Alexie Seller On Forging Bonds Between Northern Territory Indigenous Businesses & Impact Enterprises
Alexie Seller is CEO of Enterprise Learning Projects. As an internationally recognised social entrepreneur, she is motivated to identify scalable and sustainable opportunities to enable Australia’s remote Indigenous communities to thrive in business.
Alexie returned to Australian shores in 2019 after co-founding, scaling and handing-over an award-winning organisation, Pollinate Group, which equips women to lead their communities out of poverty and has reached over half a million people in just seven years. Her unique approach to community development is fuelled by her desire to see a more just and equitable world in her lifetime. Not only is she deeply passionate, but she also brings well-honed skills as an entrepreneur and an appetite for collaboration to get better impact results.
Alexie is a finalist in the 2020 Telstra Women’s Business Awards for social impact in the NT, won the Advance Social Impact Award in 2018 and was EY Social Entrepreneur of the Year in Victoria in 2017. She graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in Mechanical Engineering and Arts (Spanish and Latin American studies).
Alexie discusses the nature of impact enterprise in the Northern Territory and The Importance of effective Communication and choices of language within the sector.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Tom Allen] - To kick things off Alexie, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your passion in social business?
[Alexie Seller] - I guess it wasn't always that career that I expected I would come to, and I think many of us in the sector maybe didn't even know about social business when we were thinking about our careers. But I spent a lot of my youth volunteering internationally and across Australia, concerned about the turn cycle of volunteer models and how some charitable models are working in development. That was what tweaked my interest into what other solutions might be out there.
The first exposure I had to social business was through Pollinate Group or prior to that with Energy Poverty, and just understanding there were communities who were still spending a lot of money on kerosene who didn't have basic lighting in their homes, and they could buy a solar lighting system that was cheaper for them and much better for their health and for the planet.
I think that was my first insight that there are other approaches we can look at, and over the many years I've been involved in all kinds of causes, I think fundamentally that approach of social business really resonates with me.
I find it as such an empowering tool for communities who may never have been in business before. But when you go into business, you build confidence, you get leadership skills, you get all kinds of new opportunities, new networks, and it really opens doors, and I just see it as such a positive approach, as people can create their own pathway, if you will, through business.
You've got some great experience there in co-founding the Pollinate Group, and now you are the CEO of Enterprise Learning Projects. What sort of projects are you involved in now Alexie, and why does the organisation exist?
Our organisation exists to support the remote Aboriginal communities of the region, especially across Northern Australia.
They have some very clear aspirations about their future, and an enormous amount of opportunity and potential to achieve those, and are really lacking the right support that can help them take those steps in business.
ELP has been involved over the last 10 years in many different kinds of enterprise start-ups, a lot in bush foods, bush medicine and small tourism ventures. Through that time, it's now pivoting towards looking for more scalable opportunities. The one recently that was incubated that is now a standalone business is Magpie Goose.
It's a fashion social business that partners with artists and art centres to bring their designs in and turn them into new fashion pieces and create new industries for them. The other one is Gulbarn Tea, which is a native tea business, which is bringing a highly premium tea that is extremely unique and rare.
Wonderful. It's a really diverse range of projects and that tea sounds absolutely delicious. I know that the Magpie Goose range is beautifully colourful and there's some great art on those.
You were one of the founding members at Impact North Alexie, which is this brand new state-based network out of the Northern Territory. Can you please tell us a little bit about this network and the purpose of it?
When I arrived in the territory just under a year ago, I was coming off four years in India and a lot of exposure and access to international social enterprise networks. I really felt like there wasn't that kind of network connector here in the Territory. As I was looking for opportunities, I was talking to a lot of people and it was very inspired by what they were seeing and learning.
Many of them acknowledged that they don't get much time to connect with peers, they don't get really relevant information and resources around social enterprise in this region, because the situation is unique, working in remote and cross-cultural sectors the way we do.
We launched Impact North early in 2020, fundamentally to connect peers within Indigenous social entrepreneurship, but then also to showcase what's going on in the region and then bring some of these stories into other spaces through that advocacy for what's needed to build the social enterprise ecosystem up here.
It sounds like a really great way to connect with that community and also build it at the same time. What are your observations then of that social business sector in the Northern territory of Australia? How does it compare to other states and other areas?
I think it's interesting as there are a lot of people doing social business who maybe don't realise they're in social business.
I think the terminology is still pretty new. That's actually why we called it Impact North, to speak more specifically to the impact outcomes as the goal, social business is really the vehicle.
It's been really interesting to provide [different resources]. We bring in expert speakers to talk through different elements of social business and just help bring people along that journey. They're understanding more about that language and terminology. I think the other really interesting piece is there are amazing things going on in the region and they're not getting the funding or the spotlight that those businesses might get if they were on the East coast. That kind of ability to just bring things out to market or share stories through media is pretty limited and we're isolated. Not only are we isolated from you Tom and everyone on the East coast, but we're also quite isolated from one another.
