Melanie Greblo On Why Financial Independence Is Crucial For Women Escaping Domestic And Family Violence

Mel Greblo is the founder and CEO at Scriibed and Banksia Academy where her driving purpose is to support the full social and economic participation of women who face barriers to employment, particularly survivors of domestic and family violence.

She is a social innovator with 20+ years experience in creating social impact and catalytic communities for change.

Founded in 2022, Banksia Academy is a free, virtual online platform providing training, education, access to appropriate and sustainable employment opportunities, and a program of trauma-informed wrap-around support for women survivors of domestic and family violence to achieve long-term financial independence.

Also founded in 2022, Scriibed is a social impact business on a mission to change the trajectory for women survivors of domestic and family violence. Scriibed provides safe, secure and flexible work in the digital economy to women survivors who often face multiple barriers to employment.

Mel’s strengths converge around systems change, connecting divergent points to create shared value, social innovation, driving engagement, building long term partnerships, strategic communication, community building, catalysing policy change and action.

Melanie discusses the role of financial independence and flexible employment in combatting the impacts of domestic violence on women and scaling social innovations through helping communities to make more impactful purchasing decisions.

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 work in social innovation and systems change?

[Melanie Greblo] - I left university with not a great plan as to what I wanted to do with my life. I did have an early shock to the system which reset my path, the loss of my younger sister at such an early age due to cancer. That made me look at things completely differently.

I originally thought I would go into the corporate world and work in strategic communications when I left university. Throughout that journey and experience of her illness and passing, it became apparent there was no way I wanted to do that. It didn't feel like it had meaning and purpose; I'm sure it could have, but I didn't feel like that at the time.

I was just drawn to community at that time and purpose-led work, so I started to look at everything through that lens.

When you look at the fact that life is finite for all of us on the planet, it makes you make different decisions and choices. That revelation happened for me at a very young age, I became interested in how there is this social sphere where some people are gifted an incredibly smooth run in life while others are not.

That injustice caught my heart (as did a lot of other things), and my early career was in the community sector working with Canteen, the Australian organisation for young people living with cancer. Then I worked with The Benevolent Society for a period in their strategy unit, and this opened my eyes to what was happening globally.

This was when Social Ventures Australia took off, it was incubated at The Benevolent Society. There is so much exciting work happening around innovating the conversations about early intervention and prevention, but it moved quickly into how we can affect systems change.

That was a long time ago, coming up to 30 years ago now; it was a dynamic place to work and incredibly inspiring. That experience entrenched my passion for the sector and my ideals around social change.

As the founder of the start-up Scriibed, can you share more about this organisation, and its business activities and theory of change?

I started Scriibed inspired by my journey and lived experience of a family breakdown. That experience impacted my own economic security, I became a single parent of two young children and another older child who was becoming more independent.

When I was probably struggling the most, emotionally, financially, and in all other ways, I would often end up reflecting on how lucky I was that I had family, friends, networks and a great career. I ran my own business at the time, so I had flexibility. It struck me that other woman going through what I was going through, if they didn’t have even one part of that system to hold them through the journey, then the wheels would fall off very quickly.

I had a hunch there was possibly a problem there to solve, and so I went down a rabbit hole looking at what the problems were, and really the problem is that women (particularly survivors of domestic and family violence) face complex barriers to participating fully in the economy and becoming financially independent.

We now know from Dr. Anne Summers’ research that women in those situations face a stark choice, to either stay in violence or leave and be plunged into poverty. That is the reality for so many women sadly, and there’s also growing awareness around the prevalence of financial abuse.

Often women are coming out of these coercive, controlling relationships with financial abuse at their core, so they are already on the back foot financially. There are many ways that coercive control, domestic and family violence impact a woman's financial security and long term social and economic participation. I started with this problem thinking I couldn’t solve all of it obviously, but I wanted to see if we could make some contribution to changing this situation for some women.

We created a business where we knew we could offer a fit for purpose work model for these women that would be supportive. I started the business Scribed, and we started off by delivering mostly transcription services and some other administrative assistance to various customers and clients, everyone from small businesses right through to universities. We still do that work, but we've developed the business to focus now on delivering and outsourcing marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses.

