Transcript: WISE in Practice: Insights from the WISE Learn Book

Jess Moore: Hi everyone. My name is Jess Moore. I'm CEO at Social Enterprise Australia.

We are the national peak body for social enterprise. We're for an economy that puts people and planet first, and for unlocking the power of social enterprise to help get us there. As part of our work we host events for people across the social enterprise ecosystem to share knowledge and experience and to build connection. We're so excited about this report, and excited to host today's conversation.

The Social Enterprise National Strategy focuses on five areas where social enterprise can drive big impact. One of the five is access to decent work. Work Integration Social Enterprises, or WISEs, have a distinct role to play. They create jobs and pathways to employment and self-employment for those most shut out of work. They combine real work settings with wraparound support, and in communities with too few jobs, they create new ones. But many people don't know what social enterprise is or how to get involved. And we need better systems so that more social enterprises can reach their potential.

Today, Westpac Foundation and GoodWolf Partners alongside people doing the work on the ground will take us through a practical conversation on what it really takes to build, sustain and fund successful WISEs across Australia.

Before I hand over to them, I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands from which we're all joining today. I'm thankful to be on beautiful Dharawal land and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I also pay respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining today's conversation. I recognise that these lands were never ceded and that connection to land, waters and culture is ongoing.

A few things to note about today's session. First, this is being recorded and the recording will be made available on Understorey in the coming weeks. There is also time for questions and answers today and we welcome comments and reflections in the chat function.

What does it really take to build and sustain a successful WISE? And what does effective funding of WISE look like? Westpac Foundation and GoodWolf Partners have worked alongside WISE leaders, funders and sector experts across Australia to explore these questions in depth. The result is 'Working Better Together: WISE Learn Book', a new resource grounded in real world experience, challenges and insights from across the sector.

This webinar marks the public launch of the WISE Learn Book and brings those insights to life through a practical, practitioner-led conversation. In a moment, I'll hand over to Sally McGeoch and Lisa Waldron from the Westpac Foundation to introduce themselves, this report and its context. Nina Yousefpour and Loretta Bolotin from GoodWolf Partners will then take us through the report, how they went about it and the key themes and findings. Loretta will then facilitate a conversation with WISE leaders Alexie Seller from Impact North and Sally Quinn from Green Collect. I always feel slightly self-conscious when I use the term 'WISE leaders' - they are wise, but in that instance I mean Work Integration Social Enterprise leaders. We'll then open up to Q and A.

Whether you're running a social enterprise, funding one, or working to support the sector, we intend this session to provide practical insights and tools to inform your work. With that, it's my pleasure to hand over to Sally and Lisa to kick off this conversation.

Lisa Waldron: Thanks so much, Jess. Appreciate that introduction.

Hello everyone, welcome. I'm Lisa Waldron, Senior Advisor at Westpac Foundation and I'm grateful to be on Wurundjeri land today. It's great to see so many people here who care deeply about the future of social enterprise and inclusive employment. Before we get into the insights and findings, I'd just like to start briefly by sharing who we are and why today matters for us.

Westpac Foundation was established over 140 years ago and has worked for that time to help and support people experiencing disadvantage. For the last two decades our focus has been on supporting social enterprises to help create real jobs for people who face significant barriers to employment. The last decade has been specifically focused on Work Integration Social Enterprises.

Our approach was grounded in evidence that meaningful employment empowers families and communities, strengthens society as a whole, and expands economic inclusion in Australia. That's why we've focused on social enterprise for so long.

We invested about $35 million with 90 social enterprises between 2006 and 2026, and over that time it became clear that funding alone is never the full story. We also set ourselves a long-term goal to help our partners create 10,000 jobs by 2030. That goal was reached five years early.

Since 2015 our social enterprise grant partners have created nearly 12,000 jobs for people. What sat behind that approach was a holistic and long-term commitment: Flexible funding, deep partnerships and a willingness to play roles beyond our traditional grant making. We acted as learners, conveners and catalysts, and our unrestricted grants were designed to create a pipeline of social enterprises supported at different stages of development.

Alongside that we supported initiatives to strengthen financial sustainability through investment readiness, access to loan guarantees and, as many of you may know, collaboration with other co-funders. We invested in capability, resilience, leadership, governance, financial management and impact measurement. We drew on the skills and enthusiasm of our passionate Westpac staff through an ambassador programme, as well as investing in intermediaries and the broader ecosystem.

