Tanya Egerton On The Role Of First Nations Enterprises In Preserving Heritage And Culture For Future Generations
Tanya is the founder and CEO of Circulanation and has spent nearly a decade living and working in some of Australia's most remote locations, supporting the development of Indigenous businesses in partnership with First Nations remote communities.
She has spearheaded the Remote OpShop Project, an initiative that fosters the creation of op shops in remote communities—diverting excess materials from landfill while generating social, environmental, economic, and cultural benefits.
Tanya is the National Winner of the 2024 AgriFutures Rural Women's Award, recognised for her leadership and contributions to rural and remote Australia. She was also honoured with the 2023 AMP Foundation's Tomorrow Makers People's Choice Award and is part of the 2024 AMP Foundation Ignite Program, which features eight of Australia’s most promising social enterprises.
Tanya discusses the First Nations people throughout Australia leading social enterprises creating deep impact within their communities, and effectively balancing the environmental, cultural, social, and economic outcomes of businesses using the circular economy.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working with entrepreneurship and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia?
[Tanya Egerton] - I grew up in Yamba, which is in northern New South Wales (a long way from remote Australia). In my early thirties, I was lucky enough to find myself living and working in the remote community of Lockhart River. That's a remote Aboriginal community in Cape York, Queensland.
Through that experience, the course of my life changed. What I witnessed there was the power of culture and how culture makes people feel good inside of their hearts, bodies and minds. Growing up in Northern New South Wales, this wasn't something I'd ever seen or experienced before.
The example of what I saw there was every two years they hold the Laura Dance Festival, and this is a traditional dancing festival where tribes come from all over the Cape and Torres Strait Island’s to compete, but also to tell their stories and share their culture through dance. I watched young people working with old people to learn dance routines, and I watched the older ladies gathering pandanus, grass and plant dyes to create skirts.
The whole community mobilised around this festival, and that year they won the Laura Dance Festival. I saw the pride that came from winning this, and over the years I've watched that community go from strength to strength. Now they even have their own cultural dance space within the community.
I saw so much potential and opportunity in remote communities, and I always had a love for business, but at that time I knew I was too young, and I didn't know enough about the world to be able to step in to that space. I ended up going away and working for global companies.
I worked for TONI&GUY, as their marketing manager in Australia. I then worked for Patagonia as their marketing manager, and I started to understand more about how business could be used as a force for good and how it could create value beyond profit. I started thinking back to my time in Lockhart River, understanding that culture was a central value and a motivating force for people.
Years later, I returned to the Northern Territory, and I ended up living in Katherine. I started to embark on a career supporting the development of Indigenous business in remote communities, considering not just the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit, but also this fourth element, which is culture. I began thinking about how culture plays a part in the success of Indigenous businesses.
As the founder of the Remote OpShop Project, what are the businesses activities and how is it growing community driven social enterprises across Australia?
In 2016 we started the Remote OpShop Project, and it supports the development of op shops in remote First Nations communities. Op shops do three important things, and the first is they provide access to affordable clothing and household goods.
For context, in a remote community, access to affordable basic items is scarce. One example is in a community of 300 people, they might have a three-by-three space allocated in one store for clothing, which is the same size as a walk-in wardrobe. Another example is a towel that would cost you 2-3 dollars in an urban supermarket can cost as much as $30 in a remote community, so there's a serious scarcity issue in remote communities that we're addressing.
The second role of op shops is they are a platform for business training and enterprise learning. There are few jobs in remote communities, and the op shop is a low-risk platform for anyone at any level to come and learn basic business skills. That can lead to future business developments within the community.
Thirdly, op shops operate as a social enterprise, so the funds that come from the sale of goods in an op shop are pooled together and the community decides what they're invested into. 99% of the time, what I've witnessed is these earnings are invested into local cultural projects. The first op shop of ours was started in Jilkminggan, and now we've grown our network across Northern Australia with to over 25 op shops throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Over the next five years, we're planning to expand this to 120 remote communities reaching around 65,000 people. For context, there's around 1,000 remote communities across the country.
