Transcript: Building the Next Generation of Social Entrepreneurs

Music by: Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten

Sherryl Reddy: Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for choosing to spend a chunk of your afternoon with us and with the wonderful ASE team to learn about building the next generation of social entrepreneurs. 

My name is Sherryl Reddy from Social Enterprise Australia and we host these open learning webinars as part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative, which is funded by the Australian Department of Social Services. Our intention in creating these spaces is for people across the social enterprise community with different ways of seeing and doing things to share knowledge and experience that helps strengthen connections and collaborations across the sector.

Today's session is convened by the ASE group, the wonderful Tionne Young, in collaboration with three amazing social entrepreneurs, Imogen Clarence, Yash Dutt, and Jack Growden. I, for one, am really excited to learn from this team.

Before I hand over to Tionne, I'd like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands from which we're all joining today. I'm thankful to be on the lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal language group. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their continuing connection to waters, skies and lands that we all have the incredible privilege of living and working on. I also pay my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants joining us today, and I recognise that your presence here holds over 65,000 years of systems thinking and relational care for people and planet. In the social impact space, we've all got the power to take steps that value Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and futures. We've all got opportunities to unlearn colonial ways of being and to find ways to make equity and justice part of our everyday work. 

Tionne and her team have got an energy-filled, interactive session lined up for us today. Over to you, Tionne.

Tionne Young: Thank you so much, Sherryl. Happy Thursday, everyone. I'm coming to you from a beautiful Brisbane day. Spring has well and truly sprung here. It's very nice and warm, and I spent my morning with a group of young people on a public speaking workshop. I feel very energised. I feel very ready to speak, and I'm very grateful to be part of this workshop with Sherryl and the team. I'm thrilled that these sessions exist and we can come together, learn more about social enterprise and being in the social enterprise space. I’m really looking forward to what today has to offer us.

Yes, I'm Tionne. I'm the co-founder of The ASE Group. We work all across the country. We started working with young people. Teaching them life skills and the things that we wish we had learned in high school. Things like financial literacy, public speaking and how to start a business. It grew really, really fast. We were a couple of teenagers when we started working on this business, and all we knew was that we wanted to teach kids the skills that we wished we had. We started going into schools doing workshops with kids in a high-energy, interactive way, where they actually learned something by the end of it.

We've been able to work with a huge number of young people, almost 300,000, since we started in 2020, and it's been a joy. It's great that we have virtual sessions to make learning so accessible to everyone. We have three great speakers who come from different backgrounds, different products, different services they offer, and we're going to have some great quality time with them this afternoon.

Today, we're going to go through an introduction to social enterprise and what it's all about. I'm going to go through the basics and hopefully take you one step further when our speakers join us today. 

Social enterprise is a business with a purpose to make a positive impact on the world. They offer products or services like any other business, but use them for good, to help a social or environmental cause. They could help people, animals, and/or the environment. It's a vast area that you can go into. There are so many wonderful social enterprises, especially in Australia, and we're excited to hear from three of them today. 

Being a social entrepreneur, the difference from a normal entrepreneur really means that you're starting that business from a place of passion, or you've had an experience, or you've identified a problem in your world, and you want to do something about it. Being a social entrepreneur is very exciting. It's very tough, but the amazing thing is that you have that driving force of why you're doing this, behind what you're doing. So it's an exciting career.

A bit about me. I grew up the youngest of four kids. I lived in a town called Cherbourg, which is a few hours out of Brisbane. It's a very small town. In that town, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for the young people. There weren't a lot of people coming to visit. There weren't many careers that I could see in that town that really excited me. There wasn't really much opportunity there. When I finished high school, I decided to do the opposite of what all the other people my age were doing, which was going straight to university. I actually moved to the Philippines, and I lived there for almost four years at 17 years old. 

I didn't know anything. I did not know how to speak the language. I did not know many people at all. I knew I loved working with kids, and there was an opportunity for me to go, so I went, and I was volunteering for four years. 

I lived on this little island. I lived in a little house in the middle of a rice field. That taught me so much. So many life skills that I learned from travelling and from that experience that I could not have learned from a textbook. It was there that I learned to love working with young people, especially disengaged or disadvantaged young people who might be in crisis situations. 

I came back to Australia, and with a couple of friends, we started ASE. As I said before, going into school workshops, universities, detention centres, you name it. If there's a young person there, we hope to have some presence. So that's a bit about me. 

I love telling this next story in workshops like this because it's a great reminder for people at the start of that journey. Maybe you've identified a problem in your world, or you've seen someone else identify a problem, but creating the actual solution to that can be really tricky. This story is a good reminder. 

This is a Munion village in the Philippines. There’re hundreds of people who have lived there for hundreds of years. That house with all the clothes on top is a standard house for them. The picture on the right, where you see the timber slats, that's where they sleep.  Everyone has their little pet pig that you can see there as well. 

These people are some of the happiest people you'll ever meet. There's no running water. There's no electricity, but they're super happy, and they've lived this way for a long time. We had some visitors come from overseas, they visited these people and they observed. They met some of the people, and they thought, “Oh my goodness, this is such a problem. These people don't have toilets. They just use a bucket of water and the ground, and that is a major problem. We need to fix that”. The visitors went and spent thousands of dollars to create these very sturdy outhouse structures, with tin roofs, and a door that locked. Inside was about 30 beautiful, brand new, white, ceramic toilet bowls. They got them all plumbed up, they were working, they were flushing. They built about 30 of these structures, and they felt pretty good. They left the village and then within about 45 minutes all of these structures looked like this [outhouse deconstructed]. If you go to this village today you'll see about 30 white toilet bowls scattered throughout the village. It's become a tourist attraction now. You'll see about 30 toilet bowls scattered throughout the village that have never been touched. They have flowers growing out of them and are scattered throughout the mountain. People go there to take pictures with these toilet bowls because it's such a random sight to see, but they've never been touched.

