Tim Middlemiss On Successful Partnerships & Supporting Young People To Create Positive Impact

Tim Middlemiss is the co-founder of Ripple, the impact accelerator for young Australia - every 8 minutes in 2021, a young person discovered a new opportunity to shape the future through Ripple.

Prior to launching Ripple, Tim was Chief of Staff to former CEO of World Vision Australia, Tim Costello AO and led global engagement for pioneering impact investment firm, LeapFrog. Tim was a founding director of social impact creative studio, Agency, named international New Agency of the Year in 2015, a Westpac’s Businesses Of Tomorrow and a Gruen Pitch winner in 2017.

Tim was the creator and presenter of World Vision’s Global Leadership Conferences, presenting to tens of thousands of young people annually, and training local presenters the world over. In 2020, Tim was named in the inaugural cohort of Obama Foundation Leaders for Asia Pacific, and later named by President Obama as one of 60 community leaders for the future.

Tim discusses how organisations can build successful partnerships and where young adults can be best supported to create long lasting social change.

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

[Tom Allen] - Please share a little bit about your background and what led to your interest and passion in social impact strategy and partnerships?

[Tim Middlemiss] - My journey has definitely been a zigzag. I started off (and I really have a distinct memory of this moment) wanting to be a vet. I remember in year one my best mate telling me that if we didn't know what we wanted to do with our future we'd be lost, and we needed to decide quickly! He chose astronaut and I chose vet, and we didn't waiver from those paths for most of our schooling. He got a lot closer than I did, but I did work experience in year ten and absolutely hated it. I love working with animals, but I did not enjoy my time as a vet, so I had no idea what to do. When I finished school, I spoke to a whole bunch of people about what I should do, and I landed on studying teaching which I enjoyed. I got to meet some wonderful people and I loved working with young people. But, when I got into the classroom, I didn't love it as much as I thought I would. Like a lot of young teachers unfortunately, I ended up leaving that profession really early. It was during this time where a bunch of experiences converged and led me to start thinking about the world of injustice and poverty beyond our shores I had begun to see and the systems that entrenched those issues. I started to want to explore different creative, innovative and efficient ways of making a social impact, and all of those things led me to working in the not-for-profit sector through an incredible organisation called World Vision. From there I learned so much from the people I was around and was captivated by this mission and continued on that journey of finding new and innovative ways to explore what social impact looked like.

You are now a Co-Founder of Ripple, an organisation supporting young people in taking small steps and big leaps to shape their future. Tell us a little bit more about the projects you're working on and where you're heading with Ripple?

We talk about Ripple as being a start-up accelerator, but instead of trying to work with new business ideas, we're working with young people and helping them through that transitory period of leaving the linear pathways of an education system into the big wide world.

The way that we frame it is young people have been taught and socialised into a world in which you climb ladders, but what they really need to learn to do is sail this open ocean of opportunity.

Ripple is really all about that, helping young people discover opportunities, build capacity, grow their network and platform to shape their own future. We're trying to build an ecosystem in which all of those things are possible through Ripple. We just finished our Launchpad event, which is this annual energiser where we bring together experts and young people from our community to recharge our batteries and encourage one another on our zigzagging journey of impact. You get a lot of energy from people in our community and you’re able to connect with some really inspiring individuals. This year, we've been fortunate enough to have the Assistant Secretary General Gillian Triggs join us. We had Robyn Denholm, who is the chair of Tesla and Pete Yao who is the impact officer for Thankyou, so it was a really encouraging moment for our young people. But moments only matter if they can turn into momentum. Our focus at Ripple is to provide a long-term journey with young people in our community, building out the platform that's going to walk with young people over a number of years as they accelerate through that transition out of school and into a world that they can shape for themselves. As part of that, the two big things that we're looking at is how we build the platform itself so that young people can currently experience that ecosystem, at the moment it's a terrible user experience! We're working really hard to improve that behind the scenes, so watch this space. If you've been to ripple.gl beforehand, it will get better. The other thing that's on the horizon for us are our partnerships. Launchpad, the program I just mentioned, ran with young people from more than 50 local governments.

We're really proud of our key local government partners, and we're looking at exploring ways to help grow those partnerships with local governments.

If you work in local government, we'd love to chat with you. The other thing that we're working hard on building our partnerships with new projects, corporates and other organisations. We recently piloted a program with one with our friends over at Blackbird to make it easier for members of our community to join awesome projects, and we've got some cool stuff in the works going forward as well.

For young leaders who are keen to create positive social, cultural, or environmental change, what would your advice be to start an organisation, campaign or initiative that tackles pressing issues?

I asked a very similar question to someone we interviewed at Ripple who is a social entrepreneur here in Australia.

His advice was that every day you should wake up and try to kill your idea, and if it survived, you're onto a good thing!

