I think we’re going to see a lot of women come out of the pandemic, but when we start to see things open up, we’re going to see a lot of traumatised women. Particularly those women where they’ve been in vulnerable situations where they’ve experienced domestic violence and so on.

To the point of the other speakers, from what I heard, the budget was a very clear message to the women of Australia that we’re only worth 0.006% of the entire budget over a four year period, because the central issues that women are facing now have not been addressed. Our mission has always been to help women into work and stay in work. It’s not about job creation, but we’ve had to do a little bit of mission creep to start looking at those issues because the job creation opportunities just haven’t been made.

We’re certainly hoping that some of the state governments, will take this opportunity and use it, but I think it is about an ecosystem that needs to support a woman. We just look at the employment part, but that’s only one part of it. We know that another part of it might be childcare, and another part of it might be health and wellbeing, but we know that a big part of it is financial security and housing.

I think there’s a big opportunity for a collective voice to come together for women working in the community sector to decide this is not good enough. We need to find real pathways to help women because otherwise, in the next 10 to 15 years, we’re going to have women of my age. We’re going to have an epidemic of homeless women.

Jo was just speaking a little bit about that age group just before we went on air. Jo, do you have some more to add to that, because it’s a big issue that we’re at the moment pretending isn’t happening?

[Jo Cavanagh OAM] – Thank you Carlie, and hello Donna! Just as a little side note, I had the joy of making a tiny contribution to setting up Fitted For Work with Marion Webster and chairing a volunteer management program to help with your start-up and some of our business models.

Again, I think that’s what a lot of women in leadership have done, which is actually contribute and share to help grow the ecosystem rather than themselves as a competitive, independent entity.

Look, one of the things I think is really important is that we’ve got to have this layered approach. Whilst we invest in [as a member of Northern Women’s Fund] initiatives that are going to look after women with problems now, we have to look up to the systems that are perpetuating those problems.

We equally need to work together and collaborate with those who are in advocacy positions or working for policy change, legislative change, superannuation, and maternity leave issues.

I have a really good colleague, Avril Henry, who you may know from Avril Henry and Associates, and I certainly recommend her book and her leadership program to you as well. She and I worked for a couple of years trying to get this tiered approach to say, “where are the advocacy points?”

But let me tell you, and I won’t name the particular group, but she’s really brilliant on the numbers [I’m never good on the numbers], we pitched to a major business conference for a panel conversation about these structural issues, which hold women back from contributing to the economy. We were told that there would be no interest in hearing a group of women talking about women’s issues at a business conference! We were not pitching this [event] as women’s issues, we were saying these are structural barriers to the economy progressing, and all the evidence supports it.

But again, the decision-makers can’t see it. We’ve got to really keep partnering vertically as well as horizontally to push up the messages, the data, the stories and the initiatives that are effective to demand that they be changed at the political level.

At times we’ve seen that when female politicians gathered together and picked up an issue, they actually could influence change, but we don’t call it out often enough. Up until now, we’ve been happy to let it go on behind closed doors, but we actually need to now call it out when it is happening and when it’s not happening. I do think whilst we keep responding and helping every woman who’s important, we’ve got to pull out [and question], “what’s the theme here and where is the locus of change?” If it’s a piece of legislation, we need to make sure that the effort’s going there.

Thanks Jo. Emma-Kate, Cinnamon, did you want to add anything?

[Cinnamon Evans] – I’m just loving Jacinda Ardern really! She’s my hero in terms of women in leadership and the well-being economy and starting to talk about notions around that. I think she’s bringing those connections to light. I really appreciate her.

[Emma-Kate Rose] – I agree.

I think that the old saying, “you can’t be what you can’t see” [is true], and I’m seeing more women in leadership really challenging the patriarchy in such an obvious way as Jacinda Ardern is, which is very inspiring.

