Moira Were AM On Regenerative Social Enterprise And The Power Of Movements

Moira Were has worked from the kitchen table as a direct service social worker through to the cabinet table as a Chief of Staff to a Minister.

She has extensive strategic and operational experience in the not-for-profit sector and in government at state, regional, national & international levels. Moira received an Australian honour in 2019 (AM) for her significant service to the community of South Australia. She is a Director of Ethical Fields, Non-Executive Director for Social Impact Investment Network of SA, and is a global facilitator at SheEO.

Moira is the founder of Chooks SA, Hen House Co-op and a co-founder of Collab4Good. She is a ministerial appointment to the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board in South Australia. Moira lives with gratitude on Kaurna country on the Fleurieu Peninsula - Witawali - marked on the maps as Sellicks Beach.

Moira discusses the importance of movements to inspire change, the role governments play in creating impact and regenerative social enterprise practices.

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

[Indio Myles] - Could you please start by sharing a bit about your background and what led to your work with social enterprises and cooperatives?

[Moira Were AM] - I've got to go back a bit to when I started my professional life as a social worker. I built that on a Bachelor of Arts majoring in psychology and politics. When I did social work, I was really interested in the various roles of being a social worker, such as a facilitator, enabler, educator, mediator or a counsellor.

I've always felt that those roles have a very critical dual focus of assisting and improving conditions of well-being for humans and also addressing the structural issues that hold inequity and injustice in place.

I was very focused around systems change. It was inevitable that if I took that seriously as a profession, that I was always going to be asking questions about what's not working for who, why does that happen and who is being left behind? The other goals that have continued to hold me in this lifetime trajectory is to work out what problems I can get around or work around, but mostly I don't want to fix things that aren't working.

Bali in A Jar Founder South Australia.jpg

I'm much more interested these days in creating new systems, things that will work for those people who are most affected by problems and not have that 'white saviour' or 'mother knows best' mentality, but actually directly engage with the issues that impact the world. That's really the inevitability of social work. I had a strong predisposition to be addressing gender, race and class issues. That led me to more political activities over the years, and some of those jobs took me to issues such as domestic violence, land rights and racism. I got involved in party politics and held roles in the Australia Labor Party, particularly around women and policies. This was with Labor women at state national levels and with state platform committees right up to the turn of the century. That's how I ended up working for a member of parliament for a minister for a few years. I've found working at those policy levels really fabulous.

I've always loved making change strategically, and sometimes you can do one small thing that seems like it's a small thing, but it can change people's lives forever. That is when generational change becomes possible.

Some of the changes I was involved with were raising the school leaving age here in South Australia, changing laws around transport and drink driving which really does mean that there are complete shifts in the way whole communities can continue to live and do well together. Those are the things that got me into those places, and it was inevitable that then my attention continued to look at inequities and economics. That's what got me into social enterprises and co-ops. I've been active in co-operatives since the 1990s, and a lot of people don't think of not-for-profits as social enterprises, but I think that is misunderstood and misplaced. I led volunteering in South Australia and the Northern territory for about five years and grew to around 3,000 volunteer involving organisations. That really kept me quite close to those people who are gifting their time, talents and energy to make change.

Often, we don't value things that don't have a dollar value in the economy, but we put so much effort into volunteers who are helping at every level, whether they're in emergency services or helping the environment.

Then there's all the unpaid family carers as well, who often don't get counted in the economy, but without all of those contributions we don't have a society to live in.

That is a very interesting career that you've had Moira. You're currently a Cultivator at Ethical Fields, could you please tell us a bit more about Ethical Fields? What is their core mission and methods of generating a sustainable impact?

Ethical Fields consists of a great bunch of people. We are a company in terms of our legal structure, but we behave as a co-op. We share co-operative values and principles, and we work to be generative, in our own work by supporting one another.

Our main goals are to try and be more regenerative, distributive and developing projects locally.

We've got quite a focus in regions around Australia including the Hunter [Valley] and Gippsland and the Fleurieu Coast in South Australia and in Northern New South Wales in the river land. A lot of projects that we get pulled into are helping communities and industries work together, to see how they can be more regenerative in making the changes they want to that make the world a bit more equal. One of our little slogans we have to ourselves is involving stakeholders with an actual stake. This can take the form of providing research and direct services around training, so we train quite a lot of practitioners who want to learn how to build coalitions, learn about the capital stack and how they can unleash and release resources they might already have in their community and re-deploy them for a much more generative future.

One of the big initiatives that's come out of Ethical Fields in this last year has been a regenerative farmer mutual. A few members of the team are working hard on that, and we don't see them much at the moment because they're trying to make that happen. It will be for farmers, and basically the idea is they can be paid to look after the land and have more mixed farming and not necessarily have everything under cultivation so that they can preserve the environment.

What roles do you see government bodies playing in supporting the social impact sector now? Are there any further ways that these bodies can provide assistance to local enterprises?