What challenges and obstacles have you observed that are unique to remote Australia and how are local indigenous enterprises best positioned to address these problems?
There are some common challenges that come from living in remote Australia, and some of these issues are because of geographical distances. The communities we work in are sometimes 300-800 kilometres from any central hub. Essential services, medical services, education, training, and employment are all obstacles that must be overcome.
Then, some communities lack necessities like clean water, reliable and sustainable power, and access to healthy and affordable food. What we've witnessed is a widespread lack of access to necessities, which is not just clothing but also household goods like washing machines, fridges, and mattresses.
This is where Remote OpShop Project is trying to support these communities. At the end of the day, what I've learned is every community is unique. We've all talked a long time in Australia about this one size fits all approach, which doesn't work.
Every community has a different family structure, governance systems, protocols, different histories, aspirations and visions for their future, and so leaders and community members themselves are the experts who know what's best for their families. Indigenous businesses, things like the op shops, are community owned and led, which places control back into the hands of people. This helps to restore agency and foster outcomes beyond economic returns. Cultural returns are something not every mainstream business has built into them.
Having local people at the heart of designing and running these businesses while determining what impact and outcomes they will generate is critical, but to have thriving communities and to create these economic opportunities on country, we need to be able to make sure everyone's basic needs are met, like food, water, shelter and clothing.
To me, this is everyone’s responsibility.
How can businesses, whether they're mainstream or social enterprises utilise the circular economy model while maintaining sustainable financial outcomes?
I love everything circular, hence the name of my first enterprise Circulanation. Whether it's circular designs or yarning circles, they're all generative, positively impactful concepts. I would encourage people to begin with the end in mind.
Better design from the beginning means you create better products that you can recover, reuse, and repair them. You can even reimagine them into something else, which means you're able to monetise these products repeatedly. This is not just a one-time make, take, dispose mentality, it’s about how we can recover those resources again and keep those resources in use for as long as possible without having to draw on additional virgin materials, which can be costly and environmentally unsustainable.
A career highlight for me was working at Patagonia as their marketing manager, and I just learnt so much from this experience. They're considered as the godfather of business for good, and they have been promoting the circular economy for over 40 years. This is a highly successful company that's been able to improve its sustainability while maintaining profitability, so there are some great examples out there of companies who are successfully doing this.
At Remote OpShop Project, our focus is on product life extension or keeping items in use for as long as possible. Recycling is the last resort, because when you break something down and you recycle or remake it into something else, you're often using more resources, whether that's power, water or adding some virgin materials.
The inclusion of circular economy principles is becoming something every business must think about. It doesn't matter what size you are, whether you're large or small, a mainstream business or a social enterprise, you need to think about ways you can extend a product’s life and keep an item in service.
Businesses need to be educated on what these models look like for them, and if people are looking for resources, I'd recommend going to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation for information.
As an AMP Foundation Tomorrow Maker, you’re currently getting support to develop and grow the Remote OpShop Project. What have been your reflections and learnings from the support to date?
When I originally joined the program, it was in 2023 as part of the Spark program. Now I’m in the second iteration of this, which is the Ignite program. I came in with the mindset of a charity, because Remote OpShop Project is a registered charity. I'd spent a lot of time focusing on our beneficiaries, which are the remote communities, and I was not thinking about the business model.
I was not thinking of the Remote OpShop Project as a social enterprise, but coming into the Spark program, I had to change my mindset and start to think about how we were going to create a viable and sustainable model for this organisation. Then we could have diverse revenue streams and not be dependent on government and philanthropic funding.
Through this process, I've been able to engage the fashion apparel industry as part of the solution. Currently, Australia is the second largest consumer of clothing in the world, and over 200,000 tons of excess are going to landfill every year.
