After a 30-year career at PETRONAS, a pandemic-induced mental health challenge pushed Zalina Abdul Rahim to completely rethink her retirement. Retreating to her family's farm in Hulu Langat, she witnessed three distinct crises converging at once: a generation of city children completely disconnected from nature, neighbouring farmers losing their entire harvests to lockdowns, and devastating local floods that demanded immediate community action.

Her response was not a casual retirement hobby. In 2021, Zalina launched Ekar Lui Farm School, a bootstrapped enterprise offering STEM and sustainability-based learning in a real-world agricultural setting. Catering to mainstream schools, corporate leadership programmes, and neurodivergent children, the social enterprise has proven its market demand, growing its operations by 200 percent in 2025 without a single ringgit of external investment.

Zalina talks to us about the tight unit economics of keeping animals fed and children engaged on a bootstrapped budget, how she gained access to grants and collaborations which helped accelerate growth, and what it takes to build a viable ESG education hub that prioritises purpose over pure profit.

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