I'm not sure I can be so succinct, but I've got a few things that I'd mention. The first for me is to get out there and talk to people. If you want to address some of the world's most pressing social, cultural and environmental problems, fantastic. I think what you'll find is that so do a lot of people, so get out there and talk to people who are affected by the problem you've been trying to address. Talk to people who are working in that space or are adjacent to that space. Talk to people who aren't working in that space, but whose approach you admire and really take a position of listening first.

Often, we can shoot off in our own direction, really excited by the things that we see, so taking the chance to have people who can lift your vision and give you a greater visibility is a really important first step.

I think the second thing is to consider if the thing you want to do needs to be a new thing or if it can be done through an existing institution or organisation. There are already something like 60,000 charities in Australia, which equates to about a charity for every 400 people in Australia. A third of those charities are considered small, about half of those charities don't have any paid employees and are run purely by volunteers. Now I love charity, and I worked in that sector for a long time, and it does incredible work. Starting a new organisation may seem like the exciting or shiny thing to do, but it's important to really wrestle with the idea about whether a new thing is needed, or if instead you could work through existing pathways. I've been long associated with a couple of not-for-profits, World Vision being one and the Taronga Conservation Society being another. Those are two big organisations, but I've constantly been amazed by not only the quality of staff, but their willingness to innovate, try new things and to back new people. Consider the concept of being an intrapreneur as well as being an entrepreneur and starting something new. Then my third piece of advice is to think widely about where you fit in.

Take a look at the landscape and consider change can be made in a lot of different ways. You might take an issue like climate change and think about how that's being addressed at a civic level in terms of policy, in a workforce through corporates or at a community level thinking locally.

It's helpful to think in during that phase, because climate change needs to be addressed in all of those areas, so if you can see gaps in one of those places, then that's a great space to insert yourself. You don't need to tackle the issue in every facet, but maybe thinking specifically about where your passions lie and where you can make the biggest difference in an area that you're passionate about and in a space that is not already being addressed is crucial.

You are the global leader for communications and engagement at LeapFrog Investments. What gaps exist in the impact investment space to better support impact led entrepreneurs to create the change that they want to see?

At LeapFrog, we're an organisation that focuses on a really interesting opportunity, which is this rising group of billions of emerging consumers in what we describe as ‘emerging markets’. That is people who through the functioning of global cooperation and aid are lifting themselves out of generations of poverty and beginning to become consumers on the world stage. This is happening in places like India, Indonesia or Eastern and Southern Africa on an incredible scale, and LeapFrog exists in this niche of supporting those consumers to find the tools that are going to enable them to shape their own lives. This is done through financial and healthcare tools that give them stability and futures to build upon. For myself, I really enjoy the idea that LeapFrog has brought to the world stage that profit and purpose can be delivered in a way that makes life full of opportunity to people who have gone generations without, and so that niche is really important. But to answer your question a bit more broadly and look at the impact investment space as a whole, I think there's this trend line where impact investment began maybe 10-15 years ago, and it was a concept that looked like the kids at the side of the room who a little bit were awkward and different to the rest of the investment community. Now fast forward a decade later, they're the cool kids at the table. They're the jocks or cheerleaders of the global cafeteria of financial investment, which is a terrible metaphor! But if you'll go with me, that gives a lot of impetus to this space to help coach what impact looks like.

There's a lot of education that needs to happen at every level for people to understand what good and efficient impact looks like. It's not enough to capture the feeling of doing good things or the biggest number of people reached by doing good, but to drive deeper and really have this single eyed pursuit and north star of tangibly improving the lives of others look like and the systems in which people live. I think on a really broad level, impact investment has this perception where it's now in vogue.

There is now a burden of responsibility on impact investment’s shoulders to usher in a world where impact isn't run by people who want to do ‘impact washing’ and just sound like they're doing good, but instead to coach people on what meaningful impact looks like.

Thinking about the other section of your question on supporting impact-led entrepreneurs, we need to be fixated on this concept of a good impact. Too often at Ripple we experienced people being so supportive of what you do because it feels good, and it looks like it's making a difference. But to help impact-led entrepreneurs do that difficult and messy work of measuring and evaluating their enterprises to make sure that they're committed to a positive impact is so important. I look at brands like Thankyou and I'm in awe of the way that they lead so transparently. They stand up and own mistakes to try and shift industries towards positive impact, and I think impact investors have a unique opportunity to coach their investment portfolios to do that better.

What do you believe are the fundamental ingredients of strong and successful partnerships, and where have you seen common pitfalls emerge when multiple stakeholders come together?

