I think you’ve highlighted some of the main pain points that I’ve observed in working with a range of social enterprises. I’m curious to hear then, Keith, how you have seen the social enterprise movement change in the last five years or so given your deep experience, and where do you see it going in Australia?

We seem to be at an interesting point now. I’m involved in White Box for instance, so that’s an incubator, and someone like Luke Terry is this sort of missionary, who’s obviously done it as well, but also sees the benefit of helping others. There’s a lot of that. I see also the corporate sector slowly getting behind the notion and providing that sort of ecosystem support. Likewise, I think that Victoria is clearly ahead, Queensland’s doing very well. New South Wales; there’s now some embers and there’s groups trying to set up a peak body. They’re often local and regional and what have you, but there’s nothing that’s inherently local that can’t mean you couldn’t have a national peak body. I think that’s on the cards.

I’ve been talking to organisations like the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and you say to them, “Where’s the social business chapter? Now you represent 145 different trade and industry bodies, where’s the social business sector represented in that and how do we tap into those other bodies?” It’s up to us, I suppose, to help create that. But also, a number of those trade and industry associations are looking for the labour, and so I think about the needs across tourism and hospitality or chefs, and social enterprise is building the people that they need for those industries. There’s a nice alignment there, and so I’m hopeful that over the next five years that that alignment and the depth of knowledge spreads.

We had a session a week or two ago with the Deputy Premier of New South Wales, who is not new to social enterprise, but didn’t understand the depth of the sector and the depth of impact, and could see immediately, and to his credit, recognise the cross agency issues, these government or departmental silos and empires, and how do you break those down? Partly that’s their job, sitting above those silos and empires, to recognise that there’s value created in each of those silos and empires, but if you look at them horizontally or vertically, you’ve got to look at it holistically. Likewise, you can’t say, “Well, the feds are getting all of those benefits, so why should we support?”

We need to start to get the government agencies and the like to look at it holistically.

To his credit, he recognised that and saw a number of opportunities for us to take some of these social enterprises that presented into various agencies to explore some of the interventions that are being made to enhance the policy and delivery mechanisms that they’re already using. They recognise that there’s a bunch of stuff they’re doing that isn’t optimal. Hopefully us proving these models means that, a White Box, for instance, can replicate and scale  a number of proven models, and the fact that we were talking about taking a whole bunch of New South Wales social enterprises into Queensland, places that state of origin sort of competition into the mix. But hopefully that can be used or leveraged to decide, well, White Box is doing that partly because it’s got Queensland government support. Give us New South Wales government support and we will have new Vanguards in New South Wales.

I think we’re in a really good spot at the moment. There’s the World Forum in Ethiopia coming up, organisations like Westpac and Centre For Social Impact, and some of the other organisations that are providing support. I think it’s a slowly building movement.

Which social enterprises in Australia have you come across which are creating some great strong impact? You’ve mentioned Vanguard Laundry and Streat, you’re working with White Box Enterprises. What else?

There’s clearly Jigsaw in the disability space. We have a program where we’ve got 30 or 40 social entrepreneurs and their social enterprises, all at different stages in their evolution and across different sectors. A lot of them, as I mentioned, are providing supportive employment pathways. There’s GOGO Events in Adelaide run by Sarah Gunn, and there, we talked to them about a hybrid structure? So they’ve set up a foundation, and again there’s the interesting dialogue of how the entities work together.

Most of them come out of the Westpac Foundation’s program. We are involved with Westpac and we provide support to their social entrepreneurs and their Scale Up Grant winners, and then as I mentioned, there’s Optus Future Makers, which is more technology based, and Virtual Psychologist is an example of someone we’ve worked with there (they providing text-based counselling services and are making great impacts in mental health). They’re using technology as a solution there. There’s a whole raft of them. One of the more interesting ones, Goodwill Wines is a for-profit social enterprise wine merchant, using that donation model, where it had a bunch of impact investors who understood the social mission and were prepared to sign up and acknowledged that their return is a blend of financial and social. That business donates significant sums to charities often nominated by the customers who buy the wine.

There’s Green Connect and Community Resources. We’ve been working with Community Resources, we’ve taken Jess Moore’s Green Connect business and ‘plonked’ it into the Community Resources fold. We’ve then been working with Soft Landing, again, it’s an interesting one. It’s had an experience where it had a joint venture with a for-profit, which hasn’t necessarily worked out as they envisaged. So there’s a bit of work around that, and it’s quite a significant size. It’s got $20 million revenue across six or seven businesses, so it’s an interesting example of scaling and possibly scaling too quickly which has caused some difficulties. Jess spoke at the Social Traders’ National Conference about some of the lessons that came out of that growth and the impact on its other businesses.

I’d also add structuring. Typically in my real estate or my finance world, we tend to do things in project vehicles so that you limit and quarantine risk. Whereas a lot of these organisations are set up in, I call them blobs. They’ve got a business but it’s not in a separate structure, and that then means from a risk perspective if that business blows up, it potentially could kill the whole parent.

You asked before about lessons, I think that that’s one of them.

Grameen is in the process of doing some pilot projects and trying to bring that micro-finance social enterprise model, and there’s Many Rivers and Good Shepherd in that micro-finance space. Then we do quite a bit with Indigenous businesses under the sponsorship of First Australian Capital, which again is another incubator. Partly our program is filtered by organisations like Westpac, Optus and First Australian Capital, so again there’s a nice alignment of some of the programs with our clients. That shared value model, where we’re working closely with our clients to help amplify social impact produces a nice alignment around those sorts of things.