Carmen Garcia On The Untapped Potential Of Refugees And Migrants In Australian Businesses

Carmen Garcia is CEO and Founder of national award-winning diversity and inclusion certified social enterprise, Community Corporate, which operate in the space of corporate social responsibility.

They specialise in recruitment with a social conscience. In 2020, Community Corporate won National Social Enterprise of the Year at the Australian Small Business Champions Awards and is the Australian Preferred Implementation Partner for the Tent Partnership for Refugees - Global Business Coalition.

Fondly known by her peers as the Diversity and Inclusion Warrior, Carmen is a well-regarded social entrepreneur driven to make a profound economic and social impact through work.

In 2021 Carmen received the Women in Innovation Award for Social Impact among other accolades for leading practice innovation in diversity and inclusion.

Carmen discusses how individuals can spark change and challenge systemic issues in their workplace, and addressing the barriers refugees and migrants encounter when trying to enter the Australian workforce.

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

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your interest and work in social enterprise, diversity and inclusion?

[Carmen Garcia] - I think this is really not what I do, it's really who I am now, and that's because I was raised with really strong values. Volunteering has been part of my life since I was about 14 years old, so the importance of community was instilled in me early on.

The message my grandfather always said to me was, “to whom much is given, much is expected.” Community, life training, impact and thinking about others are just the values I've always been raised with.

My mum is a migrant from The Philippines, and when she came to Australia, she was a qualified practicing lawyer. Then like most migrants, she faced the similar challenge that her qualifications weren't recognised, and through that lived experience, I really witnessed how important work was to human dignity. I think that really underpinned my career and passion for helping people really find their purpose and doing something that they love. In my career, I've had the benefit of working in private, public and community sectors, and really, I saw that they just didn't speak the same language. They shared that focus on multiculturalism, but because of the disconnect between communities and corporates who shared similar aspirations for a better world, they didn't know how to connect. That's really where my interests came together to design something that would add value and also solve a problem, which I believe is the unemployment issue that we're facing particular for migrants and refugees.

You're the CEO and Managing Director of Community Corporate, so can you tell us a bit more about the organisation and its purpose?

Community Corporate is a certified social enterprise based here in Adelaide, but we operate nationally. Ultimately our goal is to help refugees into work. I don't know if you know this, but the Australian Institute of Family Studies said only 6% of refugees are in work after six months in Australia, and after two years, only about 25% of refugees are working. To me that's completely unacceptable, and my team at Community Corporate (of which there are now fourteen) share the same ambition for people to live their purpose and find passion through work. That's really the goal or the problem that we're trying to solve, and the way we do that is by finding corporate champions who are ultimately our customers /clients to partner with us and challenge traditional recruitment processes, so they can unleash the potential of refugees. As I mentioned in my mum's story, their skills from overseas are often not recognised and there is an unconscious bias well and truly alive in many workplaces still, regardless of the efforts of inclusion.

What we try and do is really challenge the way we recruit and really look at that hiring for attitude and giving refugees the opportunity to demonstrate their capability and skills on the job in the way that employers assess.

During COVID, because of obviously the jobs crisis impact for all, we were engaged by our employers to really start focusing on other diversity cohorts, like mature age women returning to work, young people (particularly vulnerable young people), as well as migrants and people with disabilities. Refugees are always our priority and my passion, but we’ve definitely seen the applicability of our model and the intensive coaching support that we can utilise to really help build that confidence and tap into the resilience of diversity cohorts to support them into a job pathway.

What are the benefits that are created by managers by bringing diverse individuals into their organisation?

In a lot of the employers and corporates that we speak to there's still myths we need to bust when it comes to migrants and refugees. There is an assumption that if they were to consider employing a refugee, they would need to go through the whole sponsorship process, but every refugee who arrives on a humanitarian migrant Visa actually has permanent residence, so they have every entitlement like every other Australian resident, so that is actually not a barrier at all. When you work through those kinds of perceptions of what the challenges might be, and obviously English is one of the key barriers that many employers face, they become open to seeing the benefits and talents that they can unleash with refugees. What we're seeing is that there is a genuine high retention rate. Our retention rate nationally for refugees is over 90% at 12 months in work, and this is from anywhere from entry level jobs at Woolworths to IT/finance corporate jobs in different corporate employer professional streams as well. What we really feel the business case to workplaces is that there is a huge asset amongst refugees that have not been considered because they're not getting through a digital online recruitment process. Being able to really meet the refugees and assess their competence, skills and the values that they could bring to your organisation is worth the extra effort. The return on investment is definitely there and it's just about encouraging employers to challenge the way they recruit traditionally to ensure that unconscious bias doesn't creep in and we lose capturing some amazing talent and skills amongst refugees.

Where are you seeing opportunities for South Australian entrepreneurs to create positive social change in the future?

I am a proud South Australian born and raised here, and I always say we used to be the pioneers of progress! We were the social innovators here in Adelaide, and at some point we just stopped taking risks. I think that there's a really exciting opportunity now to grow the market and to build awareness.

