To be honest, I don’t think it’s too hard to go out and make money as an entrepreneur. But, if you can use your skills and talent for good, then I think everyone should be trying to do that.

As you are a part of that community of social impact and entrepreneurs, what are the key benefits of being a part of that?

I think the key benefits are that you can get access to a range of people that maybe you normally wouldn’t. For instance, if I was only hanging out in crowds, groups or networks of people that were just entrepreneurs and had no idea about philanthropy, social enterprises or making an impact, then I wouldn’t understand that market.

Whereas being able to be involved with and work alongside some really good social enterprises, which is one of the things that I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to do at the Yunus Centre, has opened my eyes and allowed me to respect the work and the individual challenges involved in running those other organisations.

I have a much deeper appreciation for and understanding of the different challenges that people face. Where in software we think about scalable products that can enter markets across the globe and manpower is not something that we are overly concerned about, some of the other social enterprises that we were lucky enough to be networking within that base were very hands-on. They were instead recycling electronic waste and things like that, where a huge amount of man hours are required and you need a large facility to be able to do it, and it is not necessarily the most appreciated work. However, I truly believe that it’s quite an important piece and I have a lot of respect for people like that.

Where do you see critical opportunities for the Australian and broader Asia Pacific social impact sector to grow in the next year five years?

I think that we’re already seeing this with COVID, where before it, even with the adoption of digital technologies, cross border collaboration was not really prevalent. We’ve witnessed this firsthand with some traditional businesses who only six months before we’d advised them to move more digitally. We said, ‘your staff don’t necessarily have to be in your office all the time, you can be working with cross-border teams, people in different cities, different time zones,’ and so on.

We also said that technology is really enabling this, so the ability to open up those opportunities is available along with educating and empowering people, which you couldn’t do prior.

We don’t really get to see it in Australia, but there’s still so many millions of people that are unbanked. If you don’t have access to ID, or if you don’t have access to banking, where can you safely store your money? How can you go out and get a job and get paid? How do you interact in a financial system that we’re seeing here now where there are some shops that won’t even take cash anymore because of COVID? Technology is opening up all of that, and it’s really going to disrupt the whole finance access to loans and liquidity, and really, I believe in the future it’s going to be more of a decentralised nature.

That’s a very interesting outlook there Josh.

Are there any social enterprises or initiatives that you have come across recently which you believe are creating a positive social change?

One hundred percent. There are probably too many to mention, but one of the two that has come to mind recently is that I’ve seen a project that was working in rainforests called Rainforest Connection.

They’re repurposing old hardware like mobile phones and so on, placing them in rainforests and jungles around the world, which then act as a way that people can monitor for illegal logging activities and wildlife.

Through these devices you can listen to the different birds in that area, and they’ve all got a unique tone or however you’d like to put it. But basically, there are different wildlife conservation, science strategies and practices protecting against illegal logging happening because of this really cool concept. The second one, which we’ve actually recently partnered with as well is around unlocking different fundraising avenues through NFTs.

You may have seen a few things in the media recently about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are pretty much a digitally verified representation of either a digital asset or even a real-life asset. Some of these include things like the NBA trading card, top shop things and all this other kind of stuff.

The difference between going to a charity auction and buying a piece of art compared to a NFT, is that traditional charity auction’s make funds for the causes the charity wants, and that’s it. With NFT’s, you can actually code in royalties into these NFT’s. So hypothetically, if I came to you and said, “Indio, you’re a famous sports star, let’s do an NFT for you,” it could be a trading card, it could be piece of art, a piece of music, but whatever it is, we want you to embed a percentage that will go back into making an impact on something you care about. Because of this, every single time that that rare one-of-one, one-of-two or one-of-five trading card or piece of art gets traded, bought or sold, a percentage automatically goes back to making an impact on something you care about.