The people who live there, the toilets weren't a problem for them. They used the materials to build this outhouse to reinforce their floors, doors or the roof. They actually didn't need a proper working toilet. They were happy doing it the way they were. And the reason I tell this story is I want you to remember those toilets when you're coming up with your idea. You need to find out from the people that you're working with if it's actually a problem. The problem that you want to solve, is it actually a problem that they experience?

I'm really looking forward to hearing from the speakers about how they pivoted their business to be something that people actually needed to use, or wanted to use or had the energy and time to use. 

That meme up there is very, very relevant. We always show this to people who are at the start of their business journey, because there's no point starting something that people aren't actually going to use to solve a problem that people aren't actually facing. Something to keep in mind, the 30 toilet bowls in the Philippines. 

We're going to do a quick activity now before the speakers join us, called the Tree of Influence. This has been a powerful activity that we've been doing in our workshops which gets you to think about you as a person, the community you have around you and what you need to do or change to be where you want to be.

If you have a pen, a piece of paper or your phone to write on. I would love you to get that ready, and we're going to go through the Tree of Influence. This is a very common quote:

“You become the average of the five people

You spend the most time with.”

I remember Mum always telling me growing up that the people you spend time with are the people you become the average of. I thought yeah, right, mum, the peer pressure talk. But looking back, I can see how very true that is. You are the average of the people that you spend time around.

Sometimes you can't control the people that you're around, but a lot of the time you can. If you put yourself in a position to be around people who are bringing you towards your goal, who are supporting your mission or supporting you as a person on your business journey, that's probably step number one: to be around people who want to lift you up. 

If you can, if you have the artistic skill in you, I would love you to draw a tree. Draw five branches on the tree, and write down one person who influences you for each branch. It might be people that you work with, your best friend, or people you live with. Anyone who is around you who speaks into your life or has some major role in your life. I want you to write down five of them. If you don't have five, that's totally fine. You can have one or two.

Once you have your five, the next thing is reflecting on the names. Look at those five names and you can use these questions as a prompt:

• Who encourages me to think beyond myself and help others?
• Who inspires me to come up with creative solutions to problems? 
• Who's shown me values like fairness, empathy or leadership? 
• Which of these influences could shape how I create positive impact, like a social entrepreneur?

You could even write down some words that come to mind when you think of these people. Remember you don't need to put who you want to spend time with, put people who you actually do spend your time with. Be real. It's yours. No one's looking. You can burn your piece of paper after if you want to, but this is a great self-reflection for you, and it will come together in the end. So let's trust the process.

The next thing that we're going to do is, still with those same five people, write down some words that describe that person. Qualities about them. Remember they're not seeing you write this, so you can feel as you want. Think about things that you notice, things that you know that they are. Aim for five words per person, five people with five words. Remember to be realistic with this one, not who you want them to be, it's who they are to you right now. 

The final stage of this process, and the most important step, is quite profound. Read those words in one hit, not looking at the names, just look at the words. Don't look at who they're attached to, look at those words. Look at the words by themselves and think of that quote. The five people that you spend the most time with, you're the average of that. Reflect on those words. Are those the words that you want to be around? Are those the words that are pushing you towards what kind of life you want to live and what kind of business you want to build, or what kind of impact you want to make on the world?

If it doesn't. How can you change that environment? This is about you, not about them. If we asked the five people who know you best, what words would they give you? They would probably give you those same words. I want you to take those words away from this session today. If you're happy with that, that's great. If you're not, that's okay as well because this is your life. There's time to change your circle, to change who you're around.

I think I'm quite young, I'm only 26, and I've really wanted to learn this early, that who you surround yourself with actually does impact you as a person and the direction of your life. Something for you to think about and take away after this. Sorry to get all existential, but really reflect, are these the 25 words you want people to describe you with? And if not, that's okay. You can reflect and work on that if that's what you want to do. The whole point of that is to bring some awareness to yourself and understanding the people around you. Are they inspiring you to make a difference if that's what you want to do in the world? 

If anyone here wants to unmute and share a bit about themselves. If you have a business or social change idea, tell us about it.

Participant 1:  I'll have a chat, my name's Greta. I've only just started my business, which is a skincare brand. From every bottle sold, $5 is going to be donated to Josh Neille, who has the ON YA Foundation down in Victoria. He and his family look after wildlife conservation, wildlife that's injured. It's pretty much a full-time side job that they do. That $5 from every bottle goes to helping buy the food for the animals. It's all Australian wildlife, and that's a long-term charity that I want to set up with my business as a side part of it to help wildlife in Australia.

Tionne Young: Thanks so much Greta for sharing that. That's a great, noble cause to be part of. I hadn't heard of ON YA Foundation, so that's a great one. Anyone else feel like sharing about them?

Participant 2: Yeah, I'm happy to share. Anushka from Plenty Gifting. Plenty Gifting is a meal gifting service I set up here in Perth. We launched almost two years ago, and we are a 100% not-for-profit social enterprise. When you send someone a meal gift with Plenty, someone in the community gets a meal as well. So that's what I'm doing.

Tionne Young: So good. Thanks so much. I want to hear from one more person. 

