Theresa Brown On Prioritising Impact And The South Australian Social Enterprise Movement

Theresa Brown has worked in the community sector as a Community Development Manager and Service Development Manager for over 20 years in both local government and not for profit organisations.

She is the founder of Play it On, a social enterprise that provides funding to assist children from families that are financially challenged, to play their chosen sport through the collection and sale of new and used sporting equipment. Play it On offers development and learning pathways to young people with disabilities through preparation of the e-commerce side of the business and also advocates enthusiastically for the Circular Economy.

Theresa has an Honours Degree in Social Enquiry and an MBA specialising in Entrepreneurship and studied with the School of Social Entrepreneurs, she also is Whitebox Enterprises inaugural Fellowship winner. Theresa is a founding member of SASEC (South Australian Social Enterprise Council) and the newly elected Chair of its first democratically elected Board. She believes the power of supportive, connective and skill building networks can have a tangible influence on the endurance of a social entrepreneur.

Theresa discusses the future of the South Australian social enterprise sector and striking a balance between your business model and impact outcomes.

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

[Indio Myles] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your work in social enterprise?

[Theresa Brown] - Straight after school, I went into early childhood education and worked there for a while before travelling and living in South Korea. I became more aware of social justice and how strong that was in Australia, which led to me wanting to learn and study more about that. I came back to Australian and studied at Adelaide University a Bachelor of Social Inquiry.

I started to really look deeper at social injustice and what I wanted to do about that which led me to working in the community side of local government for 15 years.

I spent a significant time at Playford Council in the outer Northern suburbs of Adelaide. During that time from around the year 2000 there were significant levels of youth unemployment. Knowing that we were really wanting to tackle that, I was involved in starting up a project called the Northern Sound System, which was a youth engagement centre that also had co-located youth support services.

We had some really difficult income targets to meet as there was a venue that had live gigs, recording studios and rehearsal spaces. It was really my first foray into building significant income to balance youth engagement services. When I left the council, someone mentioned to me that Northern Sound System was a great social enterprise, and I said, "what's a social enterprise?" I'd never heard of it, so I decided to take my year off to study more with The School of Social Entrepreneurs in 2014 and 2015. I was lucky enough to be enrolled in a national course, so we travelled around Australia and visited lots of social enterprises in action. That was the moment I was sold.

I had a bit of an idea about Play It On, and I certainly pursued it more through that course. It was a bit of a slow burn however because I needed to go back to work and after a while, I changed into working in the not-for-profit space. But I had this burning desire to keep starting Play It On, and I guess the more time I spent specialising in grant writing, tender writing and service design, I knew in my heart that social enterprise was a much more sustainable way to deliver on social impact without having to compromise my values or purpose.

Theresa, you're the founder and CEO of Play It On, a social enterprise which provides financial support to Australian children so they can play the sport of their choice irrespective of their financial situation. What have been some of the key challenges you faced in running Play It On and what have you learned from navigating your way through them?

A social enterprise is challenging to start with, but I was really preoccupied with ensuring I was making the right decision about the business structure. I was really influenced in a way by my social planning background and needing to do lots of analysis before starting. This is the total opposite way that I should have started, by just having a go and testing things like if I had customers. I think realising that I had ‘paralysis by analysis’ was a key reason I chose to enter an incubator in the difficult world of start-ups, and I did a course called Venture Dorm through the Flinders University New Ventures Institute. I was challenged to find my first ten customers within the six weeks, and that's what really worked for me because…

it didn't matter how much market investigation and research I did, it was completely different from those first customers and the lessons that I learned from them.

My advice is to just test the market, find your customers, and then work out how your business will work from there.

It is a really important lesson that I learnt, not so early on I must admit!

Looking now at your role as Chair of the South Australian Social Enterprise Council (SASEC), what are your reflections on the movement that's happening there, where are these opportunities to accelerate momentum and how can people get involved in the social enterprise sector?

It's a really exciting time for South Australia. We spent probably two years with a forming board led by Sharon Zivkovic and five women that were focused on getting the governance structure in place to start the council. We started looking for members around the end of last year and have built up that membership to the point where we've recently held our first AGM. We have a whole new board, and I was elected chair, so we've got exciting work to do. Adelaide is progressing at a much slower pace than we've seen in Eastern states, so we've managed to have some really great support from networks interstate. QSEC particularly have helped us shape the way that we seek members and how we use information online to build our membership base.

