Craig Fairweather On Networking Social Impact Accelerators To Amplify Change
Craig Fairweather is the CEO of Canberra-based social enterprise intermediary, The Mill House Ventures.
Since their inception in 2016, The Mill House Ventures has gained an enviable national reputation for providing tailored programs, services and connections to enhance the capabilities of social enterprises in Canberra and Region. They have dedicated 100% of their efforts and resources to the singular goal of fostering a social innovation ecosystem and community.
Craig joined the organisation in 2021 after an extensive career of achievement and success in various executive marketing, communications and commercial leadership roles within a broad range of private and public sector organisations across metropolitan and regional markets.
He is hands-on business growth manager, enabler and agent-of-change who relishes tackling challenges positively and achieving outstanding outcomes.
Craig discusses helping founders and communities start, grow, and support purpose-driven businesses and why an accelerator ecosystem is required to mainstream the social enterprise movement.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you share a bit about your background and what led to your passion for supporting purpose-driven organisations?
[Craig Fairweather] - My career has been based on having confidence in myself; as one door closed a thousand opened.
You have got to have the confidence in yourself to step forward and have a go.
I've worked all over Australia in Sydney, Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane. I'm from Queensland originally and I've worked across travel, tourism, hospitality, and vocational training. At one point I ran my own consultancy practice and I've worked in larger organisations from both the private and public sectors. It's been an interesting career, but along the journey I've learned while working in cities you often focus and get caught up in the city. When you move to regional and remote areas around Perth, Canberra, and Darwin, you realise there's a significant amount of disadvantage in those areas.
It's part of my life journey seeing that we as citizens should be helpful and supportive of our fellow people. I realised this from having grown up with a significant Aboriginal and Islander community in Rockhampton, Queensland and from the top end of Australia where I started my career as a recreation officer with the Cerebral Palsy League. There has been this aggregation of experiences which have impacted my personal philosophies and politics. Eventually, I happened to be at a Canberra Innovation Network event, and this incredibly dynamic woman got up to speak. This was Cindy Mitchell, our founding CEO, who was at the time seeking mentors. I immediately approached her afterwards, and over time that led me to join The Mill House Ventures.
Throughout my career there were plenty of successes and failures. There were many times it didn’t work out, and so that breadth of experience has enriched me as a person and helped develop my resilience, personal strength, and conviction about who I am as a human being.
As the current CEO at The Mil House Ventures, can you tell us how you are supporting social enterprises and purpose driven business leaders?
The Mill House Ventures was established by Cindy Mitchell and some clever people down here in Canberra. It was originally an organisation called Service One, which was an aggregation of cooperative building societies that turned into a banking organisation. They saw themselves as a social enterprise bank, and then they were able to connect with people at the University of Canberra who were interested in working towards greater learning opportunities with students on real life issues in enterprise, particularly social enterprises.
The Mill House Ventures formed as a company, and they were very fortunate Cindy Mitchell agreed to become the founding CEO. The platform has evolved over time, and as Cindy was transitioning to take on other challenges, I was invited on board and had the great privilege of working daily with her. I had fabulous conversations about where the business should go. Originally it was set up to provide work integrated learning opportunities for students, and then Cindy evolved it into providing an accelerator program called Grist, which is now our flagship initiative. Grist isn't an acronym, it's based on the concept of “gristing” ideas, as farmers do with produce in a mill house. Coming on board, I immediately saw the importance (having run my own businesses and working in the private and public sectors) of an accelerator, and Grist is a fabulous program. Cindy and I understood however it's one thing to be involved in creating a home for the ideation, testing and validation of a business idea, but then once you're up and running as a business you always have needs, opportunities, threats, and gaps. There is a particularly big gap in micro and small enterprises around founders finding time for strategic work and not being caught up in the operational aspects of their business. We evolved a plan positioning The Mill House Ventures as a through life supporter of social enterprises in Canberra and the region. We have programs at the early stage, a risk accelerator program, and a program which we're very fortunate to be receiving support from the Snow Foundation to run called Refine. Refine is for people have surpassed Grist and might have a particular need, gap, opportunity or threat they would like support with addressing. We're able to provide support through either consultancy or intervention work.