Participant 3: I'm happy to be the next one. This is Karin here. Hi everyone. I run a social enterprise called Florapeutic. I'm based in Sydney, but the service that we provide is across Australia. What we do is help tackle the flower waste issue from the event industries. What we mainly do is to help event organisers pack down their flowers and then share those flowers with the local community. With our intervention, the impact is similar to food waste, you can imagine. Scale-wise it’s not as big as that, but it has the same impact as if organic waste goes into landfill, it causes pollution, CO2 and toxic liquid going to the land, created in the landfill. We try to divert those and then guide our recipients to dispose of them properly, to minimise the impact.

Tionne Young: So good. I'm not going to spend much time introducing our panellists because I love it when they can introduce themselves, their story, why they're here and how they got to where they are at the moment. 

We've chosen these three for a specific reason. They all come from different industries doing different work to help a different cause. We're very lucky that they would spare us some of their time today. Jack, we might start with you, welcome. Are you able to tell us your story? How it all started with you and LiteHaus, what you do and where you're at now? 

Jack Growden: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you and g'day everyone online. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I founded LiteHaus International back in 2017. I'll start with what we are now, and then I'll briefly talk about the journey to where we've got to today. We're an NGO based in Queensland, across Townsville and Brisbane. We exist to bridge the digital divide across education. We run two different programs, one internationally and one domestically. 

What we do is take secondhand or retired laptops, desktops, Chromebooks, and iPads from companies, schools, and universities all across Australia. We repurpose them and then put them back out to Australian students, one-to-one. Internationally, we work across 12 different countries across the Asia Pacific, building computer labs in schools. We've been able to support 563 schools across 12 countries, predominantly in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji and the Philippines. In Australia, we've been able to support over 20,000 Australian students. We've achieved that by refurbishing over 25,000 end-of-life devices. 

We're a charity, registered with ACNC, and I started the organisation back in 2017. I'm Townsville born and raised. I went to JCU, and I was on a field trip up to Papa New Guinea in the Highlands in 2017. I got to visit a lot of schools there while I was there doing my honours thesis field work. I noticed that the school that I was visiting had pretty well everything that I had growing up, except for technology. There were books, pens, paper, decent classrooms, good teachers and so on. Something was missing, and that something was technology. 

I donated one laptop to that school, and I promised 12 more. That promise ended up on the front page of the national newspaper, with a daily viewership of 3 million people. I realised then that I had to follow through and deliver on my promise. I came home, started LiteHaus, and it all snowballed from there. 

Like I say, we've been able to support over 350,000 young people get access to digital learning tools and opportunities. We've been recognised three times gloabally for our contributions towards advancing global digital equity by the International Telecommunications Union.

Looking forward to sharing a bit more of the challenges and opportunities of that journey today. Thank you. 

Tionne Young: So good. Thanks so much, Jack. We are huge fans of what you do. I encourage you to have a look at what they're doing because the impact is awesome and something that not a lot of people would think about. Thanks so much for being here Jack, and looking forward to learning more from you and seeing how we can support you.

Yash, I'll throw to you. Tell us the same, what you do and how you got there. 

Yash Dutt: Hey, everyone. I'm Yash. I'm currently based in New York. It's a bit early in the morning, but it's amazing to hear your story, Jack. Thank you for starting us off. 

I'm the founder of Yuva AI. It was a company I started in 2018. Our goal and mission is to ensure that AI is built fairly. What we do is focus on the data side of that problem. We work with the world's largest organisations, Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson, and Sony, to ensure that the data is not biased and that they're using data that is fairly sourced not gotten illegally from the internet, as a lot of you may know. We want to make sure that whatever is used to build these AI models also respects the privacy of everybody. That's the work we've been doing. 

I'm originally from Brisbane. I've been in the States for the last three to four years expanding the business. I believe that doing good is not separated from doing well. That belief has been fundamental for me. We're happy to answer any questions around that work that we're doing, and to help out where I can. 

Tionne Young: Thanks, Yash. And good morning to you in New York. I hope you've had a good morning so far. We've known Yash for many years, he started this entrepreneurship journey into AI in high school as well. It's been very cool seeing that journey take off. Thanks, Yash, for joining us.

Imogen, welcome. I would love you to tell us what you do and how you got there, your story and why you do it. 

Imogen Clarence: Hi. Thank you. I am a lot earlier on in my journey than those guys. I create Indigenous air fresheners, designed by me, as a way to create funds for an allied health service. 

I grew up in Goondiwindi, which is about five hours west of Brisbane. To access any sort of allied health service, you'd have to go to Toowoomba or Brisbane, which wasn't feasible for most people out there, especially for the Indigenous community. I wanted to create a way where we could close the gap on creating early interventions for children so that they have a better opportunity at staying in school, learning and having the same access that everyone else has here. That's pretty much what I'm doing, very early on, we started this year. 

Tionne Young: Well done, Imogen. I can attest that they do smell fantastic and they're a great addition to our office. Thank you, Imogen, for being here and for starting a business journey in the social entrepreneurship space. 

Jack, what impact have you seen when a school, someone overseas or in Australia gets these laptops? What impact does that have for them? How are you tracking that impact? 

Jack Growden: Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. It's the best part of this job, the impact-focused part of it. I absolutely love it. In this sector, you don't come here to make millions of dollars, but you come here to, in our case, make millions of dreams come true. 

Let's take the laptops out of this whole conversation, and it just doesn't happen. I don't think I need to introduce the importance of digital in today's world. It's no longer a tool. We live across a digital lifesphere, but the reality is, that for 3 billion people across the world, they have a disjointed or limited opportunity to access that world. They have a limited digital citizenship.

If we look at Papua New Guinea (PNG), for example, where the journey was founded, we've got 346 schools across PNG that have access to a computer lab and an offline e-library. When I first started this journey, there was none. Not one school had a fully functioning digital classroom at the primary level with an offline e-library and with digitally capable teachers. It's been absolutely massive for the education sector in PNG.

