About us
Next Step believes a child from a small family in a small town can hold their own in the world, given the chance to see opportunities they never knew existed. We use documentaries to show them.
Picture the sky above a rice field. A plane passes overhead, and anyone looking up sees a small shape. The cockpit, the operating theatre, the laboratory: none of these can be seen from down there. Something has to take you up to look.
A child who wants to become a pilot first needs to know the job exists, and to see that real people do it. That knowledge lives more in the real stories of real people than in textbooks.
We believe ability is found everywhere. What differs is who gets to see what. See more, and you have more to choose from. We call this equal opportunity: wherever you were born, you deserve the same view of the world as anyone else.
The founder tells of a student who, in 2000, watched a documentary about the F-15 fighter jet on the documentary programme Samrujlok, and set a goal of becoming a pilot. Today he is a captain with a commercial airline.
This is what we hope to see happen for many more children.
A documentary takes viewers somewhere they have not been. They see work they have never seen, and meet people who do it for real. Afterwards the question changes, from "what is there to do?" to "what do I want to do?"
The path we hope viewers can follow starts in their own community, then widens to the region, the country and the world. Each step begins with seeing what is there. We also want children to see the stories of their own hometowns on screen, because every place has stories worth telling and worth being proud of.
Moving to a big city is one choice. Staying home is another. Either way, the choice belongs to the person making it.
Our direction is to help people from small families and small communities find more chances to grow, to build their families' livelihoods, and to see the gap between rich and poor, and between the local and the big city, narrow bit by bit.
Work like this takes years, so we chose to run it as a business with a social purpose, in the spirit of a social enterprise: a business that starts from the wish to improve something in society, then finds ways to keep the work going.
What we do is connected from end to end. We produce documentaries. We bring them to many kinds of audiences. And we build learning services around documentaries, which teachers and families can use together with children.
One idea sits behind our work. Show children enough examples, then let them choose their own goals. Amornphat Chomrat calls this the Amornphat Method. You can read more at amornphat.com
Next Step and the Samrujlok Foundation once worked with Assumption University to award undergraduate scholarships to students graduating from Mathayom 6 (Grade 12) across Thailand. From 2001, more than 300 scholarships were awarded. Recipients completed their degrees, and many now work in a range of fields.
Next Step was founded in Bangkok in 1988. The motto we hold to is "Building a learning society." Today Next Step works through Thainess, Doxzilla and Good TV, with Next Step Studios producing documentaries behind them.
March 25, 1988
Next Step is founded
January 25, 2000
Next Step enters the broadcasting business with the documentary programme Samrujlok
August 20, 2015
Good TV launches
November 15, 2021
Thainess launches
January 25, 2023
Doxzilla launches
Thainess, Doxzilla and Good TV take Thailand's stories to viewers, with Studios producing documentaries behind them.