Recently we were successful in securing funding from the ACT Government to administer the inaugural pilot of the ACT Social Enterprise Grant Program. That's providing $700,000 over the next two years, $340,000 in year one and $360,000 in year two. This will provide matched grant funding to social enterprises in Canberra of amounts between $10,000-$30,000. We launched this in December, applications closed in late January. Our independent assessment panel just completed their short listing, and next week we go to the Q&A session with shortlisted candidates for an independent assessment panel to assess who will be successful in receiving those grants. It’s very exciting to have that funding support, but with the ACT government, we have been involved in discussions over a long period of time. We're fortunate in Canberra to be connected to our leaders in politics both in a territory and federal sense. They also provided funding for us to be able to deliver what's called scale up support. We're about to launch a new program called Scale for Impact at our programs launch in a couple of weeks’ time. It doesn't complete the whole suite, but it shows we can support people through their life of social entrepreneurship.
What major opportunities are you observing to better support founders in tackling social, cultural, and environmental issues?
Coming into the sector, it quickly became evident the importance of proven accelerators to test and validate ideas. When I set up my own business, I finished working and set up my business. I don't think that in tertiary areas or the general enterprise space there is support for people to test and validate whether their business will make money.
Grist tests two simple things, through your business, will you make money? It doesn't have to make money today, But is it something that through trade will become profitable? One of the mantras of my life has been if I don't make money, I don't have a job, and that's the same for business.
There could be a journey towards achieving that; it could take five years or a decade, that's perfectly fine. But how do we assist your capital needs throughout that? The lovely thing about what I've learnt about social enterprise is there's this incredible network of proven capability developers who run accelerators, like Impact Boom and Impact Seed. The fact we are now getting together as a collective to create this understanding, accelerators enable social procurement and capital investment. Rather than ideas being dependant upon the salesmanship of founders (as I see on TV shows), the robustness of their ideas are tested with customers.
It's not just me saying I don't think your idea will work, it’s about founders learning that process.
The most important thing for us to do with our sector is recognise the value of this proven network of accelerator programs which test and validate the ideas clever people have come up with.
One of the joys of what I do is I don't have to come up with the ideas! There are so many clever people addressing climate change, environmental issues, and community problems. They're addressing things in their local community, many of them are wanting to solve a problem in their community. They're not interested in scaling up or franchising, but others can. To have that broad church and being able to support them is quite fantastic. To have that on a national basis will prove very beneficial to the development of more inclusive economy across our nation, and not just in metropolitan areas, but regional and remote ones.
Where do you see opportunities to grow the purpose-driven business movement, and what do we need to do to take it mainstream?
One adage of the Australian tourism industry which enabled it to develop successfully was to not fight over getting people here to Australia. Instead, let's just get them here, and then they'll choose which products and services they want. This adage applies to the social enterprise sector, and I just don't understand silos. One of the missing pieces in our community, whether it’s across social media or politics is that it's okay to disagree. People are becoming ardent in their views; I don't see any value in this. What I've endeavoured to do is to get out, meet people, and travel not only in this country but overseas. I talk to people about what they do to find what's working and not working. This ensures we don't reinvent the wheel. Creating these opportunities is important. I would like there to be an event like the Social Enterprise World Forum we had in Brisbane in 2022. It'd be great to have a national symposium for social enterprises to create these dialogues and opportunities.
We need to ensure we create opportunities for various parts of the sector and accelerators to get together, learn from each other, and be open to sharing knowledge to benefit everyone.
