Chris Vagg On Full Circle Social Enterprises Helping People Escape The Cycle Of Homelessness
Established in 2016 by Chris Vagg and Olga Puga, Pass It On Clothing’s origin lay in a simple wardrobe cull. After researching traditional ways to donate clothing and learning most donations (if not all) don't land on the backs of those doing it tough, they decided they wanted to ensure their quality pieces made a difference to those experiencing homelessness.
So off they went to Wooloomooloo in Sydney one night and they’ve never stopped. They immediately felt a connection with those they were assigned to help.
Fast forward to today and 300,000 pieces of clothing have been passed on, they’ve provided 1,000 outreach services and supported 30,000 people.
Chris discusses how social enterprises can provide wraparound support to uplift people experiencing homelessness and why you should embrace opposition to your purpose led ventures and continue pressing forward on your impact journey.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in helping the homeless and social enterprise?
[Chris Vagg] - Ultimately it was the wardrobe call when I was away! I come from a football background, and I was working at the NRL setting up their head injury assessment. Olga moved in and we are co-inhabited, and after I was away in Queensland one week I got back, and Olga had gone through my wardrobe with a chainsaw. She just said, "I don't like any of it and we're going to start again with you." That's basically the origin of Pass It On; we had this pile of clothes on the floor that were mainly new or just once worn. Men generally wear things once or twice and then push them to the back of the cupboard, and I was no different.
We decided (having done research on traditional clothing bins) that most if not all of it doesn't land on the backs of those in need. Our simple ask was that for these clothes we wanted to make sure that they went and landed on someone's back, and so that's what we did. We went out one night, and we were scared I’ll not lie. I remember that first night, looking across at Olga trying to keep a strong face and thinking we had bitten off more than we can chew. In the end we got it done, we passed on 11 pieces during our first night, we thought we had changed the world and that's where we started.
Now we've just kept going, we had this connection with the people we met, and we saw the joy in their faces when they took a shirt. We saw what it meant to them, and then the other side was what it meant to us to see the impact our clothes could have on someone's life.
As the Founder of Pass It On Clothing, can you discuss some of the work you’re doing, the challenges you've come up against and your current model?
One of the major things I think we did is we started. You can start something with an idea in your head and I have no doubt it will be completely different two or three years down the track to what you thought it was going to be. That's just from naturally and learning. In the end, we were lucky that we had two years before we had to discuss what we wanted to do, so we'd already built an idea about what we had done.
We'd learned about the value of our work, and then ultimately after two years (at the end of 2017) I finished my contract at the NRL after the World Cup. While Olga was still working, we talked about what we are going to do, and she said she liked this project. I said I liked it also, so we decided we would make this work. We didn't know what CSR was, I thought it was the sugar cane company in Bundaberg (Australia)! Fortunately, I blagged my way through our first meetings and eventually realised it was Corporate Social Responsibility.
That gave me a framework for the things that we needed. We needed stock, so we developed the only subscription clothing bid in the world. We have a subscription model where we provide a clothing bin for either a day, week, or most popularly for businesses, annually. We service those bins four times a year, and that's the way we generate stock without any waste, because we ask the businesses to sort all of that out that beforehand. We give them a donation guide; they know what we're after at a certain time and we pick it up all at once.
We're about to approach our 200th subscription with Westfield in the next two weeks, and to be honest I have been told to go away a lot of time, because obviously you can donate stuff just down the road!
You must understand your value is and what value you can exchange with the other person providing a financial benefit to you. For us, our value is ensuring that a piece of clothing you're donating goes on someone's back, and that business or person must be happy with that service fee that they're paying.
That was our first activity, and then that led into us doing stuff like a homeless immersion for 24 hours. We take people and have them be homeless for 24 hours, because a lived experience is the best educator. That's one of the values I drilled down on, what I’ve learned is all through lived experience, so we just try to tailor programs through CSR opportunities. Companies have looked at their models and what they can provide, so then we fit in with what we can do and apply the lessons we've learned.
We just had a blank bit of paper, but now we've got a shop. We've had multiple shops, but currently we have a shop in the Met Centre in Sydney, where we sell our brand partners’ clothes at outlet prices, which helps us fund operating as well. We've done fundraising lunches and we run a five-hour experience in education program every Tuesday. This is our most popular program, people can come in to help with the sort and pack service for the evening at Martin place, which requires about 700-800 pieces. They will hear me give a quick keynote and overviews. They'll learn some lessons about the homeless space and come together as a team to eat dinner, then they'll go and provide the services.
They're connecting, engaging, and delivering our service, and it's a real thrill. It's quite an amplified space when we finally get to Martin place on a Tuesday night, and they all walk away with this real feeling that they've seen the impact they've had in those hours prior, and they've had a chance to connect and talk to people who are genuinely homeless or sleeping rough that night.