There are some amazing champions who just happen to be female founders and social entrepreneurs who are leading the way and opening up a dialogue that doing good and doing business don't have to be mutually exclusive and that there are benefits for all.

I definitely think the exciting thing for the SASEC board at the moment is really looking at raising that awareness and building a market not only to support the social entrepreneurs and social enterprises who sell their services and products through a better social procurement framework, but it's also about preparing customers, employers, governments and people that can actually understand the reciprocal benefits in buying for social good.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to spark change in their own workplace and challenge the old practices and norms that have been established?

My best advice is it's really about starting a conversation. As I mentioned earlier just about busting some of those myths that are completely untrue, people don't know what they don't know, and there's often just the fear of the unknown. When you think about social innovation or diversity and inclusion, it's just about thinking about desirable skills, and if you looked around your workplace now, how many people are actually from a diverse background?

Imagine if you actually purposefully went and tried to engage and explore opportunities with them, what talent and potential could that open up?

One of the other services that we do at Community Corporate is we curate corporate volunteering for companies that's really focused on skills. In a technology company for example, they might run a masterclass on coding or JavaScript for refugees as a bit of an introduction, but it gives the Australian professionals an opportunity to share skills and talent with our newest arrivals and it also builds up their personal stories and understanding to see they're just like us. They have the same aspirations for themselves, careers and families, but they just don't have the social connections. I think if we start having these really honest and open conversations, we're going to understand that more. We're going to be really open-minded and open the doors to opportunities for them. What's been really interesting for me (and I am a bit of an opportunist to be really honest) is that COVID presented a great narrative for people to really understand the plight of refugees.

No one chooses to be a refugee, no one chooses crisis, no one could have predicted this global pandemic of COVID, but we've had to deal with it, and it's affected people in different ways.

Many lost their job, they found themselves in housing stress, financial stress, and it wasn't their fault. This is exactly the situation of refugees and what they're facing when being forced to flee, and I think trying to have these conversations has really opened up mainstream Australia to understand that the truth is no one chooses crisis, and no one tries to be a refugee.

What other organisations do you believe are creating a strong social impact?

There's so many exciting social enterprises emerging, probably too many to mention. I do have a real strong admiration for Louise Nobes who is the founder of 42 Adelaide, which is a global tech model helping vulnerable people acquire the digital skills that we need for transformation in Australia. She's doing such an amazing job, and I'm really excited to work with her around opening up digital skills for refugees. The word ‘organisations’ is broad, so I'm going to interpret here. I think corporations and companies really need to get a bit of credit in terms of their proactiveness around generating and creating opportunities for social impact.

We've been working with the Woolworths group for over five years. We've helped over 200 refugees into their business, but the impacts is beyond jobs. It's about sustainability, purpose and it's genuine, welcoming and belonging. We've seen through commitments by companies such as Woolworths that we're creating generational change. Parents are referring their children who are referring their aunties or cousins’, and people then really believe it can be possible. People see it and then believe it, that is the whole theory. The role of corporate Australia (and some other partners we're working with include Ikea, Accenture, Service Now and Engineer's Australia) includes stepping up and finding ways that they can contribute to addressing this unemployment barrier many refugees are facing, and I think being open to those conversations and challenging the way we look at credentialing with engineering is so important. Their leadership is so critical to social impact, and we really can't do it without them.

That's why the narrative of social procurement and social impact investing I think is really timely, that as passionate and committed as we are as social entrepreneurs in driving this social impact, we need corporates to be on board.

We need governments to recognise the immense amount of welfare savings and risk that we are intervening in on their behalf by addressing some of the greatest vulnerabilities in society.

In terms of books and resources, are there any that you could recommend to our listeners?

I haven't honestly been doing that much reading in recent times, it's been quite a lot of doing in our risk management strategy to COVID. I definitely love a book I'd recommend to any female founder by Randy Zuckerberg, which is Pick Three. It really helps women (particularly I think women who are mothers like myself) find balance and confidence in not having to live under a blanket of guilt when you are passionate about what you do. With most social entrepreneurs, it is a 24/7 gig, so that's definitely something I’d recommend to all females. But if I may, the reason I haven't been reading too much is I've actually co-authored a book called Social Impact Investing: An Australian Perspective with Stewart Jones and Helena de Anstiss who is a great friend of mine! This book is really about looking at a number of innovative strategies and pragmatic policy initiatives that can help the social impact investment market in Australia flourish. That looks at how we build investor confidence so that the social impact investing can actually be part of mainstream investments.

It does mean there is a bit of a pitch in there to government, because they clearly have a role to play not only from a regulatory perspective, but as an active purchaser of social outcomes.

They should be leading the social procurement agenda; we do see this in many states and we're hoping with a South Australian election coming up that this new or current state government will also step up to the plate and recognise the benefits for our state in investing in social procurement. It's actually been published by Routledge this year, but if people look it up it's called Social Impact Investing: An Australian Perspective.