We now offer digital marketing services, social media, content production and management. We are also continuing with providing other virtual assistance and administrative support work as well. The premise of Scriibed is that if we can support vulnerable women in getting jobs in the digital economy, these jobs generally come with flexibility and are a pathway to well remunerated work. These women can benefit from the flexibility around the work.

This business was running along well, but I wanted to establish a network and wraparound support the women working in Scribed could also benefit from. To do this, I established the [Banksia] Academy. In the Academy, we provide a range of support for women.

We have digital skills training, so we are upskilling and reskilling women to support them in returning to work. We have a virtual hub that delivers a range of supports, masterclasses on subject matters across our four pillars, two of these being financial independence and work readiness.

We are looking at the whole person and everything a survivor is going to need to focus on and grow themselves. While they will need self-leadership to grow on this pathway back to employment, we also have a mentoring program. We match all our participants with a mentor who will walk that journey with them.

A lot of this mentoring is around building their self-confidence. If gives them one person who's got their back 100%, someone who can guide them through different things, whether it's trouble they're having with their digital skills training or something else they need help with.

Obviously, it's not a counselling or therapy role, but it's a mentor who can walk the journey with them for several months. That's the Academy’s model, and it provides a pipeline of talent to transition into working in Scribed. We also place women into employment with external employment partners we work with.

What key experiences have you had with founding these two organisations with different models but the same overarching theory of change?

I never set out to be the founder of two separate organisations at the same time! That was a good learning, because I wanted to create a social purpose business. Early on, I just went out there and got as much advice that I could possibly get. I talked to the likes of other amazing impact brands like Two Good Co., brand who had this hybrid legal structure with a for purpose business entity and not-for-profit as well.

We have this hybrid legal structure which allows us to pull different levers at different times to affect our theory of change. This theory of change sits across everything we do, and it is about creating pathway towards long term economic inclusion for women.

These benefits often are not only for that woman, but also her children and family. We want to break that intergenerational pattern; we know poverty has an intergenerational and cyclical negative impact.

It's been interesting to put these two organisations into the world at the same time, but what we're working towards is bringing it back to one brand that faces the public. We know that we have this hybrid structure, but our business is really one. Yes, the Academy has different activities than Scriibed, but it's all the same theory of change.

The Academy is about preparing women to come to work, and then they can either work in our business or work in businesses we have partnered with to place them into. We see it as Scriibed is creating a deep impact for women, they then have the security of tenure of employment. It's flexible and remote work, so they can juggle it around all their other priorities as survivors of domestic violence, particularly in the earlier years. They also then benefit from the wraparound support our Academy offers.

We see a deep impact from Scriibed, where women have got a regular salary coming in from a flexible and remote working arrangement. Women have already been able to transition into private rental accommodations because of this employment, they've even been able to put their children into local catholic schools instead of the public school system.

A lot of the time, kids who have experienced trauma need extra pastoral care and support at school. These mothers are identifying this need early and finding the right places for their children to go to school. Of course, that costs money, so some of them are coming to work with the goal to provide more suitable education for their Children.

As we continue to grow, I see a world where we can address the housing equation for women, whether it's through private rental accommodation, secure housing, or gaining home ownership through their employment.

The Academy however creates a breadth of impact. We've got the depth of impact over at Scriibed, but the Academy is scaling our impact nationally and potentially even internationally. It's a scalable model far more women can come through than we could ever have jobs for at Scriibed. It's a pathway to the same economic participation we're aiming for.

Why are financial independence and economic participation key to helping victims of domestic or family violence? How can organisations provide more opportunities to help people experiencing these issues?

In the realm of women and economic participation, there was a lot of time to make changes. For all women, we're still striving for gender equality because we know that women's equality and equity around these things are good for everyone.

Then, if you start to segment all women into different sub cohorts, such as women of colour, First Nations women, women with disabilities, or women with mental health problems, you're looking at some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Financial independence for all women is extremely important; we know broadly why it's good, but particularly why it's needed for victims and survivors of domestic and family violence is because they are often trapped in violent relationships because they don't have the financial means to leave.