That's a real eye opener for people, and the thing I've learned over time is you come into that space thinking about your differences but walk away focusing on your similarities. The only difference between these people is having a key to a safe place at night.
They put people in a box, so it just makes it easier for them to walk by. We talk about the fact we don't expect anything else from the homeless that we'd expect from you, and we don't expect anything else from you that we would expect from the homeless. Everyone's the same, it's strange how we people put others in a box in our space so they can walk past and justify it. They try to think that it must be their fault or that they brought this upon themselves; they must be a drug addict, alcoholic or gambling. This is just to make them feel okay to walk by, and we are trying to break that mentality because as we always say, how can you help people if you don't speak to them?
It's a simple statement, but if you walk by, you won't help them. One of our programs is called Shift 45, which is a weeklong program. One of the reasons we called it Shift 45 is you must shift your head to the left 45 degrees to talk to someone who's in need, but you must shift their head up 45 degrees from looking at the ground.
There's two words in this space, hope and purpose. You can't give someone hope unless you're looking them in the eye, and that's when you can give them purpose because you're looking at them and listening.
You must peel back your thoughts about what you do and just go for simplicity. What we started with is the racks we provide for people to choose clothes off, but that's one of the big things we do. We give people the dignity of choice and empower them through this. These people do not get choices during the day, when they go down and get food from a provider, they just give you something. We've given them the opportunity to choose something off the coat hanger, and that allows you to create a connection by saying they look good in that. It just empowers people when they have very little choice during the day to have some control over their life, and that's a building block to go forward.
What have you observed that needs to be done to seriously address homelessness in Australia?
It all ties into housing of course, and I think we’re targeting the wrong areas. We're talking about building more houses, but we’re not going to do it. State governments are addicted to stamp duty, one in four of their tax dollars every year can be attributed to it (22-26%). We’ve got to think about it the other way, how many people are in public housing who could be out there standing on their own two feet?
That’s what we're targeting with our (Pass It On) Academy we're looking to open, people in public housing who are ages 25-45 who've been unemployed for six months, but no longer than 12. We are helping 10 people at a time get into a residential facility of ours for one hundred days, and they will go and do workplace training during the day. They will come out with a mentor and go into private housing and employment, which then opens 10 places again in public housing for those without.
Chris delivering a keynote at the HATCH: Taronga Accelerator Program
We think that 30-40% of the people in public housing right now could be out in one hundred days, that's our strong belief. We don't have volunteers in our space, we employ the homeless when we need them because they're homeless, not hopeless. We think if you set the bar a metre off the ground, you will get to a metre off the ground. If you set the bar two metres off the ground, you'll get to two metres off the ground, and I think that's the problem. We're setting the bar too low in what we believe people can achieve, and it's not everyone.
There are a lot of people who don't have to be there (in public housing), people who haven't been able to be sold the purpose of work, what that means to you and what choice that gives you. It gives you all these different things, self-belief and self-worth, but they haven't been able to sell that to people. If you could sell that to people, we would suddenly be able to fix a lot of the employment problems we have in this country.
In the end, there will be a level of homelessness, but we think it should be far smaller than it is today. Solving that to us is not about building more houses. Build more houses, it's going to take some time, but it's about getting people out of public housing who don't have to be there and getting them to see what a life full of purpose will look like.
What are the most important traits of impact led leaders and entrepreneurs who are working in the business for good space?
You must have a relentlessness; this can't just be a job.
We always say it can't be a job, simply because there are people involved. These are human beings; this isn't a product. You must have a relentless belief in what you're doing, a drive and passion for your purpose, and be willing to cop a few knocks on the way.
You are not coming into this space because the world is perfect, there are barriers and reasons why you come in. Social purpose should be about you coming to fill a hole or fix something you don't think is working, that's why you're here, as a solution architect. You've got to be willing to get a little bit dirty and to go against the establishment, because that's why it does not work now.
You must embrace a relentless pursuit of fixing that problem, and be willing to lose some skin for it, because in the end, if you're not passionate, I don't think you should be doing it. This is not a job; this space is for people who will drill down and be relentless. In the end you want to leave a legacy. You want to solve this problem so for decades after you've left this space there is a legacy of what you've done that has changed the world. That's why we're all in this. For us, I believe there's an abundance of everything we need out there. Clearly there's an abundance, because we're burying a lot of it in the ground every day.
