Pete Williams On The New Breed & Communicating The Social Enterprise Movement Through Film-Making

Pete Williams was born in Adelaide, Australia and moved to London, UK in 2006 to attend Met Film School. He won some awards for his early commercial work and in 2014 created a successful short-form TV series called MAKERS for Channel 4 (UK), which celebrates independent craftspeople around the world.

For the past four years Pete has been researching, fundraising, shooting and editing THE NEW BREED - The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur and is very excited to share it with the world.

Pete discusses the four year journey in creating his premiering documentary, The New Breed, gives insights into the social enterprises featured in his film and how to effectively communicate social change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - You're in Adelaide at the moment and back home on a new mission, but you're about to launch this documentary, The New Breed on Friday. I'd love to hear a little bit about your background first, and what led to your passion in film-making and social enterprise.

[Pete Williams] - Well growing up in Adelaide, my grandpa was actually a video camera guy. He used to make wedding videos and things like that. Growing up, I used to be able to play with his equipment. He had a massive editing suite - this was the 1980's and camera equipment was pretty hard to come by. [I played] with his camera all the time, a lot of my film and school projects were videos and films, and I had a real love for it. That was basically my film education at the very early part. I went to film school in London in 2006, and then after graduating film school my first real independent project was a series called Indie Cities which was basically just a way for me to travel around Europe, meeting cool people and honing my craft of film-making.

It sounds like a great way to do it.

They were videos about different cities and people living outside of corporate culture in those cities. We did music, art and food as topics in each city, and it did really well.

This was in the very early stage of YouTube, in 2006, and it started getting lots of views and lots of interest, and it was picked up by Channel Four in the UK. They kept the concept, but they changed it a little bit to be about artisans, crafts people. The show was called Makers and that was really my big break in film-making. That was a TV show, [and] it was short form. They were three-minute episodes, but it appeared on TV at 8:30pm, before the movie started, and that's how I first came across the concept of social entrepreneurship.

That gave rise to this vision of creating The New Breed. So, you’re the director at Stay Gold [Studios], and you've produced this new documentary. Tell us a little bit about this project. What inspired you to pull it together? Was it just off the back of Makers that you saw that business for good activity happening and you wanted to learn more about it? What really created that inspiration and drive to work for four years to create this?

The idea came in 2015 when Makers finished. I was looking for a new project and the key thing that I learned from Makers was that a lot of the artisans that I met had some kind of social impact or environmental impact built into their business. And that really flipped my ideology on its head.

I was always anti-business or anti-big-business essentially. But, for the first time in a long time, I could start to see that business could be the solution to a lot of these problems that we're seeing in the world.

It was like an epiphany moment after Makers finished. So I started researching. I didn't know what it was called, this movement, I just started researching other businesses that were doing this kind of ‘do good’ business model. And then I read a book by Kyle Westaway called Profit and Purpose, who is in my film actually. And that really for the first time gave me some vocabulary around this movement. It's called a social entrepreneur; it's called social enterprise. It is business that thinks about people and the planet alongside profit. So I'm like, "wow, this is happening right now! This is a brand new thing, I need to jump on this right now and make the world aware of it."

What was the key lesson that you took away from shooting this film? Because it obviously really brought you up to speed with a key part of the movement, particularly coming out of the States. So what were some of those key lessons?

The key lesson I have now is that this movement has really taken off. When I first started, if you asked a hundred people what a social entrepreneur is, maybe one person would be able to give you a clear answer. But now, I think it's tipping mainstream.

Especially amongst our community, people know about it, but even my mum and her friends get it. There's so many great brands out there doing social good. But the landscape has changed just in five years.

And what was it that made you select the specific brands you worked with on the film?

Well, I moved to Los Angeles in 2013 for decent commercial work, and I was basically just hunting around Southern California. And so, I think I met about a hundred different people, a hundred different social entrepreneurs and people connected to the community over about an 18 month period.

