You’re the CEO and Managing Director of Community Corporate, so can you tell us a bit more about the organisation and its purpose?

Community Corporate is a certified social enterprise based here in Adelaide, but we operate nationally. Ultimately our goal is to help refugees into work. I don’t know if you know this, but the Australian Institute of Family Studies said only 6% of refugees are in work after six months in Australia, and after two years, only about 25% of refugees are working. To me that’s completely unacceptable, and my team at Community Corporate (of which there are now fourteen) share the same ambition for people to live their purpose and find passion through work. That’s really the goal or the problem that we’re trying to solve, and the way we do that is by finding corporate champions who are ultimately our customers /clients to partner with us and challenge traditional recruitment processes, so they can unleash the potential of refugees. As I mentioned in my mum’s story, their skills from overseas are often not recognised and there is an unconscious bias well and truly alive in many workplaces still, regardless of the efforts of inclusion.

What we try and do is really challenge the way we recruit and really look at that hiring for attitude and giving refugees the opportunity to demonstrate their capability and skills on the job in the way that employers assess.

During COVID, because of obviously the jobs crisis impact for all, we were engaged by our employers to really start focusing on other diversity cohorts, like mature age women returning to work, young people (particularly vulnerable young people), as well as migrants and people with disabilities. Refugees are always our priority and my passion, but we’ve definitely seen the applicability of our model and the intensive coaching support that we can utilise to really help build that confidence and tap into the resilience of diversity cohorts to support them into a job pathway.

What are the benefits that are created by managers by bringing diverse individuals into their organisation?

In a lot of the employers and corporates that we speak to there’s still myths we need to bust when it comes to migrants and refugees. There is an assumption that if they were to consider employing a refugee, they would need to go through the whole sponsorship process, but every refugee who arrives on a humanitarian migrant Visa actually has permanent residence, so they have every entitlement like every other Australian resident, so that is actually not a barrier at all. When you work through those kinds of perceptions of what the challenges might be, and obviously English is one of the key barriers that many employers face, they become open to seeing the benefits and talents that they can unleash with refugees. What we’re seeing is that there is a genuine high retention rate. Our retention rate nationally for refugees is over 90% at 12 months in work, and this is from anywhere from entry level jobs at Woolworths to IT/finance corporate jobs in different corporate employer professional streams as well. What we really feel the business case to workplaces is that there is a huge asset amongst refugees that have not been considered because they’re not getting through a digital online recruitment process. Being able to really meet the refugees and assess their competence, skills and the values that they could bring to your organisation is worth the extra effort. The return on investment is definitely there and it’s just about encouraging employers to challenge the way they recruit traditionally to ensure that unconscious bias doesn’t creep in and we lose capturing some amazing talent and skills amongst refugees.

Where are you seeing opportunities for South Australian entrepreneurs to create positive social change in the future?

I am a proud South Australian born and raised here, and I always say we used to be the pioneers of progress! We were the social innovators here in Adelaide, and at some point we just stopped taking risks. I think that there’s a really exciting opportunity now to grow the market and to build awareness.