As I mentioned earlier, they're often victims of financial abuse and coercive control with finances. This can happen in all sorts of ways, and there's some great work being done in the community and now in the corporate sector to combat some of those problems. There's much more awareness around this now, but it's so pervasive that I think most people would be quite shocked.

That's a huge part of it as well, when anyone is financially independent, they have agency over their lives. They have choices and less of a propensity to be controlled, that is at the core of why this is important. On top of that then, you have survivors who have experienced this that are devastated by abuse in all its forms. They're devastated financially and locked out of work, so their capacity to even think of themselves as being able to move forward and rebuild their lives is compromised.

On top of that, the other barriers they face include those interpersonal barriers, they have no more self-esteem or self-confidence. Then there are the interpersonal barriers where we talk about women leaving violence. Where there's coercive control and financial abuse, unravelling from that can take years.

Coercive control continues post separation. It continues particularly if there are children involved, that’s what we refer to as systems abuse. Coercive controlling ex-partners use systems to continue controlling a woman, so the challenge doesn't end there.

Those barriers to employment detract and distract, so it's more difficult for people who have not experienced, supported, or seen someone who has experienced this abuse firsthand to understand what it is like.

When preparing for a court hearing, whether it's in the criminal court or the family court takes days. Not only does it take the time in days, but it’s also emotionally retraumatising, it impacts the nervous system of a person every single time. That can take days to recover from, so one meeting with a lawyer can affect you for weeks.

These are the hidden invisible barriers women are facing to getting work. Then there's the cost and accessibility of childcare and transport to consider. You've got structural and systemic barriers that are in play for a lot of women let alone how much more challenging they are for survivors of domestic violence.

Co-designing from the beginning was the most critical step we took, because everything we've built has originated from this human centred problem-solving approach. It’s not just about us providing the support women need to return to work, but also creating an employment model tailored to best support survivors.

What conversations are necessary to meaningfully confront the issue of domestic/family violence and what is required systemically to begin addressing the problem?

They're certainly questions I think here in Australia we’re grappling with, particularly over the last six to eight weeks. We've seen a devastating increase in domestic violence murders of women this year and huge public interest and debate on what we should be doing. There’s a call for governments and communities to do more and do better, and a lot of different ideas around what needs to be done.

I'm going to first say that I’m not someone who's worked in the domestic and family violence sector for any amount of time. I still wouldn't consider myself as working in the sector, I think we sit at the fringes of the sector supporting the women coming through crisis.

I’m obviously very vested in learning as much as I can in the space. I'm interested in it from a social innovation perspective and what levers we can pull to create actual change.

I think what we've been doing in Australia and the policy frameworks we've been working with and how they translate into actual service delivery and support is not working. We've got a crisis support sector that is bursting at the seams all the time, there's so much need and demand that they can't meet it.

They're also not funded enough to keep scaling what they can deliver. We also have a primary prevention policy framework which focuses mainly on changing attitudes and achieving gender equality. These are all things we need to keep going with, but are they addressing the growing problem we have?

They are probably not helping right now, but in the long term, yes, we need those things. The question is what do we need now? I'm fascinated with questions and I'm a very curious person, so I'm always asking, “is there a different way we could look at this problem?”

I've talked about this a lot lately, but I feel like some of the ways we design to solve problems in the commercial world and even the tech space is interesting. It would be an interesting if we could apply some of these methodologies to solving these not just wicked but growing social problems.

It's probably one of the trickiest issues to solve because you're dealing with human behaviour and conditioning. You're dealing with a greater context of gender inequality and the way masculinity as we know it harms men and women. We all must be part of the solution, that's just a no brainer.

This is not just a women's issue, it's not something women can or should be solving on their own. We need to look at this across the board in society, because what's causing violence against women is also causing violence against men themselves, whether it's violence towards one another or self-harm and suicide.

There's so much to do, but there's no panacea or magic bullet. What I would love to see more of is an innovation lens applied to problem solving and the application of technology to support us through that as well.