Come up with innovative ideas to change something, and then the big thing is you've got to bring people with you. That comes with passion as well, you've going to be willing to be knocked down a fair bit and just shrug it off. You must have an innate belief in yourself and where you're headed. There are going to be plenty of people who knock you down, and you just need to smile and say, “I’ll see you at the other side.” For me and Olga, it's about having relentless belief in ourselves, that when we see someone in need, we have an opportunity to fix it. We know we're going to solve it, and then we just relentlessly pursue that.
There's no better feeling, we've helped people off the street. We have Emma now working for us who was self-harming when we first met her, she bought a house two years ago. We met again a month after we started the journey, and we helped her into work and housing. That’s why we want to have that full circle.
Full circle purpose driven enterprise is what we need, simply because right now we’re a fantastic band aid. we are so proud of the work we've done, but we are so not satisfied. There's a lack of joy when we leave Martin Place at night, because we know people are still going to be in need; we can do more.
Once we have that model of the (Pass It On) Academy set up and we're starting to achieve things and have alumni come through and create heroes and inspiration for other people, we think we'll be able to get a groundswell of that happening. It's going to tackle so many social issues such as employment, housing, and homelessness, and I think in the end once we get a groundswell of that community behind us, this will escalate and scale quickly.
The other thing is we don't believe if you lose the birth lottery of life, and you are born into a dysfunctional housing situation or family that that should determine your life trajectory. Sometimes that can happen, and we see it all the time. We want to provide a pathway out of that, and if you're willing to buy in, that creates incentive for others by you being the change within a family structure or a community. That shows people that this is possible, it is not just how we start but how we finish. There are ways out of this, and we think that's a big thing which hasn't been addressed yet.
When we met recently you spoke a little bit about ‘haters’ of your work. Can you tell us a bit more about these haters?
People will come at you because you're breaking the status quo. The model we're in now is built on participation rather than outcomes, and I think that's completely abhorrent. How can you get paid if you don't achieve anything just because someone else is in your system? You're getting paid for failure, but I think you should be paid on outcomes.
The haters will come at you because you're breaking the status quo, and you're going to upend their business model! We don’t want them to have that anymore, so they will come at you very hard because people are comfortable with their lives now. It's having a knock-on effect down the chain, and you're just a little upstart trying to threaten that.
I always believe you haven't made it unless you've got haters. If they're talking about you, you're cutting through, that's a big lesson for all the social entrepreneurs coming out there. You're going to have people (sometimes bigger people) push back at you, and you know it's working then. If they're not pushing at you, you're not working hard enough.
You are not in this space trying to achieve something because it's all working out, there are going to be people who you upset along the way who are just taking advantage of or not doing as good a job as they could. You are there to ruffle their feathers, and the hope is that they're either going to jump on board and get better, or they're going to be collateral damage along the way.
That's the reality you've got to accept, you've got to look at what your purpose is and who you're trying to help. We have no problem with anyone getting in the way of us stepping over them.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
We have one founder who we love and that's Rob Caslick at Two Good Company. They help women experiencing domestic violence. I sat on a panel with Rob early on in our journey, it might have been the first 18 months after starting Pass It On. I saw this guy who had a full circle, purpose driven enterprise. He started with a buy one salad give one free at a café, but they would give the salad to a woman's refuge. Someone came into a refuge in need, and you provided food for them. That morphed into where he now has a cafe space and learning centre.
Once a woman has gone in and had one of their salads, they are introduced to Two Good and can then actually go and start an apprenticeship with them in the café. They can go and get some skills from there and go into a work situation with their partner organisations and come out the other side.
For us the parallel would be with someone we meet at outreach we provide clothing to who then goes into public housing because one of our graduates has moved out of public housing. They get that stability they need, and then enter the Academy and come out the other side into private housing and employment.
To me, that is the absolute gold standard of social driven enterprise, first engage with someone when they are at their lowest and in need, and then your pathway and system brings them back out the other side. To me that is the best in show, and something we sit up here and strive to be every single day.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
I have it right here, it is called The Infiltrator. One of the neat things about our work is our homeless friends will come into the shop (at the Met Centre in the city). Some of them have different needs, and some of them can't handle the pace of outreach, so they'll come into the shop, and we'll help them there. A friend walked in yesterday, and I said to him I’m not a big book reader, but he reads three or four books a week. I thought that this is perfect, I was preparing for this interview.
I asked him to tell me what book he was reading, and he said The Infiltrator. It's an espionage book, so I guarantee everyone should read this. This guy's cool, Agita is his name, and he has recommended The Infiltrator.
I hope there are more people who get out there and have a go at doing something they believe in. There are no barriers, the beauty about the world today is there are no barriers to stop you from starting, except yourself. There are plenty of issues out there that we need to address. Good people are out there in the community taking the bit between their teeth and having a crack at changing the world, and I look forward to seeing as many more people out there as I can.