At the broader sector level we also led and engaged in research and a broad range of collaborative initiatives to help promote and advocate for the role of social enterprise in creating a more inclusive economy.

Over the last 20 years we've learned a great deal about what it takes for WISEs to succeed, including the true cost of impact and the role that philanthropy can play in strengthening the sector as a whole. I'll hand over to Sally to continue the story for another few minutes. Thank you.

Sally McGeoch: Thanks Lisa.

I'm also a Senior Advisor at Westpac Foundation, and it's wonderful to see so many of our social enterprise community online today for what is quite an important moment in both Lisa and my journey in the sector and the Foundation's.

Westpac Foundation announced a significant shift in September last year, refocusing its strategy on literacy and numeracy outcomes for children in under-resourced communities. As part of that transition we spoke to many of our partners and co-funders who asked us: What next? Can you share some of your learnings and case studies openly and practically with the sector?

The Learn Book is really the coming together of that idea. It was part of a broader $1 million transition fund which we sought to use to provide both direct support to our social enterprise partners and investment in key sector initiatives. We wanted to create a runway, a bridge, for our partners as we were transitioning out of the sector to secure other funding and support.

The Learn Book draws not just on our insights over the past 20 years, but the insights of other social enterprises, collaborating funders and sector intermediaries. It's a joint effort and it's designed to be practical rather than theoretical, to support both funders and practitioners to continue this important work of building a stronger, more resilient WISE sector. It's also a really important part of changing systems, I think, as philanthropy: To turn the mirror on your own practices and mindsets, listen deeply to those at the front lines of the sector, and be honest with each other about what it really takes to create impact together.

We think the Learn Book helps to lift the lid on the complexity, the tensions, the hard-earned insights that don't always make it into glossy impact reports, but that matter deeply to all of us in the sector.

The Learn Book has three parts which you'll hear about. There are our core learnings over roughly two decades of funding, which Loretta and Nina will speak to in this session. We worked on four in-depth case studies bringing these learnings to life. And there is also a practical grant making guide designed specifically for funders, sharing everything we've learned in the space alongside our co-funders in the WISE sector.

This work wouldn't have been possible without the generosity and honesty of all of our partners, funders and intermediaries who participated. We want to sincerely thank you for bringing this to life with us.

Although Westpac Foundation's strategy has changed, we still have the Westpac Scholars Social Change Fellowship, which is a bespoke offering for social enterprise leaders. We'd love everyone to keep that in mind as we move forward, and there are always skill volunteering opportunities available through Westpac.

For us the Learn Book isn't a definitive guide on WISE. It's a starting point which we hope will be part of an ongoing conversation about philanthropy and how we can better support the building of more inclusive, decent work for Australians.

I'm really looking forward to the discussion ahead, and it's my pleasure to hand over to Nina from GoodWolf, who will take you through the findings. And thanks again to the GoodWolf team for all their support in this project.

Nina Yousefpour: Thanks Sally, and thank you both, Lisa and Sally.

I'm Nina, director at GoodWolf, which is the social impact advisory team that has supported the Westpac Foundation team, Amy, Sally and Lisa, in this process. Our work spans the philanthropy, not-for-profit and social enterprise sectors. It has been a privilege to be invited into this process and to play a part in what is essentially one of Westpac's departing gifts to the sector as it shifts its strategy.

Extending a big thank you to the Westpac Foundation team for their commitment to this work and for sharing the learnings of over two decades of what has been truly transformational work. In GoodWolf's own work we have seen some of the challenges experienced in WISEs and the social enterprise sector more broadly. Developing this resource has been a worthy exercise for all involved, a kind of synthesising of so many experiences. And through this process there has been a real question: who will step in now to champion this space, particularly as Westpac has shifted its strategy? That's been very much part of our conversation in developing the resource.

As the sector adjusts, there is opportunity for new leadership and new champions to emerge. There are certainly many individuals behind this WISE and social enterprise movement to build on the 'why' behind this work that Lisa and Sally have already spoken to.

A really interesting insight from the project: There was one particular social enterprise with a very strong business model, at the more commercial end of the WISE spectrum. It was ready to triple in size. Even then, it struggled to access the capital and support to really develop and grow its business.