It’s rewarding for her, I mean she just got re-elected on a landslide victory, so it works if you take it up and you present the issues and you don’t get called a crazy cat lady, then you know it’s working for everybody. I think that’s the lesson that a lot of men in power need. They need to check their privilege and they need to have a look at the evidence that’s coming from around the world.

We can see that through the response to COVID, as a lot of the women led countries around the world that are responding to COVID have responded in the best way, and their countries are back on track. Then you compare that to the U.S. and the U.K. and it’s a no brainer!

It’s definitely so simple, but we have to be our own voice. No one else is going to speak up. It’s like, “okay, we need to keep backing ourselves and shouting and shouting and shouting.” We’ve got the action behind us to prove that we can do it.

[Emma-Kate Rose] – That starts with our own relationships with the folks around us. I actively pull Robert up because we’re partners in business and in life, and we have a pact that if either of us are asked to speak on a panel the first thing we ask is, “who are the other panellists?”

Is it equal representation of female and male, and we even go to the point now where we ask, “are there any indigenous females on the panel?” This is because we just want to take it to the next level. I think you’ve got to just constantly challenge yourself and challenge that privilege that is often so blind to the people in power.

Not just political power, but cultural power. There’s lots of different types of power out there, and I think women have a real role to play in leading that cultural revolution.

I agree. Cinnamon, we spoke before and you said, “I don’t see this so much in my industry”, which is refreshing. I would really like to highlight that for a little bit and see if we can pick up on some of those themes that are very gender neutral. I guess my question is you are a passionate advocate for building a strong network for social enterprise and impact led business, so how do you build and sustain an active and healthy community regardless of gender? How are we going to have this active, healthy community?

[Cinnamon Evans] – Great question. I was reflecting on this before today’s session, and I was thinking that there are two key influences on my thinking. One of those is the model of collaborative practice. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been fortunate to learn from the late Glen Ochre who established the Group Work Institute of Australia now known as the Group Work Centre, and she developed a model of collaborative practice for organisations.

It’s like the layers of an onion, and at the core you have the values and principles that underpin the work. I think in social enterprise, those values are often very clear and very much about the wellbeing of all, and the middle rings are our own self-awareness and our own skillsets around interpersonal communication.

Glen called them micro skills, around how we communicate every single day with everybody that we interact with. The outer ring is the organisational processes that we use, including collaborative decision-making or conflict resolution, planning, meeting processes, and all the other ways that we interact. For me, those have been the guiding model for how I lead my organisation.

I also need to acknowledge [and this is the second theme], the importance of self-organising systems, communities, networks, families, and organisations. For me, leadership must support a self-organising model. We see in nature ecosystems are self-organising and social systems also can be. I think that’s where you get resilience, diversity and growth.

I see myself, even though I’m the CEO of my organisation, I don’t think I could control the organisation, even if I tried. I think of myself as someone who intervenes in the system in order to help it become more of what it’s wanting to become, rather than me trying to guide it to be something. Those have really informed my practice. I do think social enterprise is a space that is obviously full of values, relationships and collaboration. Working in the social enterprise community more generally in Victoria, I see that it’s a very supportive network and community.

Thanks Cinnamon. Collaboration, it comes out again. The collaborative nature of it makes you feel like you don’t have to step in and have this ultimate power. The power is with everyone within. That’s ultimately I feel like what we’re speaking about when women work together with men as well. It’s that collaborative approach, as opposed to that top down type working.

What are some initiatives that you know of that are directly supporting women in business, and this could be in the form of mentoring programs, networks, or grant opportunities? [This is] because I think there’s a lot of women that are coming to these panels to learn how they can help themselves and what they’re doing, so I’d love to hear from each of you some standouts and we can put them in the podcast as well. Emma-Kate, please start us off.

[Emma-Kate Rose] – I’ve mentioned some earlier, but the first that comes to mind [especially because I wish I had some amazing mentoring panels when I was going through all my angst leading organisations], are accelerators, incubators and seed funds like SHEEO. I know of ImpaQt Queensland, the fund that’s going to be launched in March has a specific focus on female-led impact businesses. Also, in terms of philanthropy and support, there is a women’s giving circle in Brisbane. It’s largely anonymous though, so you have to ask around to tap into that knowledge base, but they’re the initial ones that come to mind.