I selected the three entrepreneurs, which are Known Supply [Travis Hartanov and Kohl Crecelius], BONFOLK, Janna Hart, and BUREO, which is three guys out of Ventura, California.

I selected them because they represented three very different business models. Janna's a one-for-one sock company, Bureo's an environmental collection/plastic collection company, and Krochet Kids is a female empowerment project.

Three very different business models that represent social entrepreneurship. They're at three very different life cycle stages of their business. [Krochet Kids] is twelve years old, BUREO five years old and Janna (BONFOLK) one-year-old, or basically just starting up. I thought that was just a good mix to represent the different types of business models and different stages of business.

What it really came down to [was that] they're just really compelling people. Really different to each other, really engaging, really authentic, and just people that I think viewers would want to watch.

You speak about those engaging and authentic components of the different entrepreneurs. So what storytelling advice would you give to impact-led entrepreneurs to help them craft really effective narratives? It sounds like those personable elements of the founders themselves were really important for you.

One key piece of script writing advice I always love to talk about is, “what you choose to write about or make films about is far more important than anything you make after that.” So, the subject matter of any piece of content is far more important than the flourish you put on it.

Like [for example] the filters you use on Instagram, or the hashtags you use. I try to apply that with my film too, I really wanted to. Basically it would change the world if it worked. People could watch this film and not just be entertained or have a good time for eighty minutes, but actually create an ideology that you could set in motion. Some kind of global change in narrative, or set an action people can take to make the world a better place.

And that's where I started. Obviously it's a big undertaking to try to do that. I'll let you be the judge, you've seen the film haven't you, be the judge of if we accomplished that.

Absolutely, it was great to get a preview over the weekend, and I really enjoyed it. You've done a good job, and you can see how there was a lot of hard work put into making it.

Thanks! It was four years from start to finish. It just takes a long time.

We were just saying before recording the podcast that with it due to be released in a couple of days’ time, it must be just like that final stage of birth right now. Quite daunting at the same time.

Where do you feel people could typically improve in the communication around social change?

My biggest criticism of the movie when I first started this, and where I wanted the film to be different is I feel like we do a lot of preaching to the choir, talking to people who are already in the movement.

I think it's important if we want to become mainstream, that we not dumb down the message, but we just make the message as clear and as simple as possible, to reach mainstream audiences to get them excited about being a part of it.

Not excluding them with being too theoretical or being too academic or insider talk. So that was my main thing, I wanted to make it as simple, as funny, and as entertaining as possible. Even [to an extent] when we're talking about serious issues like poverty, homelessness and environmental destruction. I think if you bring home these serious issues in a serious way, like a brow beating way, it turns people off, especially when you're making entertaining content, which is essentially a show business, or business [in the way] that we're giving people a relief, a release from everyday life. I just thought we should make it as fun and as funny as possible.

That makes complete sense to me. I think in the past, and in many podcasts, we've spoken about this movement of movements within this impact-led, social entrepreneurship, ‘business for good’ arena. In some cases those different movements use different languages and some can feel very insider like, and some can be more academic. It’s just the importance of us all coming together now and really uniting to actually create a big dent, and create the change that we need to see, and tackle some of these big social and environmental issues.

So you featured three different social enterprises in The New Breed. Are there any other social enterprises or organisations that you believe are doing a great job at tackling these big problems? Or did you want to delve into a little bit more about what those different social enterprises you featured are doing?

I really got to know the three feature entrepreneurs really deeply over the last four years. I think they were getting pretty sick of me by the end of this! I was sticking a camera in their face all the time and asking them to do something again, and I wonder if I got on their nerves. But I know them really deeply, I would probably prefer to talk on them. They were really inspiring to me.

They're all having massive success, which is great. This was something we didn't know when we first started the project. If one of them was to fail, how would that change the film, and would we still include that?

