Cindy Carpenter On Community Minded Enterprises Helping Refugees Thrive

Cindy Carpenter is Chair of The Bread & Butter Project, Australia’s first social enterprise artisan bakery, investing 100% of profits to provide training and employment pathways for refugees and asylum seekers.

Cindy also leads the advisory groups supporting three other refugee-focused social enterprises; CommUnity Construction, FoodLab and Aunty’s Ginger Tonic. She co-founded the work-integrated-social enterprise hub within Social Enterprise Australia, which advocates for payment by outcomes funding models for social enterprises, and convenes a knowledge-sharing group of refugee-focused social enterprises. She also sits on the national judging panel for Westpac Foundation’s Social Change Fellowship.

She is a Board Director for Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia, and a member of the Governance Group for Settlement Council of Australia’s ‘Road to Belonging’ national strategy. She also convenes a group of chief executive women to secure safe passage for Afghan career women to Australia via skilled visas, and co-leads a diaspora group providing education and work opportunities for young women inside Afghanistan.

Cindy was a Principal and then General Manager Aust/NZ for the Boston Consulting Group before co-founding the strategy consulting firm, Cast, 13 years ago. She thrives on helping organisations achieve their boldest aspirations and has advised many corporates as well as not-for-profit and public sector organisations.

She has an MBA from AGSM where she was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship, with an exchange to the Wharton School of Finance in University of Pennsylvania.

Cindy discusses generating revenue for a social purpose using heart-centred enterprise strategies and providing intergenerational change for refugees settling in Australia.

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

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion for social enterprise?

[Cindy Carpenter] - There were two forces really. The first was (and I think this is the same for many) I felt absolute disgust with Australia's offshore detention policy. I became interested in the refugee cause and that led me to join The Bread & Butter Project board via a friend. I suppose in that regard, I'm motivated by building support for refugees because both of our major parties are somewhat paralysed by the old rhetoric that perceives refugees as a threat. In the face of that barrier, I thought the best way to address that is to build grassroots support for the refugee cause. Refugee focused social enterprises are a terrific way to do that, and so for that reason I lead or chair the advisory groups of a few.

The other force that influenced my love of social enterprise is that I've been a management consultant for many years, most of my working career in fact. I've been trained to maximise profit, and I've been exposed to the negative side of that, which is endangering people and planet through a blind pursuit of profit growth.

It's clear we can't keep doing business the way we've done it, and I'm attracted to the capacity of social enterprise to blend the best of business with a strong social purpose for good.

As Chair and former acting GM of The Bread & Butter Project, what is the organisation's purpose and what impact is it creating?

The Bread & Butter Project trains refugees to be artisan professional bakers. We offer a six to eight month fully paid training program, and during that time, we pay for their attendance at TAFE to study a tertiary education in baking. We provide English tutoring on site as well as paid work placements. We're thrilled to have over a 90% retention rate through that program, and 100% success in securing job offers after graduation. There's a chronic shortage of bakers across Australia, and there has been for years. Not many young Aussies want to get up at 3am and do a dough mix! There's a shortage, we're able to help fill it, and we've got a greater than 95% satisfaction with our program. What we're most proud of is what we've seen through research the Social Impact Hub did for us, a proven intergenerational impact. We now train 20 bakers a year.

Going into the factories is such a pleasure, we see people from across the world. Wherever there is strife, there is a trainee coming who's interested in becoming a baker, and often we have people who have quite different backgrounds and they've never baked but end up fully embracing it. They’re surprised by how much they love the process of baking. It's very physical to bake sourdough, you're required to pound the dough and stretch it across tables. It's meditative, physical, but we're proud too that 50% of our trainees are women. The dough starter for our bread is a family member, it's called George! George came from Bourke Street Bakery, who launched Bread & Butter out of the goodness of their heart. Having had an experience of setting up a bakery in an orphanage in Mysot on the edge of a refugee camp, they brought their experience to Australia.

Cindy, you are a speaker at this year's Social Enterprise World Forum in Amsterdam. What are you most looking forward to about the Forum?

I loved attending SEWF 2022 in Brisbane, and I know you were instrumental in that Tom, so I applaud you and all your colleagues. It was wonderful to soak in the optimism and see the real-world success of social enterprise. I felt such a sense of hope that we can do business responsibly.

It's not abstract. It's concrete. We're doing it, and we can end disadvantage and environmental degradation through doing business in a much better fashion.

I love that social enterprises don't compete. Having come from the corporate world, the Boston Consulting Group (who I worked for previously) is known for being leaders in competitive strategy. I grew up with competitive strategy. It's so fresh for me to be amongst a group of people that don't feel like they're competing. They feel instead like they're pulling in the same direction, and so what most excites me about SEWF 2023 is the opportunity to experience that across a greater number of international social enterprises and advocates.

Where do you see opportunities to grow this ‘business for good’ movement across Australia and more broadly overseas?