A lot of WISEs are structured as not-for-profits. Mainstream traditional finance is usually out of reach for them: Voluntary directors are not in a position to provide director guarantees, and capital is often required to be more patient. This was an example where Westpac came in and provided a blended approach.

Today we have solutions like the White Box SELF fund that offer that type of capital to enterprises. But it illustrates the challenges. All businesses require capital and different types of support. When you have the complexity of working with disadvantaged cohorts, there are additional considerations around what capital and support are needed, and at what stage.

Work Integration Social Enterprise clearly plays a critical role in employment pathways and there is demand and interest in it, particularly from philanthropy and government. But there is a limited shared understanding of what it really takes, as Sally mentioned. WISEs are also operating in an increasingly complex environment, and it is harder to deliver impact at scale when you factor in rising costs, margins and other considerations around complexity.

There is a gap between the expectations and reality in how WISEs are funded and supported. This resource comes at the right time to speak to many of those learnings.

In terms of the process to develop the Learn Book, I did want to thank everyone involved, as this was very much a collective effort. While we drew heavily on Westpac's learnings over the last two decades, there are insights from across the sector. We used a 'working out loud' methodology.

We had two advisory groups. The first was a WISE Advisory Group, and I'd like to thank Ability Enterprises, All Things Equal, Bama Services, Impact North (with Alexie joining us today), Nundah Community Enterprise Cooperative, SisterWorks and White Box.

Our second advisory group comprised funders and supporters. I'd like to thank the Brian M. Davis Charitable Foundation, the English Family Foundation, Greater Melbourne, the Honig Foundation, Ian Potter, Macquarie Group Foundation, McLean Foundation, Minderoo, Minter Ellison, Paul Ramsay Foundation, VFFF and of course Westpac.

The four case studies that were mentioned offer deeper insights into some of the challenges and what leaders and organisations have experienced in having to shift and respond to complexity. They are: Australian Spatial Analytics; Dismantle, which as we speak is undergoing some changes; Free to Feed, which operated for 10 years (and I'd like to acknowledge that this was an organisation that Loretta founded, and Loretta has now joined the GoodWolf team and really led this process); and Green Collect, from which we'll hear from Sally today.

In terms of the resource itself, we were cutting it very fine. We've had around four months for this process and the main link is not yet available but will be tomorrow, so we will contact you all with the link to it.

The resource will be structured in three components: The main resource, the appendices (which include a lot of Westpac's grant making tools and guides that they would like to leave the sector with), and the set of four case studies.

I'd like to thank SEA for offering to house the resource. It's great that it has an ongoing home and it will be available on Understorey. Philanthropy Australia has also offered to house it on the Better Giving Hub.

We will continue to share this and there will be a couple of follow-up events. Please feel free to use different pieces as social enterprise leaders when you go and talk about the challenges and opportunities in the sector. That's the whole purpose of the resource. I'll hand over to Loretta.

Loretta Bolotin: Thanks so much Nina.

As you've heard from Nina, what we've created together with the sector is quite a rich resource. It goes through some of the foundations of WISE, then builds into some of the key insights. It's full of quotes and first-hand, lived experience from WISE leaders, both throughout the resource and through the case studies. I encourage you to have a good read with a cup of tea.

Today I wanted to share a few of the key takeaways. Rather than getting into the detail of the resource, I'd like to step back and look at those key takeaways for philanthropy, for WISE, and across the system. Then we'll have a conversation with Alexie and Sally, who we're very grateful have joined us today.

On the role of philanthropy: A big acknowledgment that alongside Westpac, the philanthropic sector has been feeling its way through the last decade. What we wanted to do is take the learnings we've heard and distil them into some key takeaways for philanthropy, acknowledging the work that's already been done.

The first piece we wanted to highlight for philanthropy is to start with impacts. This is really an invitation not only to the small group of existing WISE funders, but to other funders and philanthropists to come on in. WISE funding does not need to be only for WISE funders.

When you look at broader philanthropic priorities, including youth, people with a disability, justice, regional disadvantage, and people seeking asylum and refuge, there is a real opportunity for a broader pool of funders to come in looking at these impact areas and support WISE. We've seen some funders treat WISE as a little bit of a dirty word and perhaps not want to go there because of the complexity in the model. This resource and this project is really an invitation to come on in.

I also wanted to highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping the sector, and acknowledge that funding preferences to date have really influenced which models scale, which geographies thrive and which voices have been heard.