It's a lot of work to bring people together, but it's so far been really very promising, and we are planning an online summit in a month for the whole of Northern Australia [SESNA], and we’re collaborating with other social enterprise networks in Northern Australia, WA and Queensland as well to start to create those spaces that are specific for people operating in these regions.
Really, it’s to give us an opportunity to talk through the challenges we face, but then also to invite people in, to provide exposure and ideas from other areas that we can learn from.
SESNA will be fantastic Alexie.
I'm really interested in talking a little bit more about the language used. You've deliberately chosen Impact North, and we've been flipping around the term social business. Obviously, a lot of people use terms like social enterprise, impact-led business, purpose-led organisation.
Ultimately, what can we do to make this as accessible as possible so that we essentially bring together what is a movement of movements?
It's a really good question, and I think we do ourselves a disservice in the sector by trying to segment that language, because the fact is that we're up against commercial business, which is pretty united in how it approaches its language.
I think for me, the focus is always on language that speaks to something real. With social enterprise compared to social business, business is more interesting to me. Businesses are simple, and a more real used term. It comes out of my mouth more often.
Then speaking to impact, it's always just going one step further. If we're just talking about social business all the time, it's going to become a buzzword and people will say, "I don't quite understand what it is." But if you say, "we're using business to help people get jobs who can't normally get jobs," or, "to create industry opportunities to improve the environmental situation in this region," it's making the effort to spell out a bit more of what is actually happening.
That's where I find people then start to become united. Language can really divide people in a way that's unhelpful. We're always very focused on that, just going a bit further to help people or understand what's going on.
That's a great reflection there Alexie.
Where do you see opportunities then to support Australia's remote Indigenous communities to thrive in business?
There are so many opportunities in this region. I think anyone you meet who has spent time in remote Indigenous communities will say it's not a lack of ideas and it's not a lack of potential or opportunity. It's also not a lack of people wanting to get involved, but what's really missing is this long-term genuine commitment to making it happen. I say long-term and genuine because a lot of the current solutions are quite short term, like training workshops or small funding bases that don't build businesses. No one can build a business from a $10,000 grant.
What we're looking at is really being that partner for communities who want to build businesses, and building with them over time and bringing in the skill sets that they may not have access to locally.
We can't expect each community to have every kind of job profile you might need for a business. It's also then working with them over time and expecting that there will be hurdles and there will be challenges. I think that's what's just really different and difficult for the region.
Obviously, a lot of our work is government funded, and typically they tend to be less risky in how they fund. But business is risky. You've got to accept that there will be changes and you won't run to the plan, but you'll keep building along the way.
I think that's the big opportunity for me, it’s just the ecosystem that is up here. There are lots of people trying to do this. It's us coming together and figuring out what the best pathway is to support their aspirations. I'm doing that and committing to it, rather than coming up with some crazy new business idea. There are so many opportunities that if they were supported, well, they would be successful.
There's some great points there. Let's talk about some tangible projects or initiatives. Which ones are those really inspiring you and which ones do you believe are really creating great positive social change?
I get the pleasure of looking out and about all the time for what's happening in the region. I guess one I've come across recently is a young Aboriginal entrepreneur, Sorrell Ashby, she's a Gamilaroi woman, running Guumali which is a social enterprise that is supporting land and sea owners to take advantage of economic opportunities.
She's running all forms of businesses at the moment in terms of consulting and governance support, but actually also building market connections and facilitating opportunities for landowners which is really incredible.
Another young Aboriginal entrepreneur, Liandra Gaykamangu, a Yolgnu woman, has just moved back to the region who was operating out of New South Wales and I love what she's doing because she's connecting all of the elements of the social enterprise environment, both social and cultural impacts in her model. She has a swimwear fashion brand that works with Aboriginal artists, identifies inspiring Aboriginal women as her models and actually names her swimwear after them, which is really awesome. People hear great stories about the art, but also about these change-makers in the sector, and then use recycled materials to develop her products. I think there are just some really exciting things and she's running that out of Milingimbi, which is pretty remote and pretty impressive to be doing that.
There are many other examples of people just getting quite creative, and not the kind of business models that are the ones that you expect, but just really leveraging all of these areas of culture, social and environmental impact to create something quite impressive.
Wonderful. They sound like a couple of great initiatives.
To finish off then Alexie, let's talk about some books or resources, which of those would you recommend to our listeners?
I always get stuck on these questions, and I was going to say if you want some fun and novelty reads, I just read the Thursday Murder Club, and it was great!
It's always good to step aside into fiction sometimes!
Totally! I'm a big fan of fiction, I find reading for me is a bit of an escape from all the thinking that goes on elsewhere. But, by far my favourite business book has always been The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I think it was especially important for me at Pollinate Group, because we were in quite a rapid growth phase in terms of building teams and got up to 100 staff and 500 entrepreneurs before I finished up. There's just lots to learn in that process if you've never done it before, and lots to learn about just making hard decisions quickly. That's always a great one for me to fall back on.
There were so many learnings there and they sound like a couple of great recommendations.
Alexie, it's been a pleasure to talk to you today, best of luck in your onwards journey.