It is a reality that young businesses do fail, social good or not. And it is more difficult when you're a social good business, because you're not just thinking about profit, you've got other things, other costs and social impact areas that are taking revenue out of the business.

That makes it even harder to start up. I'm very thankful that all three were successful and had a positive story, not to give away the ending of my film!

I was going to say, you'll have to watch it to see what happens!

[Laughter] Yeah maybe one does fail who knows?

Maybe they do! But tell us more about Known Supply.

People are probably more familiar with Krochet Kids. This is a brand that started about 10 years ago, in 2006, so [actually] 14 years ago out of Costa Mesa. They're basically one of the very first companies doing this. They were a non-profit at the time.

They had no idea what social enterprise meant when they first started. They just saw poverty in Uganda and they had one skill as boys growing up in Washington in the snowfields, they knew how to crochet beanies.

So why don't we teach these women how to crochet a beanie, then we can sell it in America and then give them the money for it. That's how the business started off, and it's 14 years later and they're this huge company now. The founder, after having a deep impact with Krochet Kids, decided to flip the company and start Known Supply, which is basically a t-shirt blanks company. It started in Uganda, but also in Peru, empowering women in poverty in both places to make these t-shirts. The film really captures that business pivot for Kohl and his company from Krochet Kids to Known Supply. And they're really killing it. Do you want me to talk on the other two as well?

Yes! It’d be great to hear a bit more about these other two.

Well BONFOLK is a pretty simple story, it's a one-for-one business model. And when I first met Janna, she was in about 12 stores in Louisiana where she's from, and she sells these amazing socks and gives a pair of socks to a homeless person for every pair of socks sold. Now, she is in about 80 stores or 90 stores in Louisiana, Los Angeles and all over America, and has donated over 300,000 pairs of socks. She's only been a company for two or three years now, which is epic. It's pretty impressive.

Another amazing story is BUREO, which is three surfing guys, who are buddies from Ventura, California. When I met them, they were making skateboards out of recycled plastics, and the plastics they get from fishing nets in Chile. They've pivoted their business throughout the filming, and now they realised in making their own products and addressing the whole supply chain of fishing, in terms of getting more plastic, they're partnering with existing companies that use plastics and trying to sub out plastics in these existing big companies in their supply chain.

They've just signed a massive deal with Patagonia. So every Patagonia hat brim now is a BUREO brand plastic brim. So every hat you buy from Patagonia is rescuing a hundred grams or so of plastic from the ocean.

It's a really compelling story, and it was great to track their journey on the documentary as well.

To finish off Pete, when we were speaking before you had a wall full of DVDs in the room that you're speaking from. And perhaps being a film maker you want to talk a bit more about film, but I'm curious to hear about what books, films or other resources that you'd recommend to our listeners.

I think Kyle Westaway's Profit and Purpose is the place to start. That's really where I first got my knowledge of social entrepreneurship. Also, he's a friend of mine and he's in the film. He writes really well and really cool, and it's not too academic. Even though he's a Harvard lecturer, it's not written in an academic way. It's very understandable for anti-intellectual Aussies like me to get my head around! I read about 50 books while researching the film and you can actually go to newbreed.tv, the film's website, and you can see my reading list there of about 50 books. It ranges from books about social entrepreneurship, but also about inequality and globalisation. I think the most important book in there that started this ideology in my brain very early on is No Logo by Naomi Klein. You know that one?

Yeah, I have heard of it, but tell us more.

It's amazing! So she wrote No Logo in the late nineties, and it's still so relevant today. It's essentially a book about production, and how so many big corporations nowadays consider their brand more important than the actual products that they produce. But it also covers amazing topics like sweatshops and globalisation and exploitation, it's a really well researched book. It’s inspired me to not just think about social entrepreneurship, but think about how to make the world a better place. I really recommend it. Every book that she writes is amazing. Naomi Klein writes a book every five years or so because it takes so long to research her books, but that's my favourite.