Amy Orange On Developing The South Australian Social Enterprise Ecosystem

Amy Orange - Social entrepreneurship.jpg

Amy Orange is a social enterprise founder and thought leader on a mission to build a thriving social enterprise ecosystem in South Australia through collaborative practice.

Amy is a Co-Founder of Collab4Good, the social enterprise intermediary which builds the capacity and capability of impact-driven organisations and entrepreneurs in SA to drive positive social change. Amy is also the Social Procurement Lead with Social Traders, where she links certified South Australian social enterprises into their national social procurement marketplace to enable social procurement opportunities. She is also the Principal Consultant of Fourth Sector Solutions where she works with organisations to develop enterprising solutions which align people, planet and profit for a better world.

Amy sits on the board of directors of Infoxchange Group. Amy holds an MBA from Flinders University, and has been recognised for her contributions with an award from Women in Innovation (2017) and being named as one of InDaily’s 40 Under 40 business leaders in South Australia.

Amy Discusses Increasing Momentum Within The South Australian Social Enterprise Landscape As well as the importance of moderating ego to become a successful entrepreneur and access funding opportunities.

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

[Indio Myles] - Amy, thank you very much for joining us today.

[Amy Orange] - Thank you so much for having me, I've been following Impact Boom for a long time, so I'm thrilled to be able to contribute to the conversation.

It's our pleasure. Amy, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to you working in social enterprise?

I'm always someone that has been very passionate about social justice from a very early age. I can remember arguing and having debates with my family when I was about five or six years old around why are people not able to access certain opportunities, why does it matter what colour their skin is and why are these people being judged? I always had a very strong focus on social justice issues and so it was a pretty natural career choice for me to go and work in the not-for-profit space, which I did for nearly a decade.

But after a while, the traditional not-for-profit model frustrated me, as even though there was a lot of great work happening and there still is, there's a bit of a tendency for that work, impact and outcomes to start and stop on the whim of funders.

There's a bit of a tendency to be reactive rather than proactive and often it's constrained by what grants and funding opportunities would enable activity. It was about 2015 when I heard about this concept of social enterprise, and it was through a presentation by Sarah Gunn who is a founder of Go-Go Events at the Go-Go Foundation.

She really demonstrated to me that you can have this opportunity where you can create social impact through business practices, which offers people dignity, choice, and often a real way out of poverty through sustainable business practices.

It was shortly after that I started thinking about my own social enterprise and I started Harvest Fair in 2017, which was a food-based social enterprise created to offer flexible employment for women who have been excluded from the mainstream workforce, and we had a mission to use the power of good food to advance gender equity in Australia. We were operational for about 18 months, and we did online meal delivery of ready-made meals as well as stocking ready-made meals in big supermarkets around Adelaide. But for a number of reasons, I had to make the tough decision to close Harvest Fair down in 2018.

A few of those reasons were certainly my own naivety and a lack of business know-how, but it was also in large part due to the lack of ecosystem support for social enterprises in terms of funding, recognition and learning opportunities that might have enabled me and Harvest Fair to thrive and to create a real lasting impact.

Really, since I'd made that decision to close Harvest Fair down, I recognised some of these reasons were because there was a lack of support surrounding us and Harvest Fair. I've really dedicated my work now to building up the social enterprise ecosystem here in South Australia (SA) so while it looks like I do wear many hats which I certainly do [and I'm lucky to be able to do so], each hat's really purposeful in creating the conditions for social enterprise to thrive here in SA and to be taken seriously at state, national and even international levels.

Amy, you're currently working across a range of organisations and as you just said you wear multiple hats, so how have you seen South Australia's impact-led community grow over the past couple of years and where are there some key opportunities for it to grow better and to meet the needs of the local community?

It's a great question and you're right. There's been quite an enormous shift in momentum in South Australia for social enterprises and for the impact sector over particularly the last eight months. We've really gone from having no organised ecosystem to really now having three or four more bodies in South Australia to support social enterprises. That includes Social Traders who demonstrate the role of social procurement in creating sustainable social impact, Collab4Good as a social enterprise intermediary who build the capacity and capability of impact-driven leaders and organisations, and the South Australian Social Enterprise Council which has just formed as the peak body to provide a formal voice for the SA social enterprise sector.

But really beyond these three organisations we've still got a really strong community, so there's a lot of individuals and networks who are actively supporting this space and who've wanted to see social enterprises grow and reach their potential.

Collab4Good has actually brought a number of these people and groups together into a bit of a coalition as well of industry leaders and invested stakeholders to try and build our influence and advocacy. We are also creating the conditions for what we want to see for social enterprises to thrive in SA.

But I do think it's worth noting that while it seems to have happened quite quickly, it's definitely been the result of many years of lobbying and efforts by people whose shoulders we're really standing on now. There's been a lot of pockets of work that's been done over the years by many people, and we're just starting to see the fruits of those efforts now.

In particular I'd like to mention the Don Dunstan Foundation and the Flinders University New Venture Institute as well who were pretty key early adopters and were really responsible for bringing the impact community together through creating conversations and running workshops. They were quite instrumental in accelerating the social enterprise movement to where it is today. But also, to answer some of the other parts of your questions, part of the work that the Don Dunstan Foundation has done is they brought Social Traders here to the SA, and I think that that's just brought a huge amount of credibility to the sector. It's also given us national exposure to social enterprises, businesses and governments and the way others think. I know that certainly expanded my thinking about what's possible and what lessons we can adopt here in SA to lead and develop that leading policy and to create the conditions for leading practices as well. But in terms of opportunities and what the key opportunities are in SA, there's lots of work to do.