It's frustrating that governments are behind when it comes to the benefits of AI and how it could be applied to different subsections of this problem to create better outcomes. Whether it's in policing or other parts of the problem, it would be great to have a human centred design approach to solving some of these issues.

There are other things I think we need to step back from, and it's tempting in crisis to have these knee jerk reactions. There have been so many recommendations made from royal commissions and inquiries over the years. The people who do know what needs to be done in this space constantly feel like they keep outlining solutions, but no one implements them, and no one will fund them.

It is also important to take a step back from those entrenched positions and look up to the bluer sky. Ask more beautiful questions, ones like, “what would happen if…”

The one conversation (and it's not a new conversation) that is getting more attention is what would happen if we just flipped our expectations? What happens if we changed the onus that is constantly put on the female victim to leave the relationship and remove herself and her children (most often with nothing) out of the family home?

Everything in the woman's life is turned upside down. Everything. If you must escape violence, which means you must leave for safety, you must leave your home with your children. The entire solid ground you were on (even if it was violent) is gone, and so everything needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

It strikes me that by just problem solving around how to get women out of their home and into safety creates these chasms of thinking. It prevents us from some of that ‘bluer sky’ problem solving, thinking we could be doing to move the needle.

You could then start asking yourself questions like “what would happen if we did everything we needed and invested everything into keeping these women at home with their children by removing the perpetrators instead?”

There are obviously a lot of scenarios where this wouldn't work, but let’s just say there is an AVO scenario, evidence of a perpetrator with a woman and children who are at risk. Whether they have breached that AVO or not, here is an idea to stimulate innovation. What happens if we remove him? Put him somewhere else for a period and look at the issue from a human centred design approach for everyone, not just the woman and the children, but also him.

What are we doing with the perpetrators? We can't just lock them all up, there are too many. We can't put them all in prison and we can't keep them in prison when they breach, so we must find a way to respond and have a more restorative approach to this issue. If you talk to a lot of women too, they don't necessarily want to leave the person who is abusing them, they just want the abuse to stop.

Again, the problem solving and questions we ask are important, and I feel like at not just the community level, but also the policy and funding levels we need to do things differently. I'd also like to say that I don’t hold some wisdom that other people don't, I think this is all being felt and thought of by a lot of people right now.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

One of the organisations I’ve been inspired by throughout the 10 years they've been running is Global Sisters. They saw the link between economic participation, financial independence and women's empowerment early on, so their model is about supporting women into business ownership and self-employment.

Global Sisters are empowering women through delivering an accelerator program supporting them to get their business ideas off the ground and to step into the world that way financially. They've worked with a lot of refugee women, migrant women, and other women as well. They also do work with women who access their programs that are also survivors of domestic violence.

The way Global Sisters innovated from the beginning to tackle something quite differently from how others were ten years ago is always inspirational. They embraced technology straight away, and so much has changed in the world since then.

This was their vision and approach to innovation back then, they embraced technology and had a strong grasp of what it takes to build community and build a community of who they call sisters. Inspiring and fantastic work creating a huge impact.

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

I read a couple of books about 25 years ago at the start of my career that still good, and I don't even know if you can get your hands on some of them! One of the books was called The Power of Unreasonable People, and when reading it you almost feel like all the rules you had learned throughout your education about being a particular kind of leader were wrong.

It was almost like you were given permission to throw those ideas out the window, because it's the people with crazy, bold, unreasonable ideas who affect and unlock change.

Early on I celebrated the fact I felt like an outlier or a bit of an anomaly in life. If you feel like a duck out of water, those types of books allow you to be more of who you are, because they’re the people we need on the planet right now.

There is also the work of (now Lord) Andrew Mawson, the social entrepreneur who transformed the East End of London (Bromley-by-Bow, the Borough). It is an incredibly inspiring story; I get shivers thinking about that work.

I also recommend the work of First Nation leaders here in Australia and the social impact they create. Noel Pearson amongst others has committed to the work that is shifting the dial, opening dialogue and conversations for more to happen. I also love books about life hacks, innovation, startup land, and the principles of applying the lean methodology to social start-ups. The Lean Startup as well as other books like that are great for starting your journey.