I'm super proud of what we've done for many years, but most particularly recently. Social enterprise in Australia is really coming into its own. There are now over 12,000 social enterprises across Australia. There was a beautiful report about this, the Pace Report. In fact, it's got Bread & Butter Project on the front page! It's a terrific snapshot by Social Traders and Social Enterprise Australia of the social enterprise world in Australia. We've got a thriving peak body, a national strategy, we're squarely on the radar of most levels of government, and we now have sizable commitments to grant and payment by outcomes trials. We have a Social Enterprises and National Accreditation Scheme through Social Traders that's increasingly being adopted by government and embraced by industry. The beautiful building blocks that took years and years to build are coming together. It is just so exciting in Australia.

The biggest opportunities to grow the business for good movement internationally are by encouraging all governments to recognise the power of social enterprise to deliver effective social purpose outcomes.

Cindy at the opening of Park Sydney bread bar with Mayor of Sydney City, Clover Moore and graduate baker Steven.

Work Integrated Social Enterprises — Cindy at 10th Anniversary for Bread & Butter Project.

The social enterprise sector is still fledgling in a lot of places in the world. In some ways, we're still fledgling in Australia, and we're amongst the most well developed. We need to encourage governments to provide funding, and supportive procurement policies so that we can scale. Secondly, we need to be encouraging all large corporates to support social enterprise, especially through their procurement agenda. They can make a serious difference. I'm not sure they're aware that it's relatively easy for them to tweak their procurement approach to support social enterprise and make such a difference to the futures of social enterprises in their country. Woolworths did that for us, because we have in-store bakeries for Bread & Butter Project inside Woolworths Metro stores. They're 'scratch bakeries'; this is an innovation, for a large supermarket chain to have a bakery that goes from flour to finished products, baked in the store. There is beautiful, fresh, hot bread coming out every hour or so. It means then we have these little mini factories and Woolworths is supplying the capital equipment. We have beautiful little mini factories sitting in these stores where we can train people, so we've got more training capacity. It's why we can now train 20 or more trainees a year.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to start or grow their enterprise and where are you observing common pitfalls?

I get exposure to many entrepreneurs through my connection with Westpac Foundation's Social Change Fellowship. As I see them struggle with their business model, my main advice is to ensure you've got a solid customer proposition that will earn you sufficient trading revenue so you can fund at least 80% of your costs. Even a 20% gap is hard to fund every year, but if you can at least get trading revenue to 80% of costs, then you've got so much more freedom. The cost structure needs to include the additional cost to service your social purpose agenda. For us, that's wraparound support, because for refugees, they're coming with trauma they need support with. We must cover the costs of that at The Bread & Butter Project. Also, you must cover a decent salary for the founder. It's not fair that founders often aren't adequately paid. They're certainly often paid below market, so factor that in and think creatively about your business model so you can fund at least 80% of the cost. The rest you can try to get from government and philanthropy but try to get the bulk of it through your trading revenue.

After years of strategy consulting, the most challenging businesses to run I've seen in my long career are social enterprises, because you need a combination of commercial acumen to compete successfully with serious players (we compete with big bakery chains) and then you must have a passion for social purpose and an ability to advocate for funding. It's a tricky skill set, and you'll not be able to do it with one person; you'll need to harness a great board and leadership team. That's my advice, but don't let that thwart you, because it's so monumentally rewarding at the same time. I'm so excited to see these incredibly talented people that come through every year. I have the great pleasure of interviewing them for the Social Change Fellowship, and it's such a joy every year to do that.

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

I'm going to go broad and then narrow after that.

I'm inspired by initiatives that help us all realise we are connected. We're connected to each other, we're connected to our environment, and success is about much more than economic growth.

Cindy with Hedayat Osyan, Ehsan Wahedi, and Behroz Shadab at UNHCR event.

Now that's so easy to say, but it's hard for movements to get traction around that. I'm impressed by people like the economist professor Mariana Mazzucato's approach to the role of the public sector and mission-driven collective innovation to address societal changes like reducing fossil fuel reliance. If anyone hasn't come across Mariana Mazzucato, I would recommend learning more about her.

Then closer to home, I'm excited about initiatives like FoodLab, and I'm on the advisory board for FoodLab. It's a food incubator for migrant food entrepreneurs. It provides training, a commercial kitchen space, and it's got an attached community garden to help food entrepreneurs launch their businesses to sufficient scale but in a circular end to end way. It grew out of the environmental science faculty at Sydney University, and now it has become its own separate entity. We've got a commercial kitchen space now in South Strathfield which we're actively fitting out. It's a great example of a collective and circular approach to disadvantage. I'm excited about the bigger movements that are unbelievably necessary to address the perils we're experiencing on a planetary level. Then I also love the very specific local initiatives that are real world, physical examples of addressing that.

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

I have an addiction for buying books. I think I might be Booktopia's and Audible's most loyal customer! I have loved Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and I'm ploughing through The Matter of Things. Both books are about the risk of allowing the left hemisphere of our brain to dominate. The left hemisphere is focused; it's literal, logical, and concrete. It's confident to the point of arrogance, while the right hemisphere can perceive our integration as humans with the complexity and mystery of the world around us. If I think about that in terms of social enterprise, pure profit maximisation (which is what I did for most of my consulting career) belongs to the left hemisphere-led world. Social enterprise belongs more to the right hemisphere-led world, where we understand the massive importance of the impact we have on the world and how we must integrate with the complexity and mystery of the world and take full responsibility for our part in it.