We are now engaging the industry to redirect some of those items from landfill, and it is either being burnt, buried, or sent offshore. We've all seen those mountains of clothing in other countries like Ghana, but we don't seem to think it's our problem or our waste.
Remote OpShop Project has started to establish a network of reuse hubs in regional Australia, and we've just opened our first one in Darwin. We're going to be capturing this excess and then redirecting it back out to our remote community network, which will increase the viability of this network itself.
At the same time, we're not just going to take the fashion industry's excess and do them a favour, because they're getting a lot of pressure from the federal government who are saying, “you need to be responsible for your waste or excess, just like the tire and battery industry pays levies and fees to dispose of theirs.”
We're saying to these companies they need to pay to play, and while we can support them as a reuse facility and provide environmental and social impact data to help them be part of the solution, it doesn't come for free. This is the business model we're adopting.
What advice would you give to an entrepreneur or individual who is thinking about starting a social impact project or business?
I never call myself a business development manager or a business consultant, because I don't like those terms. I think of myself as a facilitator and enabler, so I would say for anyone who's wanting to step in this space, hone your facilitation skills.
I wish that we had hundreds of trained facilitators out in remote communities doing this work, because I think we'd be able to create some amazing impact.
Learn how you can create opportunities for others to build their capacity and be intentional about that. Look for frameworks and tools you can use to design experiential learning opportunities for people to be able to build themselves. This is not just their technical skills; I'm focused on building people's interpersonal and soft skills.
People need to first feel confident and be able to communicate and work in teams. Soft skills underpin your day-to-day life, and I'm a big believer in human centred design and design thinking, which means designing solutions with people and not for people. This is critical in any business. I run workshops for business owners and start-ups on innovation, and we talk a lot about understanding who your customers and beneficiaries are so you can work with them in a space of co-creation.
Designing together is an important part of any business or any enterprise. If you are working in remote First Nations community, I recommend always coming with a learner's mindset; remember you're stepping into someone else's home and culture.
What inspiring projects have you come across creating a positive change?
I'm lucky because I'm surrounded by inspiring people doing amazing work through the AMP Foundation and my recent award at AgriFutures. I was lucky to spend the last six months with an incredible woman, Rebecca Keeley, from Yarn, who's part of both programs.
Rebecca has been developing an app that provides speech pathology services to families in rural and remote areas, and these families would otherwise lack access. Bec's a clinical practitioner, she’s worked all over regional and remote Australia and what she witnessed was young children waiting sometimes up to three years for speech pathology support. A three-year-old child might be six before they even get to see a clinician, and that's creating a significant disadvantage.
Yarn's providing families with access to evidence-based activities they can do at home while they're waiting for clinical support. This is greatly reducing the long-term impact of speech and communication difficulties, and if you want to check that work out, you can go to yarnspeech.com or look up Bec on LinkedIn.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?
At the recent Reignite Retreat, I brought along a book called Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown. A lot of people would have heard of Brené and watched her talks online, and I love Atlas of the Heart.
It's almost a dictionary of all the different feelings and emotions we have as human beings, and being able to understand and articulate those emotions to other people and ourselves to be able to build deeper connections is beautiful. I own the audio book for that as well, and I listened to it for about 10 hours straight while crossing the country at one stage, I just couldn't get enough of it!
As a young teenager I absolutely fell in love with the work of Cahil Gibran. If you've read The Prophet, it's poetry and philosophy that’s just beautiful. I can still open that book and read any page any day, and I never get tired of it.
As an enterprise and business facilitator, a lot of my work has been based around the learnings, tools and books of Strategyzer. They're the creators of the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas, and a bunch of other amazing business innovation tools and resources. For anyone who's working in the social enterprise, innovation, start-up, or business spaces, I recommend jumping onto their website.
There you can get into their resources, but you can also buy their books at the bookstore and start filling out some of their canvases which are great tools.
Initiatives, Resources and people mentioned on the podcast
Recommended books
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
