Sally Giblin On Helping Children Understand How To Nurture The Environment
Sally Giblin is an award-winning founder, podcast co-host, environmentalist, writer, and parent. Her purpose is to unleash the power of families and educators to rewrite our climate story.
Sally is a Co-Founder of Be The Future, which is creating multi-sensory EDUtainment for young children that inspires environmental action using humour, surprise and hope. She's also a Co-Host of the Hope. Act. Thrive. Podcast, where she has bite-size conversations with leading climate thinkers, doers and shakers.
Sally is a Greenpeace Australia Pacific General Assembly Member, an Australian Parents for Climate Action spokesperson, and a Climate Reality Leader. She’s also a startup mentor for Founder Institute, the world's largest early-stage accelerator. She’s been at the forefront of many social impact initiatives over the years, with organizations such as Young UN Women and Social Good Summit. She’s also spreading the word about environmental action through writing for media publications and speaking at events.
She previously Co Founded Pure Bundle, an award-winning circular fashion startup, and was a Management Consultant at PwC.
Sally discusses her work with businesses, communities, and families to help the next generation thrive with the environment and deal with the climate change crisis.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your passion for social enterprise?
[Sally Giblin] - I've had quite a diverse career. I've done a lot of different things in the corporate space, but I guess the thread always through that is I was trying to find work more about social impact. I did a lot of volunteering in addition to my corporate roles, and eventually this opened my view to more work in social and environmental impact, which of course are intertwined. It was while watching a David Attenborough documentary that cemented for me the need to take immense action on our climate and biodiversity crisis. At the time I was living in London, and I was one of the co-founders of Pure Bundle, a circular fashion brand. I was already on the impact journey, but I wanted to go deeper and do something around helping change hearts and minds. This meant helping people to find their unique place in acting against climate change and thinking about different ways of engaging people by communicating more playfully to bring people's attention to the space.
Are there any milestones you would like to share?
Helen [Hill] and I have been creating and building Be the Future for two years now. We met when she and I were both living in London. We met on an online hashtag, which is quite wild. We were both ambassadors for this movement called Tackle the Crisis, which is focused on climate positivity. In this sea of logos, I found a logo for her other business, Unlikely Genius, and it looked quite cool. I tapped into this logo and saw she's an educator and graphic with a quirky sense of humour. I realised she was the person I wanted to bring this Be The Future idea [which it's become] to life with. Quite crazily, we've only ever met twice in real life, as this was all happening throughout the COVID pandemic where I moved back to Australia. We've been doing this for two years, and the creative journey does take a while. We've developed an EDUtainment kit for young kids, all about trying to spark hope and playful action.
It's a book, game, and activity book, so we've reached the point where we're about to have a Kickstarter campaign to do our first print run for that EDUtainment kit. That is an enormous milestone we've been working towards throughout working with our community of parents and educators to help create and develop this project. We have had loads of conversations, tests, and experiments to engage and bring more people on the journey with us. It's been a wild ride, and we've done a couple of wonderful accelerator programs too. Impact Boom has been very involved in those programs which has been an immense help. We're only just at the very start of our journey, but we've already been around for two years.
As the Founder and Managing Director of Be The Future, can you share more about the organisation's purpose and impact you've generated?
Our purpose is to create a future for our kids where people and nature thrive. This is a very lofty mission, and we want to engage every household and educational institution for young kids in Australia and the UK. We want our playful way of engaging people in climate action and sustainability in all those places. For us, it's about different multi-sensory EDUtainment. We're blurring that line of being evidence-based and educational with it feeling so playful and fun it's also entertaining for the kids and their families. Our work spans across different products; this first EDUtainment kit has a storybook, card game, and activity book. We've also had free audio stories, colouring sheets, and things like that. We plan to create a digital platform that's very engaging and gamified. We’re trying to engage people in different ways that work for them, and then helping people to find their unique place in climate action.
That's probably been one of my biggest learnings; climate and biodiversity doesn't mean you have to be protesting on the streets or a climate scientist. There is such an immense need for change across our society within individuals, businesses, schools, governments, and organisations.
Anyone can act in a different way, whether it's in their local community or the role they're moving into at work. We want to be part of changing hearts and minds and helping people find their place across generations. The reason we're focusing on children at this young age of four to seven years is because at that age, kids are so curious. They're doing so much reading and playing with adults in their lives, whether it's parents, grandparents, or teachers. It's this beautiful, sweet spot where you can open the minds and curiosity of the kids, but adults can also learn and grow alongside them.
