If she could not win over members on board composition, she could at least ensure that within staff, there would be male colleagues and partnerships with men’s groups. She has lately become preoccupied with masculinity, dropping the term “toxic masculinity” after a group of former perpetrators told her it discouraged men from seeking help.
She is now advising a new men’s group, Fellowship Of Men, Singapore, formed by men who have used violence and social workers, helping them set up what could be Singapore’s first dedicated men’s helpline.
Three years ago, she tendered her resignation, setting a final departure date of Dec 31, 2025. Her reasons included a desire to leave while the organisation was strong and at its peak; and the wish to stay long enough to help steady the transition.
Then there was the deeper cost.“I’ve given up a lot ...that’s the cost of doing this job, where I’m always on,” she says softly.
The three-year runway was to force herself to let go and to give Aware time to prepare.
“I also don’t want to stifle everyone. I find I know too much, and I can take over people’s jobs if they’re not there, which is very bad. They need time. They’re not going to be as good as me. They haven’t made the same mistakes I made.”
In those three years, she built a senior leadership team, steadily handing over operations, fundraising, community engagement and communications so that she would no longer be “employee No. 6 doing four jobs”.
Some quarters were taken by surprise when the board ultimately chose an outsider to succeed her. That outsider was Ms Lim Shoon Yin, a former senior DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) leader at Shell, Microsoft and Givaudan who – alongside championing women’s leadership – also speaks four languages, including sign. The mother of four daughters had first approached Ms Lim after an eventful decade in the Family Court, asking how she could better support other women. Aware formally announced her appointment on Jan 1, 2026.
For Ms Lim, the real work now is not to cling. She is clear about what she does not want: budgets to manage, staff to line-manage, a board position that confuses governance with operations. She is equally clear about where she can still add value: fundraising, advocacy, training and mentoring.
“I am still senior adviser in the organisation and Catalyse Consulting, Aware’s DEI subsidiary that supports companies,” she says.
Freed from day-to-day responsibility, she is looking forward to finally renovating her kitchen and cooking more, drawing on the macrobiotic and shiatsu philosophies she studied while in New York. She remains fanatically devoted to walking, tai chi and hiking – disciplines she credits with keeping her sane through years of stress – and has a long list of trails to conquer.
Ms Lim leaves Aware with “no burning regrets”. There are ideas she did not manage to execute – especially around men and boys – but nothing that keeps her awake at night.
Her hope is simple: that Aware under the new ED will be even more professional, less dependent on any one person, yet just as dynamic and “really on the ball” as it was under her.
“Aware,” she says, “has never been about one person.”
Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.
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