I guess here in Brisbane a lot of the female social entrepreneurs are very familiar with each other and tend to bounce stuff off each other in a very informal way with some pretty nice blokes surrounding us as well.

Like Cinnamon mentioned, it’s a very collaborative space, and we do like to see each other succeed and we do support each other. That’s all that comes to mind for me at this point.

Thanks Emma-Kate, that’s great! Jo?

[Jo Cavanagh OAM] – Well, yes, I’m in Victoria, and the Victorian Government has committed to over a number of years now a social enterprise strategy and growing social enterprise. There’s the Social Enterprise Network, and I’ve noticed too that the federal government has got a program called Boosting Female Founders Initiatives.

I don’t know whether anybody’s had any engagement with that, but I certainly know that from women I’ve worked with [and some mentoring myself] it is challenging to find those funding opportunities that don’t require hours and hours of paperwork and preparation because much of the granting process is still risk averse. It’s those networks that will do what Warren Buffet said and have confidence in the person with the ideas and their track record to go from idea to execution and be able to work with failing forward.

An idea might still be a good idea, but you’ve got to pivot as everybody has done in COVID and do it slightly differently by backing the women founders to do that. I mean, the statistics are that only 3% of global venture capital funding actually went to women in 2019.

We are a long way, and I know of the Women Donors Network, the Melbourne Women’s Fund, and there are more and more initiatives. There’s giving circles that are really trying to bring the gender lens to the forefront, because we can’t hope that merit will catch up. Wendy McCarthy, Susan Ryan and my generation thought education was going to be the answer, that we would open up education and on a merit system, women would then rise to the top. But, we haven’t!

In some cases, we’ve gone backwards, even though we’re so highly educated and particularly in caring professions, we’re highly educated and yet the most poorly paid. I do think it is still about networks, and I think the clever use of LinkedIn and some other online platforms are important to get yourself connected, and ask, “who can I talk to?”

Because although the collaboration is important, business strategy is really important too. You have to strategically be able to work out how you’re going to get from here to there, and how you’ll know whether things are on track or not, because there’s people relying on you being successful. If you’re trying to benefit others in the community, we can’t just kind of throw darts.

We have to actually be very intentional. We do need all that good business mentoring as well, and there is lots of that out there. But, because you’re in the less well-paid spheres, I encourage women to speak up and ask for scholarships and ask for not-for-profit rates. Sometimes it’s just that people haven’t thought of doing it.

If there’s something on at the Australian Institute of Management Leadership, and you want to attend, you should ask, “is there a scholarship rate, or a not-for-profit rate?” Again, approach women, as most women who have got a track record are happy to donate time and provide specific direction to what people are wanting to do and share their experience. Also, Zoom has just changed everything in terms of getting like-minded, interested people with shared interests together for a little pocket of time to see what you can share with people.

Thanks Jo. Donna, do you have any advice for our women?

[Donna De Zwart] – Look, I concur with what Emma-Kate and Jo said.

One strategy that I found really useful is to develop your own board of directors. Have the idea that no one person is going to be an expert in everything but develop that board of directors that’s going to help you.

Over the years, I’ve delivered quite a few talks to university students who are really interested in getting into the sector. Often, we see a lot of heart, but not a lot of business acumen.

It’s great that you’ve got the passion and the vision, but you also need the business acumen as well. Certainly, when you’re looking at the community sector, and I come from a corporate background originally, money is seen as something a little bit dirty. But it’s not, it’s just green energy that we need to keep going.

I think it’s really important to have that board of directors that elevate all those different skills that you need, whether it’s the interpersonal or whether it is around creating a budget that’s actually going to deliver.

I like the term green energy, Donna! Very true.