Camilla Schippa On The Value Of Integrating Refugee Women Into Australia's Labour Force

Camilla Schippa joined The Social Outfit as CEO in 2019, after a 20-year career in the field of international development and peace.

Previously, she held the roles of Director of the Institute for Economics and Peace - which she led for the decade 2008 to 2018 - and Chief of the United Nations Office for Partnerships in New York from 2005 to 2007. Camilla has lived and worked in Africa, Europe, North America and Australia.

She is a passionate promoter of the principles of multiculturalism, equity and social justice with a particular focus on migrant affairs and issues affecting children and young women.

Camilla discusses supporting women from refugee and migrant backgrounds while championing sustainable business practices for the fashion industry.

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

[Tom Allen] - Camilla, what was it that led you to shift from your career in international development and peace to social enterprise?

[Camilla Schippa] - Thank you for that question. I spent over 20 years in international development and peace that took me from living in Kenya to Norway, to then spending a long time with the United Nations in New York.

Quite frankly, as I was turning 50, I wanted a change. I was really sick of grey suits, international flights and to an extent big egos.

But, by reflecting on everything that I had learned over those 20+ years, there were two things that were staying with me the most. One was that the projects that I had funded which dealt with women's empowerment, particularly by providing women with jobs, were the ones that were creating the biggest impact on society and were trickling down to entire communities. That to me came across as one of the worthiest investments.

The second thing [I learnt] just by studying and researching on peace indicators for many years was that it doesn't matter how peaceful our society is today, if you don't build resilience, that society is at risk of conflict sometime in the future. That resilience is built through strengthening social cohesion.

Those two things, the social cohesion and the women's empowerment are two things that The Social Outfit does so well, which is exactly why I chose to take the helm of the organisation.

Wonderful. You took the helm of The Social Outfit in 2019 and you’re the CEO now. Can you please tell us a little bit more about how the organisation supports women, whilst also saving some waste from entering landfill?

It's an amazing organisation, so let's start with waste first because that's a quicker answer. The fashion industry is one of the most exploitative in history, and it's one of the biggest polluters on the planet.

I believe it's ranked only second after oil in the world. There are a lot of ways [the fashion industry] pollutes not only at the end of the cycle in terms of consumers, but also along the cycle in the supply chain.

What The Social Outfit does is that it collects that waste. We go to the Australian fashion labels that are producing here in Australia and we ask them for their excess, leftover trims, fabric rolls, zippers and buttons. We take it all, and we have some amazing industry collaborators that give us their beautiful waste, which is how we have been able now to save eight tons of fabric from landfill since we started our operations about six and a half years ago. That's the environmental side, but in terms of supporting women, we have made it our mission to support refugee women in Australia.

The reason we are doing this is that only about 20% of female humanitarian migrants in Australia are engaged in the workforce. Until you get a job, you don't really start your process of integration.

Initially, we were just hiring women upstairs. We have our shop front in the very funky neighbourhood of Newtown, Sydney, and on the ground level we have our shop and upstairs one level is our work room [we're all together in this space]. That's where we hire women to make the clothes, and that is so that we can build on their skills. A lot of migrants come to Australia with sewing skills, but what they lack is language skills [as they don't speak English sometimes] or understanding the practices of how we work in Australia.

We've focused on employing them, teaching them everything there is to know, from what superannuation is, to their rights to having paid holidays, to how Australians would like their products to be. But we also support women downstairs in our shop.

That's where we hire younger women, often new migrants that have only been in Australia for one or two years and they're in their early twenties. They would like to start working in Australia, but it's so hard to get your first job. We get them in, train them up, teach them everything there is to know about retail, and then we transition them out to other employment, whether it's retail, customer service, restaurants, you name it.

That's a great operation there Camilla. Obviously, you’re creating some really positive impact for the different people involved. In your experience working there then, what have been some of the biggest challenges in growing your social enterprise or perhaps even just sustaining it throughout COVID, and how have you worked through these challenges?

[There are] plenty of challenges as there always are with social enterprises. The biggest one I suppose of being in the fashion industry is how do you get seen? How do you get heard?

How do you compete in a very crowded space with all those brands that have much more money than you have to pay for their marketing, and therefore appear to be very ethical and sustainable, but truly they are not? How do you get that space for yourself? The key to me, and I've learned it very well now with COVID is to stay true to your values.

When COVID hit, we had to shut the doors to our store, and we sell 80% of our clothes in our store, so it was a big dilemma. I was thinking to myself, "are we going to survive this?" A lot of people were saying, "why don't you start making face masks?" I thought that everybody is making face masks and it's a bit of a weird thing for us to do as I didn't want to be making money off a very bad situation.