I think for individuals themselves to be able to, not only tap into digital resources, I think that's selling a little bit short, to get access and citizenship to this digital world that we're all a part of. I think is what's most important. If you look at the students who are going through school now, they're going to work into the 2060s, the 2070s, the 2080s. If we're already living in a digital world, you can only imagine what it's going to be like in decades to come. If they're denied access in the classroom to digital tools and to build capability in this digital world, they're not going to be able to influence it and create and grow. So I think that's the big thing.

If you don't mind Tionne, I might just briefly speak to Mark's question there. We're a registered charity, and we behave like a charity. We never charge the end user for the device. It's not like we're selling devices to schools or to the end user here in Australia. We're significantly funded by philanthropy, so about 40% philanthropy,  anywhere between, depending on the year, 25% to 40% of government funding. That's been state and also some DFAT funding for our work internationally. Also community fundraising as well. It's not easy. 

I think we're going to talk a little bit about challenges and opportunities. I'm pretty straight up about the challenges part of our job; it's not easy. At the same time, I think we have a fairly easy sell. Nobody on this call could join right now. We couldn't be having this conversation with Yash over in New York and wherever everyone's joining from if not for digital. So we have a fairly easy value proposition to sell. We've done very well off of corporate funding, private philanthropy, you name it. There are definitely more challenges for us in scaling. 

When you look across the International Telecommunications Union, the Pacific Islands Forum recently talking about digital as a real highlight. I think we're certainly progressing and growing our organisation to tap into more DFAT funding and other funding bodies across the Pacific.

I might leave it there for now so I don't take up too much of the time. 

Tionne Young: Awesome, Jack, thanks so much for that. Yash, throwing to you. I was talking to you a few months ago about ethical AI. Can you tell us about that and how that might apply to anyone starting a business or in the social enterprise space? 

Yash Dutt: Yeah, especially in the AI space, it can initially be seen as oxymoronic, ethical AI. But it is possible. I do want to assure everyone. I think you just have to be smart about how you do it because a lot of the time with social enterprises, it's a really funny balance, right? You're trying to do good, but you also have to deal with stakeholders/businesses whose interests are going to be potentially different from yours. What's that common ground that you can find? 

For me in my journey, I found that data was a way to get the best of both worlds. The reason why it's been so good is because, look, every AI company is restricted by the data that they can use to build their systems. Also that's where all these biases are created, that's where there's a bunch of privacy concerns as well. The general rule here that I figured out is, what are those sorts of problems where you both are aligned? As an enterprise, but then also in doing good in the world and if there's something you're passionate about those are really good problems to identify. Then from there, without focus on the data side, like I said, we're focused on trying to do research. 

I'm also an AI Ethicist and Strategist here at Duke University. A big part of my job is looking at, what is this technology fundamentally? Where is it moving? What kind of applications are generating value for people and businesses? Then, working backwards from that. I think that reverse engineering has really been helpful. It's another great tool for leaders to use, because from there I can understand, where's the issues going to be ethically in the data sets? For example. 

If these are the sorts of AI models that companies want to use and create. Then what kind of data are they going to need? Where are the shortcomings of that data? Where are they going to need to get it? Then you have to get involved with the government side and the policy side too, which is a huge thing right now in the AI world. They've used up all the data sets from the internet and now they're looking for data from companies and licensing that from companies, for example private warehouses of data from healthcare. I was talking to somebody in cybersecurity yesterday, and I think that's kind of the approach. 

When you sign on to build a social enterprise, it's a much harder job because you're trying to balance so many more things. I'm happy to talk about that a little bit more. As it stands with the data side that's how I came to it and how I think about doing good but then also doing well. It's about balancing everybody's needs and interests.

Tionne Young: Absolutely. Thanks, Yash. I remember many years ago, before anyone knew what ChatGPT was or AI, Yash was in this space. He truly is an OG when it comes to AI. 

Imogen, you've taken something that you're really passionate about and with the talent that you have in the creative space and made it a physical product. You're still quite early on in the journey, but what you've done so far is amazing. Can you share some practical steps that you took to make it real, make it happen, make people see what you're doing and want to be part of it? 

Imogen Clarence: Yeah, I pretty much started with the purpose first. Growing up in the community, I recognised early the lack of health care that there was. The lack of awareness other people outside of those communities have on what we have access to out there. We didn't even have laptops at high school, and I didn't graduate that long ago. 

I had the art. I wanted to create a product that people can have in their hands, that can be in the car, or in the workplace, and that creates a conversation as well. Everyone is learning about what is still happening in community, especially around the Indigenous space. Understanding that there are still a lot of challenges that they face out there.

Probably one of the biggest challenges I've had is getting in front of people, getting people to hear. I sell more to businesses instead of to consumers. A lot of that is getting in the room. I do, I attend any showcase. I attend any local entrepreneurial meetup in Brisbane, especially joining ASE. It’s getting people to hear the purpose of it and getting the product in their hand. Then, continuously following up so that they follow through. That's probably one of the hardest things. 

It's aligning myself with my values and then aligning that with companies that also share those values or have values of the company that I can meet with. It's hard to get in the room, but once you do, get them to listen and you've got to give them a reason why they can't say no.

Tionne Young: Absolutely. So good, Imogen. 

People may not follow up. They might get disheartened and not want to follow up if it's not a yes the first time. Even seeing your progress throughout business, following up with people or connecting with people. You never know where that might lead or what connection that might lead to. That's a great lesson for everyone. If the answer is no at first, keep following up. Find a creative way to follow up. That's a good point, give them a reason why they can't say no to you.