There has been a historic emphasis on scale and transitional employment models in particular, which has unintentionally narrowed what success looks like. Through this resource we try to highlight that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for WISE. In regional areas, for example, transitional employment may not be the best model - a long-term job for life might actually be the best option to respond to the issues in that local community.

Our invitation here is for philanthropy to listen carefully to WISE and to acknowledge that their funding preferences and profiles shape the sector.

We also acknowledge the focus on jobs targets. What we've heard is that as a key metric, this has within WISE distorted decision making and at times led to premature growth. Philanthropy is uniquely placed to support WISEs to fund their resilience and impact costs, not just their expansion.

We wanted to highlight that short-term competitive funding creates instability. When philanthropy is on the journey with WISE and backing growth, it should look at and prepare for ongoing multi-year support, to minimise the risk of funding cliffs in a very dynamic market.

We also wanted to call out that sustainability expectations need recalibration. One of the things we think is holding the sector back is different viewpoints on sustainability. What we've heard is that sustainability for some WISEs is about mission continuity and building a diverse range of revenue sources.

It's not always about looking at one moment in time at profitability or breaking even from commercial income. Expectations for year-on-year growth or a decrease in reliance on philanthropy often push WISEs to simplify their forecasts to meet the needs of the funder, rather than put forward something more nuanced and engage in a genuine conversation.

We wanted to highlight to philanthropy and to funders: Fund to plan for challenges, not just success. Build resilience within WISE to increase survival rates. Conversations around downside scenarios, around risk, and around what happens when things don't go to plan, should happen early.

Finally, I wanted to highlight what I think is a really wonderful legacy of the Westpac Foundation and of Lisa and Sally and how they've worked alongside WISE: The importance of balancing trust with proportionate due diligence. I think they really struck the right balance.

Trust is obviously essential to good philanthropic practice and it works really well when paired with fit-for-purpose due diligence and capability support. What Westpac Foundation did well, and what you'll see in the tools they've left behind, is that through the process of doing due diligence to receive funding, they actually built capability and brought awareness not only to the WISE, but to its governance structure as well. It's a really good way of working, and we're lucky to have these tools left behind.

Key learnings for WISE. There are only four key takeaways here, and it was very hard to distil them. We know that WISE leaders have the answers within themselves.

Through the case studies, what we wanted to impart to WISE is to grow in response to realistic demand. Expansion into new geographies, ventures or cohorts should be driven by confirmed market demand and supported by realistic financial buffers and diverse revenue sources.

The Australian Spatial Analytics case study illustrates this really well. A core learning for ASA is that future geographic expansion should be customer-driven and contract-led, rather than establishing new sites or projects in anticipation of demand. So thank you, Geoff, for your participation.

And to plan with rigour rather than pressure to scale: Scenario plan and model realistic impact costs and forecasts. Funders play a powerful role in influencing scaling strategies and can support WISEs to align funding with the most appropriate and sustainable long-term strategy for their impact and business model. The key takeaway for WISE is to have an honest conversation around the ongoing role of impact costs and how your forecasts and models are built - and that means not being afraid to raise possible risks or worst-case scenarios early, so that you're well supported into the future.

Finally, when we look at policy and systems: WISEs are delivering strong employment outcomes. We've seen this through the research, but they're not well supported by existing systems.

A couple of callouts at the systems and policy level. The first is that a more aligned advocacy effort is required to demonstrate the value of WISE and to create a more enabling environment. With Westpac stepping out, we're looking for new champions to come in and to represent WISE alongside Social Enterprise Australia and other peak bodies, to bring WISE onto the government agenda.

On data and evidence: there has been a huge investment in understanding impact costs, but less in understanding WISE outcomes and impacts beyond the individual beneficiary. Aggregated sector data is needed and we would love to see investment in that space.

And acknowledging that philanthropy and government need to walk side by side: The opportunity to fund collaborations and sector coordination is equally as important as funding individual WISEs. There are multiple roles for funders to hold, at both the individual WISE level and at the systems level.

So we're really lucky today to be joined by Sally Quinn, the founder and CEO of Green Collect, and Alexie Seller, the CEO of Impact North, also herself a social entrepreneur and founder. I'm really grateful for your participation in the WISE Learn Book, and GoodWolf appreciated your counsel through this process.