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We also don't have many intermediaries in Adelaide, so in terms of building the capacity of the sector, we're looking at the support that we give each other within the network.

We're all really close and we've been able to help each other in practical ways, so we are hoping to build a lot more on that. There are a couple of intermediaries that have been really helpful. We're lucky to have Social Traders with Amy Orange and Collab4Good who have both been fantastic supporters. But one thing that we've been really excited about as we've been building that membership base is just realising how many female-led social enterprises we have in Adelaide.

In fact, we've got nearly three times more female-led than male-led start-up social enterprises. We really hope to foster interest, but we know that there's a lot of emerging social enterprises. We hope to connect probably with more traditional not-for-profits that have social enterprises to support some learning within the emerging social enterprises that are signing up as well. We don't have any funding from our state government, so we'll be definitely advocating strongly to support both the social enterprise ecosystem, but also individual social enterprises with start-up funding. This is because we know how challenging that can be for many social enterprises, but then there's also that growth spurt that we would like to see from funding as well.

I think there's a fair bit of work that we can do in informing the philanthropic sector about social enterprise.

Some of our early conversations have indicated that they're not quite sure what it is, how it works, what social impact means or why are we sometimes a not-for-profit but other times for-profit? There's a lot of unpacking to do within that sector, and we're hoping to really get some great backers that will stick with us for the long-term and help build the ecosystem here. We know that we've actually got in South Australia some strengths, including that we love to network, have high rates of individual philanthropy and we love a good support network breakfast! We're hoping to gather some momentum with people that are willing to support us as a sector to grow as well as the social enterprises themselves. I guess we've had to form close ties with more of the start-up tech community also. It's not always been the greatest fit for a lot of social enterprises, but we're doing some work to influence and see more inclusion of social enterprise in that sector as well.

There are so many different programs that are going on there, so it will be exciting to see what happens in the future. Theresa, from your experience in all of these great programs that you're running currently or have run in the past, what would be your best piece of advice that has stuck with you?

My advice is don't get obsessed with having the right business structure, but really focus on what your purpose and values are. Then, think about where are you going to get customers? Who's going to pay to keep this enterprise running?

The realisation I had came from listening and chatting with a guy named Adrian Ashton. He said that your business structure may need to change over time, and mine certainly has done that.

I didn't expect initially to get cash donations to help with Play It On. I've had to adjust my business structure to suit that, but in the beginning when I was very customer focused, it needed to be something different. This is the question that new social enterprises come to me with all the time, so I would say focus less on your business structure and more on customers and your purpose.

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

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I've got a really fond spot for a social enterprise in Adelaide called One Culture Football, an NDIS provider that will support people with disabilities by including them in sporting activities, but also funds the work that they do with new arrival communities. It's really nice to see them take advantage and be opportunistic about the growth of NDIS to fund the work they're doing that's really difficult to get funding for. I've also recently completed the COREO course on circular economics, and those girls are amazing in the course that they deliver. They're involved in so many amazing projects popping up across the circular economy. It's such an exciting time to be involved in that, and I found their work so inspiring that it has really prompted me to do more.

As I touched on, there are some great female-led social enterprises coming out of Adelaide, and recently we saw three of them all win funding to further develop and grow their social enterprises through the Women's Leadership and Development Program.

These winners included the GOGO Foundation by Sarah Gunn, Community Corporate led by Carmen Garcia and the Inventorium led by Eddie Blass. These winners are all actually SASEC board members from the past and present, and they're doing great things for that space.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend?

I talked about Adrian Ashton who is from England and I’d recommend his podcasting and blogging. He has some really sound advice for social enterprises, particularly around business structure, start-up funding and measuring your impact. A book that I've recently gone back to is Truth, Growth, Repeat by Mike Edmonds out of Perth. I read it a couple of years ago when it just came out, but recently in my role as Chair I've been seeing how many new social entrepreneurs are starting up that have left their corporate jobs and are looking for more purpose in designing social enterprises. I went back to this book because that's exactly who he's targeting, and it's been really good to help me get into that headset again. A long-term influencer for myself has been the work of Hillary Cottam out of Scotland. She has done a lot of work to reshape the way that the welfare system has worked for quite some time. Her latest book, Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State really talks about the benefits of social enterprise in that you can design something that's based on working directly with people.