Yash Dutt: I was just gonna say on that point. I wanted to reiterate that. I was speaking with the president of Stanley Cups and Crocs two days ago and he said the same thing.

You never know who you're going to meet. The way he articulated it was, you're always auditioning, you're always on stage. The way he got to become the president of Crocs and Stanley and all that great stuff was because he put himself out there like you are, Imogen. And like everybody here is as well, at this event. The simplest things. Showing up, putting your best foot forward how valuable that is. 

Tionne Young: Absolutely. You don't know what you don't know. You never know what connections can lead to something. So good. Gonna go around again, Jack, starting with you. Talking about the challenges that you faced in your business or charity model, getting it off the ground. What have been some of the trickier hurdles that you've had to jump over? That we can learn from if you'll let us in on some failures and successes and how you've overcome them.

Jack Growden: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I would add to that point as well. I'm married now, but if I ever went back out in the dating scene, I think I'd be very good at getting rejected. Because that tends to be what happens when we reach out to companies for funding, and for laptops. It happens constantly. If you're not prepared to be rejected, don't bother in this sector, because it's just so hard.

It's a very difficult sector. I do a lot of these conversations and I try and massage that into a nicer message, but it's just bloody hard. What's the key to the success in this sector? It's hard yakka. At the end of the day, like Imogen, hearing your story at such an early stage, I remember what it was like for me at that stage, too. People are interested in talking to you, but they're not interested in giving you a check for 50 grand. 

I'll cut straight to what groups can do for people like us. We're young people, we're having a crack. I'd like to think that all three of us on this call and everybody that's working in this sector is doing something meaningful with their lives. It's not easy. It's all-encompassing because it's all about purpose. When you're speaking to people, they expect a certain tone from you. They expect a certain energy. I speak a lot of boards. Recently, I spoke to The Deloitte Foundation board and they've had a full two days of meetings and they want a bit of inspiration. That's what they want to see from us, and we have to bring that. We bring our full energy every single time we turn up, present and talk about our issue. It's a very energy-sapping sector. That's one of the biggest challenges, I have to say. Also accepting that rejection.

I find a lot of people who don't quite succeed in this sector take things a little bit too personally, and it's very easy to do because you really care about your issue. The reality is that a lot of people couldn't give a stuff about your issue. That's just life because they care about their things. I know we've got a couple of funding bodies on this call. They've got their own areas that they want to focus on. There are so many issues in the world,  and even in the time since I first started LiteHaus, I've seen that quadruple. The number of different subsections of issues and the different ways of tackling it. We live in a world of problems and a world of issues, so you have to get used to hearing 'no'. 

Staying true to your mission is really important as well. I heard before purpose first. It should always be purpose first. It should always be purpose first. This is what this is about. I do balk sometimes at labelling LiteHaus a social enterprise and even that word, I have to say, and that might not be a popular opinion here, because ultimately it's about impact. If you want to brand yourself a social impact, it has to be impact first. Otherwise, you're an enterprise that exists within society and you should be doing good things anyway. 

To me, the moment you let go of that purpose, the moment you let go of that impact and impact focus, you've perhaps lost your way a little bit as an organisation. It does happen. It's happened to us as well. The reality is, I mean our fixed costs are over a million dollars a year. We have to fundraise, we have to sometimes bend and think, well, maybe if we changed a few things here, we would get that funding that's over here. That's the reality of the work that we do. The more you can keep that singular focus on impact as much as possible and never, ever, ever, ever give up. Because at the end of the day, if I look at my story. If I gave up, then those kids in Papua New Guinea, still to this day, only about 8% of the PNG student population have access to a computer. We're responsible for most of that 8%. There are probably only two or three other groups that have been doing anything in that space. I'm sure that others in their respective areas know exactly what it's like. We plug holes, we fill gaps, and if we're not there, if we don't turn up tomorrow and the next day and the year after, that gap just grows wider and wider. Having energy is the most important thing. To turn up every day and never give up on your journey and get on with it.

Tionne Young: Jack, can you tell me a bit about the first time that you went into one of these places with the laptops? Can you tell us what that experience was like? 

Jack Growden: Oh, absolutely amazing. Papua New Guinea is an extraordinary place. It's an extraordinary civilisation that has lived for 50 years as an independent nation. Tens of thousands of years of building an amazing, innovative civilisation. It's an incredible place to be. I've now worked as I say, in 12 countries as diverse as Ukraine to Cambodia to Kiribas to PNG. I can tell you, the level of appreciation for our work. Not just appreciation, but how deeply members of the community and schools throw themselves into our work and make the most of it is just unrivalled in PNG. It's an amazing occasion when we go to schools, and we have the opportunity to present equipment. It's just incredible. I've been to PNG probably 40 times now. I absolutely love it. We feel like we're home in PNG as well. It's incredible. 

Did I learn it on the job, Andrew? Yeah, we've learned everything on the job. Our accounts team is me. Our legal team is me. That's just the way it goes. I had to learn everything. We're actually about to start building classrooms. That's also me. It's just the way it's got to be. That's also one of the challenges is that you can seek technical advice on things throughout this journey, but no one knows it better than the founder and the one that's driving that energy behind it. You really do have to become multi-skilled and be able to be across everything because you're covering ground that, if in a for-profit enterprise, you'd normally have 10 staff to do. It's probably the best professional development journey, starting an organisation like this, you could ever have because you have to learn everything on the go. 

Tionne Young: That's great Jack. Couldn't agree more. Yash, how about you? Challenges that you've overcome.