I think government is one part of the system. I get a bit frustrated when people say, "oh, the government should do this,” or “the government should do that." Governments get elected by people and legislation is often the last thing that happens, it's not the first thing that happens.

Essentially, parliaments are legislative chambers, that's what they do. They make the law. The law is a way of codifying how we want to see the world organised.

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I think government's job is also to support creating the conditions that will support leaders and develop those emerging pathways, not just be at the end of the legislation. They do have an important role for creating legislation and regulations, and with that comes measurement and how things get valued in our economy or in our systems. In the impact investing space, some of the things I would love to see more governments doing is creating fund structures where we might have more funds cycling through like no interest loans for social enterprises. There are quite a lot of those models in other parts of the world. Canada is doing a massive piece around that at the moment, and the Canadian Development Bank historically over the last decade have done a number of things to fund First Nations people, female founders or people from under-served communities as well.

Governments have a really important role as customers, so procurement policies are fabulous, quick and very effective mechanisms to shift some of the conditions in entire industries and sectors. We have seen this supply Aboriginal and First Nations businesses, and I'd like to see more and more of that for social enterprises and for impact enterprises. Procurement is a really big piece, whether the government is a customer themselves, they are grant makers building that into their grant conditions, or if they're giving tenders out that they build it into their tendering. In South Australia, The Department of Transport have built social procurement into their tendering processes, and I'm a big fan of that becoming a really good strategy.

As an activator at SheEO, you see female founders at different stages of their entrepreneurial journeys. Where have you observed that opportunities exist to better support female founders?

There are more opportunities than we realise. I keep reminding people that if you want to support female founders, one of the things you can do in your everyday life is a customer of them. If you've got superannuation, look into Verve Super or if you're wanting to buy period products in your school, buy them from Taboo to address period poverty. If you're interested in actually holding an event, whether it's a school social or a big food award ceremony, go to the social enterprise that can help you with that. In South Australia, that'd be GOGO Events.

First of all, think of yourself as a customer and then actually proactively make those choices to buy from businesses who are female founded.

The next thing is there are a few changes that are already happening out there, like the Grameen Bank has just announced micro-credit for female founders in Australia running micro enterprises. The Canadian example I gave your before is about to see more state and federal governments having specific funding arrangements. While we do have a federal funded program called Boosting Female Founders, it's pretty limited, there's over-subscription to it and it can't keep up with demand.

We need a few more of those programs. Closer to home for me, The Hen House Co-op that I founded, we're looking at creating an online digital platform as a co-op for women who are in small businesses or microbusinesses that can sell their products and services online to customers who might want to buy from those people. We all know about Patreon, this is like a 'Matreon'. They're calling that program Flock, and we're just about to go into the MVP stage for that. I'm looking forward to sharing that with people. I think there are tools and instruments available, but we do hold that power in our everyday consumer hands and we don't need to leave it to others. We can do things ourselves.

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

I will talk about some projects and initiatives, but I really think it's more about movements. It's about where we have a whole culture and approach to solve some of these problems. The movements that have really inspired me in recent years have been the Me-Too movement which I think is completely disrupting the patriarchy. Black Lives Matter is definitely disrupting racism.

Here in Australia, the Uluru Statement From The Heart with those principles of a voice of truth telling and treaty is really disrupting colonialism.

I think those movements are really important, and Greta Thunberg's climate school strike is another movement helping the planet. When people come together across time and cultures to be able to act together, you can get really big systems and social change. In fact, that's really the only time those things actually work. We might be interested in supporting projects and initiatives, but they themselves have to be part of something bigger if you want social change to actually happen. In SheEO, we talk about it as working on the worlds to do list. That is the 'SDG's', or the Sustainable Development Goals.

Locally, the Hen House and Collab4Good are creating movements, with the leadership of my co-founders Amy Orange who has been a past Impact Boom interviewee and Sarah Gun.

We're really looking at how you can do those things as an intermediary for social enterprises and how we can support those movements and also orientate social enterprises to seeing their place in impact and their place in systems change. We've got an event coming up in November called Impact Chains, which we hope will make some of those initiatives and projects visible, but within a bigger context.

To finish off Moira, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I love this question. I like poetry and songs, and I think that I would really encourage people to find those stories for themselves that they love. For myself, my go-to's in my White Celtic tradition are David White and John O'Donohue. I'm really influenced by Audre Lorde's work, and Sister Outsider I think everyone should read. Margaret Wheatley's books and particularly one of her most recent ones Who Do We Choose To Be? I think is worth reading. In the economic space, for those of you who are born in this century my suggestion is Ernst F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful and Charles Eisenstein's book Sacred Economics, which is very challenging. In the Indigenous space, I really recommend people read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. If you want to tap into a feminine side of that, Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass is great. You can't go wrong with Allie Kobing Eckerman as an Australian poet also; her voice is haunting and dangerous.