But I thought hard and long about our values, and I then said, "okay, we can use a lot of remnant fabric [especially all the small bits] to make face masks, but we are only going to make them with a ‘buy one, give one’ model".

Joucelen Gabriel, Han and Nikita Majajas.

This essentially meant that any customer that came to us to buy a face mask had to buy two, and the second one would be donated to a person in need who doesn't have the means to buy a reusable face mask. We owned this to stay true to our values, but what happened is that it was a nice story and the media loved it.

That's where we again found our voice and a space. Everybody started writing about how The Social Outfit has this model, and we sold over 10,000 face masks which is incredible for such a small work room like ours.

Absolutely it is Camilla. Throughout all of this process and in working closely with these women Camilla, where have you seen opportunities to better support refugee women in employment and integration?

Well, when people ask me, "why do you do this, these women could get government support in Australia, you don't need to give them a job," I say, "a job in Australia for these women represents so much more than a paycheck." It's a step towards integration, being confident and ultimately independence.

It's really important, but the first job is so hard to get. In fact, for us, 90% of the women we hire we have provided them with their first Australian job. What I would love employers in Australia to think about is that when you see someone who comes from another country, do consider what they did in that other country, don't erase their past completely.

It doesn't matter if they haven't worked here, they had good experiences to bring and bear from their past. Let's not discriminate against them because of that, otherwise they will be stuck. It's really important that they work and it's also really important that we listen to them and to what their aspirations are. I find that a lot of these women in Australia get channeled into a particular area and that's aged care. But some of them might have completely different wishes, desires and skills. We know that it's not until you do what you're passionate about that you do it really well.

What advice then would you be offering to other women who are aspiring to enter these leadership roles in their organisation? Because one thing you're doing is providing support to refugee women or migrant women to enter the workforce, but for those who have deeper experience and are really looking to lead an organisation, what have you learned?

I've learned that it's important to forget your imposter syndrome. We all have it, so just don't listen to it, don't give it the space that it's trying to get, and don't be scared of your ideas.

I used to whisper my ideas in the ears of the big bosses at the UN, and then see them own those ideas and say them out loud and everybody's clapping. I'd be thinking, "why did I do that?"

Don't make my mistake, I think women need to be brave and have the courage to stand up for their ideas. At the same time, do not ever forget to be kind because being kind always pays off.

Then the other advice I have [which is again something I learned recently] is don't be scared to make change. I made a massive change in my career going from the global stage to the local, and I've proven to myself that I could do it. Also, I've never been happier! Change is good.

It's frightening though, isn't it?

Absolutely, it's terrifying. When I was working at the Institute for Economics and Peace for example, the founder of the Institute knew nothing about peace research, theory, and the science behind it. He is a school dropout that made a lot of money in the tech space and then set up the foundation. But his brain applied to the problem of how you build peace in countries was incredible, he brought so much innovation to the field.

I think it's not only experts that are required, but also it is more important to have people from different sectors who have moved around in order to ensure that we bring that innovation and those new ideas forward.

We've started delving into some other projects that are creating some really positive social change, so what inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which you think are just creating excellent change?

If I can be totally self-serving here, I'd love to mention an initiative that we are working on at The Social Outfit which is called Wear the Change. In my international career, I got really frustrated and sick of the fact that my suitcase was always four times bigger than my counterparts, and It was because of this pressure that women have to wear a different outfit every day.

Trainees in Heirloom Community Print by Diego Jose.

From a waste perspective, in Australia, every product that is sold is worn on average seven times before it ends up in landfill. We need to change this approach and debunk the myth that we can't be stylish unless we wear new clothes all the time.

Wear the Change is a campaign that we will be running during refugee week [which is in the middle of June]. We will ask people to take a challenge to wear the same garment for five days in a row styled in five different ways. On one side, this will raise funds for the work that we do, and on the other really spread the word about ethical fashion and the fact that we don't need to consume so much, and we can be stylish by wearing the same item over and over.

It sounds like a great campaign Camilla, so we will keep an eye out for that. To finish off, what books or perhaps other resources would you recommend to our listeners?

Great question. I have a book that I've read very recently that I would wholeheartedly recommend. It's called Rising Heart, and the author is Aminata Conteh-Biger. Aminata sits on the board of The Social Outfit, she is a refugee and she arrived in Australia many years ago as the first refugee from Sierra Leone. She had been kidnapped in her teenage years and kept as a sex slave by the rebels during the civil war in Sierra Leone.