Yash Dutt: Jack, that's so, so true. You can really tell how much time, energy and how much this means to you in the way that you speak. I think for everyone that's running a social enterprise, you have to have that. It's a non-negotiable because I talk to people in the business world all the time. 

Another part, alongside that energy, is also talking in their terms. To get at Andrew's question around data provenance. You have to talk to them in a way that they understand. That they can see how it affects their business. The example I like to give is we have to know the legal side of this problem so well. If you can communicate to them that doing the right thing is also the right thing for their business, you can break them out of their ways of thinking. It isn't here's a problem that you should care about and an emotional play, there are the legal business implications as well. 

For us, companies may want cheap data or data that is biased and has a bunch of issues, but then you have to show them the second-order effects of that. They'll face litigation, for example. Show them examples where that's happened in real life, and where companies have had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars. OpenAI just had to settle a big case recently, around books, that gave money to authors, and so that's another big thing. It's about putting it in their frame of reference.

That empathetic piece is super, super important. As you said, Andrew, doing the right thing data-wise is actually less risky. The problem is in a lot of boardrooms, it's like, no we want AI and we want it now and we want to do it in any way possible. We want to automate the business. There's a whole education piece that I think social enterprises sign up for when they become a social enterprise, especially when you're raising funding, when you're trying to sell a social product to these businesses. That's a huge thing. 

Another benefit of doing that is that you gain credibility, too. There's a book called "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss, which I think is a great book. It's about negotiation, but really it's about empathy, customer empathy and design. The big point from it is, in order for us to negotiate with these stakeholders that may hold very different views from us, we have to come to a common ground and you have to really understand their perspective, and talk to them in a way that they understand first. The examples that he uses are in terrorist organisations and those are the negotiations that he's doing, but it honestly still applies to business. 

Oftentimes, the people that you're dealing with, the boards that you're dealing with do not have the same perspective as you and they are on a schedule. Every quarter they have to submit their financials to the board and they have to be making money. Being able to talk and understand their perspective and come to that common ground is usually a key to productive discussions moving forward. Also, establishing credibility, which you definitely need to raise money, to sell something.

Tionne Young: Thanks, Yash. Imogen, over to you. Challenges. Lessons. 

Imogen Clarence: I think both Yash and Jack covered a lot of it. Probably the hardest thing that I've had to overcome is doing it by myself. That could be that I'm at home by myself, and there's a million different ways I could go about it, or especially with rejection. I'm stuck in my head. I can't go back and forth with anyone. I'm not in a workplace where there's three of us talking about an idea. It's just me being like, should I do this? Is it going to be the correct thing for my business? Is this the make or break? 

Then with rejection as well, I’m thinking, oh, my God, this isn't gonna work. This is just me now by myself. What can I even do? Especially after having a deal go through, you're on such a high from that, and then to have the rejection after. You could go two weeks without even hearing from a single person after a hundred emails. That's probably one of the hardest times where you're like, oh, my God, it was such a fluke that that happened. 

I just have to sit down and draw it out, or I'll call my sister. She has no idea what I'm talking about, but she lets me vent about it. It's going back to, what do I want this to accomplish? Make a small goal. Recently, we just looked at, yes, we want to be able to provide early intervention to all the kids that can't have it. Yeah, that's great. But let's go to our community. That's where we wanted to start. Both my sisters are occupational therapists, so we're thinking, what can we do now that could benefit us? We're creating plans for the schools to implement things in the classroom to help all children learn. My sister just went out there for two weeks and assessed a few kids and were creating intervention plans just off their donated time. That's four kids. It's quite small to what we want to achieve, but that's four kids right now, and that's four more than we had a month ago. 

So many times I have to sit down and work from what is the purpose of this? Why do I want to do it? Why am I going through all of this rejection and all of this isolation? Why am I doing it? And then everything goes off the back of that. If you're passionate about it, you get back up. You just keep going. You go to the events where they're saying, yeah, yeah, we'll do it, we'll support. We'll buy them, we'll buy them. Then you never hear from them again. Or you email, and you don't get anything back. It's hard. It's very hard. You have to have something that can drive you for it, and just revisit that. Start small and work towards it. That's probably one of the hardest things. Go back to basics. Get a pen and paper and sit down. 

Tionne Young: Totally, Imogen. That's a really great answer, and I agree with you. Agree with you wholeheartedly there. It can be very isolating starting something, especially by yourself. Your family and friends don't really understand what you're doing or why you're doing it. Why are you working so much? Why are you putting so much effort into that? It can be a really isolating experience. Thank you so much, all three of you, for sharing so honestly about that. 

This question has three parts. What support has helped you with the people around you? People in this chat might want to start a business or they have a friend or a partner or someone who's on that journey. What support from the people around you has helped you most as a founder? So that we can learn when we're on that journey or helping other people on that journey. So that's question number one.

Number two question. Did you realise how hard it would be before you started? If not, knowing now, would you have done it? 

Number three, how can we support your business? What are you looking for at the moment? Are there any introductions or any way that we can support your business?

Jack, do you want to kick us off? 

Jack Growden: Yep, I'll kick it off. I'll start with the people around you. I think this is a really interesting one and good on Imogen for being so honest about that because it's not spoken about enough. As I said before, we're usually doing the role of 10 people, and then as your organisation increases, so too do the demands. For example, I might be driving a forklift at 2 o'clock and then packing a container and then at 2:30 I'm expected to speak to, maybe we got an ACNC audit and I've got to be across accounting law and everything like that. Then at 3 o'clock, I’ve got to be a presence to fundraise with The Deloitte Foundation. Having to shift gears all the time when it's just you and Imogen brings up a very good point, which is that, you have to deal with things that cross your desk all the time. 

