When Niney Chong was diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in 2020, her first reaction was not just personal — it was strategic. A Social Impact Marketing Strategist with years of experience in training, speaking and community building, she asked herself a pointed question: if she, a well-read professional, had never heard of PMDD before her own diagnosis, how many other Malaysian women were navigating the same silence? That question became the founding logic of Womentum, a women’s community and social impact start-up she launched in February 2021.
The Founder and the Leadership Team
Niney Chong serves as CEO, Founder and Consul for Hormonal Healing at Womentum. Beyond the community, she is also Founder of Ministry Of Marketing.Asia, Co-Founder and CMO of Chatbot Malaysia, and Director and CMO of BAYU PLT, as well as a Certified Professional Image and Branding Consultant. She is a mother of two.
She built Womentum with a co-founding and consul structure that places recognised public figures and credentialed professionals alongside each other. The leadership team, as reported by Prestige Online in March 2022, comprises:
- Adelina Adna — COO of Womentum; Chief Creative Officer of Ministry Of Marketing.Asia; Co-Founder and Creative Trainer at Passion8 Creative Space; Microbusiness Branding and Social Media Strategist.
- Varin Gill — CFO of Womentum; Business Finance Partner at All Black Ventures Pte Ltd; 200-Hour Yoga Teacher; Primordial Sound Meditation Facilitator; holds a Sexuality Coach Training Certification.
- Sazzy Falak — Consul for Body Empowerment; Co-Founder of Precession Capital Bhd and Akar Pohon Capital Bhd; award-winning actress and TV host; Certified Fitness Trainer; mother of three.
- Aishah Sinclair — Consul for Emotional Care; Co-Founder of Akar Pohon Capital Bhd; host, emcee and event speaker; Radio Announcer on Mix.fm; mother of two.
- Lisa Surihani — Consul for Cognitive Fitness; award-winning actress, TV host and model; appointed UNICEF Malaysia Goodwill Ambassador in 2017; Women of the Future Southeast Asia Awards (Arts & Culture) nominee; mother of three.
The name Womentum — a compound of “women” and “momentum” — signals the community’s intent directly: to keep women moving forward, consistently, across every dimension of their lives.
Five Pillars, One Framework for Momentum
Rather than organising around a single cause, Womentum structures its work across five interdependent pillars. Each pillar is led by a named consul who speaks from both lived experience and professional background. The framework, as described by the founders in their own words to Prestige Online (published March 2022), operates as follows:
| Pillar | Consul | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Body Empowerment | Sazzy Falak | Body positivity, physical self-care, mindful nutrition and understanding the body as a long-term asset |
| Emotional Care | Aishah Sinclair | Checking in on emotions, acknowledging feelings, and taking deliberate action toward emotional wellbeing |
| Cognitive Fitness | Lisa Surihani | Mental health, managing brain fatigue, building focus and achieving mental clarity |
| Hormonal Healing | Niney Chong | Awareness and management of hormonal conditions including irregular cycles, mood disorders, infertility and sleep disruption |
| Vigorous and Zesty Lifestyle | Adelina Adna | Linking the other four pillars through nutrition, positive mindset and a sustainable, momentum-driven approach to daily life |
Adelina Adna described the fifth pillar’s integrating function plainly: “A vigorous and zesty lifestyle links the other four pillars and focuses on nutrition, being in momentum, and creating a positive, can-do mindset.” The model treats personal wellness not as separate from professional ambition, but as its precondition.
Building the Community: Programmes, Platforms and Taboo Topics
From its founding in February 2021, Womentum operated across Clubhouse, Facebook Live and Instagram Live, using digital platforms to reach members at scale. The community runs weekly activities through what it calls “Tribe nurture zones,” including seven Clubhouse rooms. One room, led by a moderator and focused on leading with heart and mind, is specifically described as including PTSD and mental health specialists. A “Morning Intentions” room sets weekly goals; a “Friday Joyroom” closes the week by celebrating member wins.
Lisa Surihani, as Consul for Cognitive Fitness, described plans — as of March 2022 — to introduce structured Pillar Programs designed to normalise conversations around mental health, including depression, suicide and anxiety. Womentum’s approach pairs expert guests (doctors, mental health professionals, coaches) with open discussion formats intended to reduce stigma rather than merely raise awareness.
Sazzy Falak singled out conversations that remain absent from Malaysian public discourse: responsible sex education, reproductive health, and workplace sexual harassment. “In our society, even in the entertainment industry, it still happens,” she said, referring to sexual harassment. “Most of the time, women keep quiet and are afraid to voice out.” Her comments point to a gap the community explicitly tries to address — not with policy advocacy, but with normalised conversation.
For the month of March 2022, Womentum ran a weekly Instagram Live series every Wednesday at 9:30pm on the subject of unconscious bias — timed to International Women’s Day and its “Break the Bias” theme that year.
On Leadership: What the Founders Believe
The Womentum founders speak about female leadership with specific precision, avoiding the generalised inspiration common to this space. Several distinct positions emerged in the Prestige Online interview:
Niney Chong argues that clarity is the defining trait of effective leadership — not exclusively female leadership, but leadership overall. “If a leader has clarity in her vision, it’s so much easier to lead because the team will be able to see the goals and direction clearly.” She couples this with what she calls leading from the heart and, separately, kindness.
Lisa Surihani’s view on success focuses on decoupling roles from gender: “A CEO does not necessarily have to be a male, or a housewife does not have to be fulfilled by a female.” The measure of a successful leader, she suggests, is the ability to demonstrate that professional roles are not gender-determined.
Varin Gill points to lack of support, lack of education, lack of network and — notably — motherhood as the factors most commonly preventing women from pursuing leadership. She adds a less conventional observation: that leadership begins internally. “The definition of leadership is important. It’s not just about leading the world about you, but also leading yourself towards happiness, dealing with your emotions, and expressing yourself.”
Why the Womentum Model Matters for Malaysia
Malaysia has no shortage of women’s empowerment initiatives. What distinguishes Womentum, based on the evidence in the supplied sources, is the particular combination of elements it brings together: a structured five-pillar wellness framework, a leadership team that includes both credentialed professionals and high-profile public figures, a willingness to open conversations on topics — hormonal disorders, reproductive health, workplace harassment — that remain underdiscussed in mainstream Malaysian media, and an accessible digital community model that reached members through free and low-barrier platforms from its first months.
Niney Chong’s founding insight — that her own diagnosis of PMDD went unknown until 2020, despite her professional exposure — points to a structural information gap affecting Malaysian women broadly. Womentum’s response is not to wait for institutions to close that gap, but to build a peer community that does so directly, one pillar at a time.
For observers tracking influential Malaysian figures who are building lasting community infrastructure rather than simply occupying public roles, Niney Chong and the Womentum co-founders represent a model worth watching — one in which leadership is defined not by position, but by the number of other people it sets in motion.
Source: Prestige Online Malaysia, published 22 March 2022. All roles, titles and programme details reflect information as reported at that date.
Photo by Sable Flow on Unsplash