The initial work of Social Enterprise Australia and all the state and territory bodies in our region has been outstanding. We need to map out what constant work is needed, because politicians will move on to the next shiny thing. They'll think, "I've done this already, what's the next thing?” We need to keep them coming back to where our problems are. We also need to be able to tap into the financial sector and explain this is a sector to invest in. While the sector is thin in Canberra, in other markets there are real opportunities for investment. This is not in traditional terms; expecting to generate high financial returns out of impact businesses is not realistic. They must view it as a yield opportunity, where they’re already making money out of investing in larger firms, so they can afford to allocate 5% to 10% percent of their billion-dollar portfolios to solve problems. That comes from creating opportunities where we all get together and map out where we need to go. Not being afraid to disagree is crucial; I’ve got a view and I know I'm always listening to other views because we have different perspectives. We all have different life experiences and philosophies.
What traits have you observed in successful entrepreneurs generating an impact?
Most founders we deal with have lived experiences of problems. But it's very easy to get siloed into these spaces.
Being inquisitive about business and other areas of the world is important; that willingness to have conversations with people, listen and learn is important.
Inquisitiveness about new ideas, the way people operate their businesses or how they market their impact is important. The other crucial trait is resilience.
Running your own business is incredibly tough; you're going to doubt yourself and be stressed. However, the fact you're in control is a positive thing. Being able to cope with failure healthily is crucial. Find healthy ways to cope, not drugs and alcohol but your loved ones, mentors, colleagues, and mindfulness.
In Grist one thing I constantly tell participants is don’t allow your personal identity and self-esteem to be wrapped up in whether your business works. For a lot of people, the business and problem they're trying to solve becomes intertwined with their identity. I encourage people to not think like this; your identity is your identity.
the person you are is not dependent on your worth as a entrepreneur or whether your business is a success or not. My identity is not wrapped up in The Mill House Ventures, my identity is my identity. I come to work and enjoy what I do, but my self is not dependent upon whether my business succeeds.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?
The Mill House Ventures has an incredible list of successful social entrepreneurs it has supported. In our last cohort, what stood out was that picking one or two enterprises was like picking your favourite child! I'll give you two examples; one is an example of somebody who has looked to solve a problem in their community through the creation of a Cafe in a suburb of Canberra called Gordon. Nate and Tara established Little Luxton, and they did this because they identified there wasn’t a place in their community to gather and meet friends . They also wanted to support the Gordon Community Centre, which is a place people come to get support, particularly around receiving foodstuffs and grocery items. They decided to would combine those needs and create this little cafe at the Gordon Community Centre. It was a very long journey; we became involved with them around 2018-19. They opened in October of last year and give a dollar from every coffee sold to the Gordon Community Centre. They provided $48,000 last year to the Gordon Community Centre, and now they’re looking at how they create employment opportunities for young people in the region to develop their barista and customer service skills. They are not motivated to go anywhere else, so this is one of the examples I often use to showcase the length and breadth of social enterprise.
On the other hand, there is the guy who established Lids4Kids. Lids4Kids is a charity that identified that because of the container deposit scheme, lids were being thrown into landfill because they are too small to be recycled. He created this national charity which is now collecting these lids. He came to us for help, and we said we couldn’t do much unless they had a product. They came back to us with the idea of building skateboards, and now they take these lids collected through Lids4Kids, shred them, and turn the lids into skateboards. It's the first of many recreational products this might create the opportunity for, but I think this is going to be a global opportunity. We’re working with the University of Canberra with clever people in their design workshop to model and ensure the skateboards are strong. There are three different types of skateboards, a display deck, cruiser deck, and trick deck, the one you use to do all those fancy tricks! The other advantage of what they're doing is skateboard's are traditionally made from a diminishing product, the Canadian maple tree. This is a natural product which could be replaced by a recycled product, and serious skateboarders go through six-twelve skateboards every year. These skateboards end up in landfill, and the amazing thing is we've helped them identify how they can make this product through these. We have came up with the name Endless Australia. If the skateboard snaps, the plastic component is endlessly recyclable because of the capture process.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
I'm a huge fan of Paul Bird. Paul's a Melbourne based guy who has worked for large and small impact organisations from both a for profit and charity perspective. He is a generous man who has written a book called PurposeFull. If I quote from his introduction, he quotes the great African American athlete Jackie Robinson. "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." I recommend you look out for the book PurposeFull by Paul Bird.