It's a very emotional sector, this. You might have a crying mother of three children that just wants to sort it out and doesn't want to feel like a failure. Wants a laptop for each of her kids, and she's got so many other things going on, she overshares. Then the next thing you know one of your staff walks in, and they want to talk about this. You don't have the same supports within the company around you because you don't have the ability to hire more staff. It is a really good point. 

To the people around you though, one thing I think has been a real strength for me. From day one of this journey, I had say, three guys that were good friends with me. They're now Head of Programs Digital, Head of Programs Training and Warehouse and Logistics Lead. My dad was the very first person I told about LiteHaus. He came and saw me today at 2 o'clock. None of them come from a social impact background. I was the first in the family to go to university. Just to put this into perspective, I just got back from Oxford. I've taken everybody on that journey, and that's the key. Because there are people that can give you advice along the way that have the technical advice, but they don't love you.

They like you, but they don't love you. Your friends do, your wife does, your husband,  your father does; these sorts of people around you. 

They can only contribute if you give them the ability to contribute. They need to know what your business does. They need to know your donors. They need to know your staff. They need to know where the spare set of keys is at times, so they can just go in and help out here and, oh, yeah, yeah, I have been following that DFAT accreditation journey and oh, Deloitte's given more, have they? To me, you've got to give them the tools to support you. That's absolutely critical. Have that core group that comes with you on that journey. It makes it so much more rewarding as well because being the single founder, not a co-founder, you need that around you to give it that meaning. Yes, you do have to do things, sometimes working 17-hour days, that if your family aren't aware of that and then they're just going to think what's going on?

To the second question, how hard would it be when you started? Absolutely. You realise how hard it's going to be. I promised people computers. I didn't know I could even go back to that community or not. Yeah, I opted into this. I didn't get any sleep the night before, and I could see what this could turn into if we put our energy and applied ourselves into it. Absolutely, I'd do it, well, I wouldn't do it again now, but I'd happily at 20, yes, I'd make that decision 100 times out of 100. Would I go back and at 28 now and start a new one? Yes, but slightly differently. But that's a story for another time. 

Look, it's incredibly hard, and it only gets harder. It just changes. So for Imogen, for example, I imagine on your journey it's hard sometimes to get into the door. We can get into a few more doors now, but we've got staff that want to kick down your door and say, I need a pay rise, I need this, I've got a problem here. And so the problems just change and amplify as well. But it's the same spirit. If you love the journey, you'll get through it. 

As for number three, great question. How can you support the journey? I think this is a two-part answer for me. For us obviously, the specifics of donating devices. We've all got one; we all work at companies that have devices. Kids go to school at schools that have computers. It's free and easy to get involved. It costs absolutely nothing. It's a bit of a no-brainer to donate. By all means, share our link as far and wide as you can. We're on the lookout for 5,000 laptops to support kids going back to school right now. 

More broadly, that's how you can support one particular niche group, and we're lucky we have that avenue to support. But I'm very passionate about saying this, and I say it pretty bluntly, that we just need cash. That's what people need. It doesn't matter what issue yours is; we need cash. I talk a lot about this because it's obvious, and it doesn't get spoken about enough. I worry that so many funding bodies, groups and companies, in particular the corporate sector, are looking for every other way to support, but they just forget the most important thing. If you took money out of their business, it wouldn't run. I can't pay people on good intentions. I can't pay people on nice pats on the back and things like that. People create change, and people have mortgages, and people need cash to be paid to go and deliver that change. 

I think we as a whole sector, the aid and development sector, are slipping. The USAID doesn't exist anymore. The British are cutting their funding in half by 2027. Our sector's under attack in a lot of ways, and we've forgotten about the basic fundamentals. We just need cash. Cash solves all of our problems. There are so many well-intentioned people out there. When I'm talking to funding bodies and groups like that, send your cash and send it unrestricted because Imogen knows how to grow her organisation. Give her the respect for that. Just like I did, just like Yash does as well. We know what to do. We just need the cash. Simple as that. Sorry if that's a disappointing answer to anyone, but that's the reality of what we do, and that's what we need. End of story. 

Tionne Young: That is bang on, Jack, thank you so much for saying it like it is. Perfect. Yash.

Yash Dutt: Thank you Jack. Again, thank you for the passion that you bring. It's so good to hear. And yes, cash - cash definitely is a huge thing. 

To answer the first question. I think it's really important to align yourself with mentors, along with everything that Jack said. Find mentors. LinkedIn is my hands-down favourite platform in this world. You will be so surprised by who you can reach out to cold through a connection request. A smart, well-written connection request, and they'll respond. You'll be able to find a mentor who is doing maybe the kind of work that you're looking to do, and that's a couple of steps ahead. Or maybe they have had the whole career that you would like or the kind of impact that you would like, and they're often willing to help you. It's about putting yourself out there, honestly, that's the hardest bit.

A piece of practical advice I'd give is to go on LinkedIn and cold direct message (DM) 5 people after this call. I do it to this day. I have a meeting on October 8 with one of my idols in the data and AI space, and that was through a cold DM. 

The reason why I really want to emphasise that it’s as great as having your friends and family around you, at least in my experience, a lot of the time, they haven't also understood why I'm so passionate about this. Why is this so important to me? Yes, it's a good thing, but I spend my weekends doing this. I want to do this instead of the things that people usually want to do, maybe going out. For me, I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything because this work is so important and is so linked to my identity that I want to be doing it. That is actually super difficult for a lot of people to understand. I found that my friends and family, in a lot of cases have just been a bit, oh, you've got a bit of a screw loose, don't you? That's okay, and it's nothing against them, and there's nothing wrong with that. Aligning yourself with mentors that have been through the journey and who have gone through the thing can be like, yeah, it's okay. That has been super helpful for me.