We do have these three formal bodies now, but we still need a lot of support to do our jobs well, and the state government has a huge opportunity to look at what COVID economic recovery really looks like and if there are new ways of addressing some of the challenges we see around employment and other social challenges.

While you never really want to rely on government to make things happen, in the case of the social enterprise sector we have seen in other States, particularly Victoria, Queensland and certainly what's emerging in New South Wales, government policy and recognition of social enterprise really does help to build and shape the marketplace potential. This could be the development of a social enterprise strategy for South Australia, a social procurement policy framework mapping sector funding programs, or intermediaries like Collab4Good who is building the capacity of social enterprises and enabling funding opportunities that provide social enterprises with flexible funding.

That funding is not restrictive and actually allows them to use funds to cover the cost of things like rent and all the capital inputs that are quite often excluded from traditional funding mechanisms, but are so critical to social enterprise to create strong foundations.

Also, universities I think have a big role to play as well. I think that they support the sector a lot through partnerships, awareness and education. In SA, they now offer a range of undergraduate and post-graduate courses in social entrepreneurship and social impact which we never had, or I certainly never had five years ago. The more we can really embed the impact of the triple bottom line into our traditional business, legal and accounting courses, the better equipped our business and industry leaders will be in other areas and not necessarily just in social enterprise. [They can then] play their parts now and into the future in terms of creating impact through the work that they do as well.

Amy, it's lovely to see such momentum gathering in the South Australian social enterprise space, and it's across so many sectors as well which I find quite amazing to see. It is so much development in so little time really. Let's focus a bit more on the entrepreneurs themselves now. Where have you seen early-stage social entrepreneurs you've worked with typically find themselves struggling, and how have they then worked through those struggles?

There's lots of challenges I think that social entrepreneurs particularly in South Australia face, but I'd say probably lack of funding would be the number one challenge.

As we all know, you have to spend money to make money in order to have the impact that you want to create, and here in South Australia, we have a bit of an awareness issue and a lack of understanding about what social enterprise is.

[We also have a] bit of a siloed ecosystem where you either fit into the box of being social impact in the not-for-profit sector or you're a business.

There's not much opportunity to bridge the gap between the two of those in terms of funding opportunities, so social enterprises often fall through the cracks of funding opportunities in SA. We are getting more exposure to national funding opportunities, but we do tend to find that SA does get a little bit left behind as quite often there is a bit more favour towards the East coast contenders.

I definitely think that having some more funding programs really requires recognition and support from government and philanthropy to open up requirements and be a little bit more flexible in some of those opportunities.

Speaking about the entrepreneurs still, what would be one piece of advice that you think all entrepreneurs need to know?

I think there's a piece of advice that I feel is pretty timely at the moment, and that's to not let ego hinder progress. I say this on a couple of levels, and I guess firstly it is a reminder to entrepreneurs at both ends of the ego spectrum, because I think that no matter whether you have a bigger ego or you're super humble, often entrepreneurs won't ask for what they need because they don't want to be a bother or because they think they can do it all. I think that that is a common challenge that entrepreneurs face.

I think definitely you should try not to let ego get in the way of progress, but more importantly what I'm keen to convey in this message about not letting ego hinder progress is actually for our broader social enterprise ecosystem.

It feels like the sector and ecosystem is really growing so quickly across Australia, and this means a lot of new players are coming into the space. This is just quite naturally making people who work in the sector feel nervous and want to protect their patch a bit, but I think

there's a risk of the sector becoming fractured if we let ego get in the way of broader sector progress.

We just need to keep reminding ourselves why we're in the sector in the first place, [and how] we're here to really create big sustainable social change and that everyone is necessary to be part of this thriving ecosystem.

It doesn't matter if you're a social entrepreneur, funder, researcher, intermediary or capacity builder, I feel like we're really on the precipice of real change. We're finally getting state and federal governments on board and having a collaborative and united sector which celebrates each other and the role that each of us plays is just so important at the moment.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change in their space?

Specifically, I'm probably most inspired by Taboo sanitary products and I have been for many years, well before Isabel was recently named Young Australian of the Year. Taboo and I started our social enterprise journey pretty well at the same time, and so we're kind of operating under the same challenges and lack of ecosystem support. Yet, Isabel and Eloise, who are the co-founders of Taboo have just made really smart, savvy business decisions.

I've always been so impressed with the way that they conducted themselves, they took their time, built their community and they were still in high school when they started this, so I think they're just a great example that age and experience doesn't always mean you won't be successful.

It's been fantastic to see Isabel named as Young Australian of the Year and how much that's been able to project their platform and the way that they work around addressing period poverty and having those conversations. It's helping them to sell more products which means that they can donate more back and run more initiatives to address this issue in Australia but also around the world. I think Taboo is just a fantastic example of what social enterprises can do and Isabel and Eloise are fantastic examples of social entrepreneurs who have been really smart about the way they've gone about it.

I've had the pleasure of coming across Taboo and their work recently. It's amazing to hear they started around the same time as you as well, so you've taken quite different journeys into this space and it really shows how diverse this sector is. To finish off Amy, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

Things are evolving so rapidly for social enterprise here in Australia but also across the world.

I'm really interested in keeping my finger on the pulse and I try to dedicate at least one hour each day to reading new articles and news as it is happening to keep up with what's going on. I follow my favourite organisations, entrepreneurs and thought leaders on LinkedIn and Twitter and make sure I spend an hour each day reading articles and information posted by them.

Some examples are Social Change Central, Impact Boom of course, who I've been following for a long time and I always get some really great insights from the podcast and reading the transcripts. The Centre for Social Impact are good as they have some really strong evidence-based research that I think is just fantastic information and offers really practical insights. Griffith University is good as well, and so those are some good examples of local Australian wide news.