Sally Giblin and Co-Founder Helen Hill.
As a participant in the HATCH Taronga Accelerator Program, what have been the key lessons you have learnt during this program?
(The HATCH Accelerator) has been fabulous. We're coming to the end, which is quite sad because one of the best things is just the people you are connecting with in the space. This is whether it's the other participants, people delivering the programs, mentors, or other connections you make beyond that. The people you are engaging with are so incredibly helpful, and this is one of the big things that helps as you get involved in this climate and biodiversity space which is intellectually heavy. It is complex, and so it helps immensely to find communities of people who also care and are taking steps to change whatever that issue might be and are on their own journey. Throughout the program I've developed more of this attitude of experimentation.
You can put so much stress on a particular marketing campaign or project, where it must work and if it doesn't your idea could be all over.
If you can look at your enterprise as a series of constant experiments, where some things work better and some don’t work as well, you can learn, evolve and change things to grow.
We've already changed some of our first potential communities and audiences. We’ve also changed how we're engaging people quite dramatically, purely because we are getting out there, talking to people, discovering new opportunities, and testing things.
You need to be solving a problem for people and responding to what people want and need. If you're creating something but are very steadfast with the mindset of, "I have to stay with this particular way we are going to do things," it might not resonate with people. If you can be open to evolving and changing, you have an advantage.
I've had to develop that mindset to just say it's fine. You need to keep ebbing and flowing, there is a lot of uncertainty, and just getting more comfortable with that is crucial.
As a female leader, throughout your previous experiences and now, what have been some of the challenges and opportunities you have seen in this space?
For me, the biggest opportunity is to try and move beyond the idea of mentoring being the biggest thing female leaders need. We need to move more towards the idea they also need money to make things happen.
You can be guided, challenged by, and introduced to the most wonderful people, and yes of course, lots of things bubble away with that. But there is also the reality there are certain points where you have to spend some money to make money.
If you don't leave samples, develop a marketing campaign, or put money into getting PR, then success is probably less likely to happen. You can absolutely do a lot yourself, and my co-founder and I do an immense amount. We do a lot of upskilling, but it gets to a point where you need to spend money on certain things. There is this tricky point when you're bootstrapping where you're able to put a certain amount of effort in, but there's a real tension of trying to get to the point of generating income, particularly when we've got a cost-of-living crisis. There is an opportunity for more innovative ideas around funding enterprises at earlier stages, whether it's around offering debt funding (not necessarily equity funding) or introducing other creative ways it could be done.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?
I'm inspired by various initiatives in the HATCH Accelerator program. There are five other initiatives, and they're all completely different which is an immense part of the program’s value. One enterprise is led by two fabulous Indigenous women and focuses on soft cultural burning. One is around circular fashion while another initiative is encouraging more sustainable seafood. Another participant is creating a better way to deal with soft plastics with a device that squashes them right down and improving the recycling chain. Lastly, Habitat Pods are making biodegradable cardboard structures for small animals to have as a habitat after fires. These projects are all completely different, and people are starting these initiatives from different career spaces and experiences. But everyone is so passionate and we're all helping each other in different ways to lift each other up. This has been wonderful to be a part of, and I can't wait to see where everyone takes their initiatives after this program.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
One of the things I've realised throughout this journey is how important it is to work on your mindset and cultivate the belief you’re able to make change. No matter what, you come across loads of challenges and things are going to pop up. One of the things I find most helpful is when I exercise first thing in the morning, I listen to podcasts that lift me up. I'm a huge fan of Tony Robbins and Brené Brown. I'm also listening to some of Oprah's ones, and they often have fabulous guests on. Not only you are learning from these incredible people and their insights, but you’re hearing their stories and life lessons. One of the people I've been finding the most inspirational lately is Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx in the US. She had this insane amount of tenacity and grit to keep going, not take no for an answer and make things happen. That is such an important ingredient to building anything, and so I find listening and almost feeling like you're having conversations with these people is helpful, especially if I'm in the head space of feeling less like I can do it.
I'd love to finish by mentioning our Kickstarter campaign starts on June the 13th. That is when we're going to have our EDUtainment kit come to life, so people will be able to support that campaign.
There are all sorts of rewards for different levels of joining our creative journey. This is all the way from small digital rewards to contributing and supporting local schools or early education centre.