For me there are two driving commitments behind impact and partnerships that matter. The first is impact isn't vertical, it's horizontal. It cuts through every element of a business or a life, and naturally partnerships become a key part of that. Anyone who is trying to do anything does that thing in a relationship, whether that's in the communities they inhabit or in the businesses they work. If impact is truly horizontal, then it needs to be considered in any partnership that you take on. The second factor is that impact doesn't get done by an individual; everyone has a role to play. There can't be any spectators in the world of impact, because you are either making a positive or negative impact in whatever you're doing. I get really passionate about impact opportunities that lower the bar or widen the path for positive impact, and I think partnerships play a really key role in doing that. Some groups may have a better ability to reach a number of people and others may have a better pathway to programmatic impact. I'm super passionate about partnerships instead of just creating new things to try and achieve an end. I think one of the elements that is core to a really good functioning partnership is just like a soccer team, it is that people will play different roles, but those roles have a place. If you have a defender that wants to be a striker, your team is instantly at risk. You might have the best nine other players, but if just those two positions can't work out who's doing what, your whole team falls apart. It's very much like that in partnerships, you have to be very clear about the role that you're going to do and the role that you play together. That's where clarity of role and also clarity of credit becomes really important.

The best partnerships that I've seen have been when two organisations or more are doing their natural work and they can see an overlap. In response, they come together, divide responsibilities and keep clear-eyed about who does what and what good looks like.

More often than not, you see those pitfalls emerge when what's most exciting to one company is attaching themselves to a brand of another to look good or reach more people. As soon as the motive is triggered by thinking, "if only we could add that brand to our website," or "if only we could get an email to that list of people, we'd finally hit this goal," then there's an undercurrent and ulterior motive that's not surfaced so those partnerships crumble. This is because one party is after something different to what the other party has signed up for.

We're fortunate enough at Ripple to work with some amazing partners, chief among those at the moment being local government. Local governments are big organisations and they have set ways of working, so we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that things will take time and we need to work through and build trustful relationships with those partners.

But in the end, what we get out of it is an organisation that is so purely aligned to the strategic impact outcomes that we are looking for, young people thriving in their communities, workplace and participating in the civic system.

It's a no brainer that when we build those partnerships they last for years and years, they're not just fleeting. For us, that's a deliberate decision to take the slow partnership building path over the more quick, exciting or thrilling partners that might exist to have something that's really held together.

The relational versus the transactional value of partnerships is so important right?

Hugely, and that's not to say that there aren't frustrations that come in any partnership. But if you're aligned to what that ultimate outcome looks like and clear on the roles that you have, then when those frustrations come up it's really clear how you might resolve them.

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

There's this great organisation I've heard of called Ripple, and if you're 18 to 26 and interested in accelerating your impact head over to ripple.gl! Now, one of the great parts about working with a whole bunch of young people is getting to hear of some really awesome ways that people are addressing social change differently on a daily basis. One group that comes to the forefront of my mind is called Tech for Social Good, which is run by a small group of young people from a couple of different universities who are doing degrees that I couldn't even explain the name of. Things like mechatronics (if that's a word) or software engineering. They work in that tech space, and these are people who are getting headhunted by some of the biggest technology companies in the world, and they have decided that they want to use their network and a community to keep this generation grounded in how they can do better in the world of tech.

Now the next generation of our technology leaders are tied to a strong stance of ethics and morality. They have learned from our past mistakes, and I just think that they're a great example of the collision between impact and passion.

I'm a huge fan of them even though I do not understand most of the words that they're saying! I want to also give a shout out to the less exciting world of social change where day in and day out you have organisations whose brands we know and have been around for eons and eons are working hard. This is whether it be groups like World Vision or Save The Children in international development, or The Salvation Army or Red Cross here in Australia. Each day there are people getting access to clean drinking water, going to school for the first time, or who are having their breakfast picked up so that they can eat before going to school here in Australia that aren't slipping through the cracks because of the amazing civil institutions that we get to be part of. I'm inspired by people doing great new things like Tech for Social Good, and on the other side, that hard, less exciting social change that's been going on for generations.

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

It would be remiss of me not to give a big shout out to my good mate Shane Hatton who has just had his second book published Let's Talk Culture: The Conversations You Need To Create The Team You Want. Shane is a great leader, and his book has been really well timed for me, because at Ripple we're wrestling with the idea of how to turn an idea that's shared between a couple of founders and early team members into a culture that's shared across a growing team. Anyone who's working in a space in which a small thing is growing into a bigger thing, Let's Talk Culture has been a really helpful book about how you have those conversations with your team to build a culture that's fitting of the organisation that you want it to be. Stuff like The Great Resignation has some stories about cultural toxicity in other organisations that we've all seen and heard, so this is a great book to help step you through that. To be honest Tom, there are only a few business books I've actually read. I actually tend to read more history books as a former history teacher. My recommendation is going to be The Biggest Estate on Earth, a great book that looks at agricultural sustainability pre-colonization in Indigenous Australia. This book has just blown my mind over the past few months. If you've read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, you will enjoy The Biggest Estate on Earth. If you haven't read Dark Emu, you will enjoy either that or The Biggest Estate on Earth, and you should read one or both of them.