That goes to the second point as well. This is incredibly difficult, and I did not expect it to be as difficult as it was. It often takes a couple of years staying in the game to get to the point where people recognise you, trust you, and you even maybe begin solving the right problem as well. Then everything starts to take off. I remember that for us, it took us two years before we made the equivalent of two years' worth of progress in six months. That all was on the back of just being out there, talking to people, doing odd jobs here and there. You have to be in this for the long haul, and if you can stay in it, you get those rewards for sure. But it does take time.

Lastly, for us, we're really trying to work with big enterprises that have huge data sets. We want to make sure that they're not exploited by these AI companies. We do a lot of legal work, regulatory work, and we talk with boards around securing their data. So we'd love any introductions in healthcare. Healthcare is a big vertical that we are working with. Any media companies as well that are sitting on these proprietary data sets, and making sure that they're fairly compensated for this data. That they can make money off of it and know that it's being done in an ethical way as well, when it's used in AI. That's the kind of introductions we would love right now. 

Tionne Young: Great. Thanks, Yash. Over to you, Imogen. 

Imogen Clarence: Probably with the support. I was at an event a couple of months ago, and one of the top entrepreneurs in Australia was there. I was very excited - very excited to get to meet him and show him my product, because I believe in the product. I believe in what we're trying to do, and I was faced with not a single positive thing, pretty much. It was all around, why does everyone want to do something good? Why can't it just be about the money? And just tore apart the product.

That's fine. I have people who don't like it all the time, especially with the Indigenous side of it. I get a lot of that as well. He had a few comments around the Indigenous side of it. I got home, and I was very taken aback. I thought, yeah, he's right. What am I even doing? 

But then the people around me, my boyfriend was like, you wanted to do this your whole entire life. I haven't taken any money out of the business, everything stays in it. I work every single day, and I still would do it every day. I love doing it. There are so many people that do love my product, and just because this one person didn't. I have the people around me who remind me of those things. They will sit, they'll listen, and they're my biggest supporters. That's what I would recommend to everyone.

If there's somebody in your world that is doing this, it's very hard. It's very lonely. You might not know about it, but even just sitting down and letting them vent, they could be throwing different words at you that you have never, ever heard before, but just being somebody that's there. I have my family sometimes sitting in the lounge room, packing orders or putting barcodes on. We have a little production line going, and they love it. I always say, I'm sorry. I'll pay you. They're always happy just to help, because they know what I'm trying to do is so important to me, and them as well. It's that constant reminder that what they're doing is worth it, because sometimes it doesn't always feel like it. 

For number two, I had no idea how hard it was going to be. I think when you look at small businesses or people who have started their own business, you only see the success. You only see successful ones that are going viral or these ones that have gone to a million-dollar company. You don't see the thousand others that haven't succeeded or are still in the process of getting there. 

It was quite hard, but if I went back, I would have done it a little bit differently. I know I learn from my mistakes every day, and I look at people who are also in the same industry as me, and I look at what they are doing and use that to help me grow as well. 

How can we support you? Getting any sort of introduction from anyone that wants to buy my air fresheners or hear about the challenges that are going on. Getting in the door and making those connections. Especially companies that have the ability to help, and it can aid their company as well. For example, I work with some mining companies that put them in their fleets, and it helps. I’m in a position where it benefits their company, so they can have some good and positive things going on amid some of the bad things with the mining companies. Referring and getting us in the door, I think, is probably the biggest thing.

Tionne Young: So good. Thanks so much, Imogen. As I said before, our office loves your air fresheners, and they're beautiful as well. I would encourage anyone to get involved and support your business. Looking forward to you proving all those people wrong and making Dreamtime Air the success that it can certainly be. 

Can we give a virtual round of applause to our speakers, Jack, Yash and Imogen? Stay connected with them, join them on LinkedIn, and follow along their journeys. 

Thank you to everyone for your time in this session. Remember that building that community around you that believes in what you're doing is super important. Reflect on those words that we went through in the Tree of Influence activity. Really grateful for Sherryl and the team for having us along today. Thanks, everyone. 

Sherryl Reddy: Thanks, Tionne. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I want to say, wow. Why can't every Thursday afternoon be filled with 90 minutes of such incredible wisdom and energy? Thank you, Tionne, for your fantastic facilitation. We loved that Tree of Influence exercise. Such powerful thinking about the people that influence our lives, and that came through so strongly with Jack, Yash and Imogen in everything they shared. 

Thank you, Yash, Imogen, and Jack for your absolute generosity in sharing your experience, expertise and creativity in the social enterprise space. It was a real gift to be here in this Zoom room with you. Mountains of gratitude to each of you for the way you've encouraged all of us, regardless of age, to get involved in supporting you and the next generation of social entrepreneurship.

So many golden takeaways. Imogen, your courage to make Dreamtime Air real and to put yourself out there. Creating a product that creates a conversation, overcoming the isolation, getting in front of people, aligning yourself and others with your values. What a gift.

Jack's framing of impact first, impact first and LiteHaus International's commitment to access and citizenship in the digital world. 

Yash, your deep passion that ethical AI is possible. Finding that common ground of business and ethics, and doing that balancing act of doing good and doing well. 

Thank you all so much.

Really appreciate your time and sharing all of your experiences with us today. I also want to say thank you to the ASE crew behind the scenes, who've made every interaction so very joyous in leading up to this session. Thank you, Meriel, Taj, Jahin, Gabi and Tionne.

Thanks, everyone. Take care.