SMC was established in Singapore in 2020 and has grown into a network of 6,000 alumni across 40 countries. SMC Netherlands is its European hub within the Global Integrated Talent Ecosystem. We run Walk & Talk: a free, volunteer-organised mentorship morning where students and early-career professionals walk three structured rotations with three different senior mentors, then close with a keynote conversation. It is free to attend, and a place is earned by curiosity alone.
Why walking
Walking does something a meeting room cannot. Two people move at the same pace, look at the same view, and settle into a rhythm together. Seniority flattens out on a footpath, questions arrive more easily, and the conversation travels somewhere a scheduled thirty-minute coffee rarely reaches.
The rotations matter too. Three segments mean every mentee meets three mentors rather than one, and every mentor meets several mentees. Every pairing gets a fresh start, and the range of perspectives in a single walk goes far wider than any one-to-one programme can offer.
A deliberately mixed room
We curate every cohort rather than filling it first-come-first-served. We aim for around 60% international participation and keep any single nationality to roughly a quarter of the group, so several cultures are always present. Across everyone who has joined SMC Netherlands so far, that has produced 30 nationalities among 66 mentors and mentees, with more than three quarters holding a passport from outside the Netherlands. That balance is the point: the value of the morning comes from a Dutch student hearing how a Singaporean founder thinks about risk, and from a Hungarian executive hearing what a Rotterdam master’s student is actually worried about.
Our inaugural hike ran in Rotterdam on 9 May 2026, with twelve senior mentors and twelve international mentees, and mentors travelling in from Singapore, the Netherlands, Hungary and Belgium. Thirty-six cross-cultural conversations in a single morning.
What mentors get out of it
Mentoring here is about legacy rather than obligation: what you have built means more when it is passed forward, across borders and generations. In practice a morning is three conversations with people at the start of their careers, and the chance to spare them a few avoidable mistakes. It is also time alongside other senior leaders from industries that are not your own, and a way into the Singapore network and the wider chapters. We ask no preparation of you, and nothing beyond the morning itself.
Who you would be walking with
The mentor bench is founders and chief executives, partners, directors, professors and senior managers, from technology and AI, finance and venture capital, maritime, port and trade, life sciences and health, energy and industry, consumer goods, agrifood, the public sector and academia. Most mornings put you alongside people whose industry is nothing like your own.
A globally integrated talent ecosystem
Beyond the individual walks, SMC is actively expanding past Singapore through trusted country chapters, connecting talent, innovation ecosystems and mentorship communities across regions. Further chapters are established or in development, with Singapore anchoring the collaboration as a global talent connector.
SMC Netherlands is the European hub of that ecosystem. Our work is to connect talent, innovation and cross-border opportunity on this side of the network, so that a mentee in Rotterdam sits one conversation away from a mentor in Singapore. Mentorship is an unusually durable way to build that, because the relationships outlast any single programme, posting, or funding cycle.
We work with chambers of commerce, universities, embassies and corporate partners to widen that network. If that describes you, the Get involved page has the routes in.
A note on how we run. SMC Netherlands runs entirely on volunteer time, and the programme is designed to be cheap enough to run that it stands on its own. Partners help us reach further; the door is already open.