What we heard through this process is that WISEs don't operate on a single model. As Nina mentioned, they sit on a spectrum between more charity-oriented and more commercially oriented approaches, particularly in relation to their revenue mix, with all models along that spectrum creating meaningful impact but having different ongoing requirements.

The Learn Book is full of quotes around sustainability, the role of philanthropy and the role of the market - sometimes encouraging caution around over-relying on trade, and for other WISE leaders, a strong sentiment that commercial viability has to come first to plan for the future.

We also heard quite definitively from Dr. Libby Ward-Christie that for most WISEs, impact costs are a significant portion of their total costs and it's unlikely that revenue from trade can fully fund those costs on an ongoing basis.

Overall, we noted a persistent confusion around what WISE sustainability means in practice, and limitations in sector maturity and alignment around this. So Sally, in your experience with Green Collect, I invite you to share: How can we better understand sustainability?

Sally Quinn: Thanks Loretta, and thanks for having me.

It's really lovely to be here with friends in the ecosystem. I hope to speak as a practitioner and to share something of the voice of the people we're here to serve, whose lives are very important to consider in this conversation.

Well, I intentionally started a WISE - though the term Work Integration Social Enterprise wasn't around 20 years ago. Very much at the heart of Green Collect's purpose was to create jobs where there were gaps, for people who were unable to access work at times when they needed it most.

In those 20 years, there has been a lot of adapting and learning around what sustainability means. When I think about the key elements we've had to adapt to or respond to, the big one is the market.

We run a business. The market is changing, its needs are changing. We need to anticipate those changes, offer a product and service that is relevant, reach our customers, and be able to deliver in a way where our costs aren't exceeding what we're charging. The business landscape changes a lot. That's one of the key factors in why sustainability can vary over time.

Then I think about the social sector that we're part of: The job creation, the support structures, the other actors in the system and how they're acting. There is a lot of change there in relation to philanthropy's focus - around geography or funding types, as Loretta mentioned.

And then there is the impact model itself, which has had to adapt and grow in response to the community's needs. As we consider what constitutes a high-quality job and how it's structured in terms of hours of employment, training and transition.

These three things are constantly in play, with a lot of change within each of them, and a real need to balance them. Sustainability is not a linear journey because we're responding to things in the market right now that are affecting all three.

An example: At the moment the market is really tough. Businesses are holding back, being a bit slower to say yes, particularly in environmental areas, and that impacts job demand. We've learned to create a model that works with the business, not at odds with it, so that when business is growing we can respond and increase work.

But funding can affect that. If we have an internal goal, or there is an external goal from a funder, around job creation, and yet business has decreased, we face hard choices. Do we reduce people's hours? Do we change the type of work people are doing? There are so many factors to keep that balance of sustainability working.

In terms of that journey to sustainability: We started Green Collect with a $30,000 loan, so we didn't have capital to invest to create the enterprise. It took us five to seven years to get to a position where - and I'll use percentages, though I don't think they tell the whole story - we were covering about 50% of our operating and impact costs through trading. Over the next 15 years we fluctuated between 60 and 90%, and we're sitting at about 70% now. There are so many things that come into play in that mix.

When I think about the lived experience as a practitioner running an enterprise, what sustainability actually means to me on a day-to-day basis is: When I come to work, I'm going to be able to carry out the work we need to do that day smoothly, with the resources we need, and focus on what we need to achieve - trucks coming in, items being processed, people being supported.

Sustainability is being able to do the day's work without having to change priorities because there's a crisis we're managing, often around cash flow. So the day-to-day is the primary experience of being sustainable. But there's also always, in the back of our mind - and the phrase 'valley of death' comes up in the Learn Book - this question of whether not only can we deliver today, but are we going to be able to sustain our purposes and draw on the tools and options we need to sustain the business into the future.

There's this everyday element of sustainability, and then there's the bigger question: do we have the tools and options we need to ride out the market, to ride out the changes in the sector, and to stay on track with our purposes?

Loretta Bolotin: Thank you Sally.

Sally Quinn: Sorry, I could say a lot more.

Loretta Bolotin: I know you could. It is really a hot topic.

We heard so much from leaders around moving away from fixed percentages, and I like that idea of viewing a WISE along its journey - moving towards higher revenue generation at certain times and moving back at others. It really does reflect the nuance.

Alexie, what key messages from the Learn Book and your experience would you share with funders when it comes to shaping the view of sustainability and impact costs?

Alexie Seller: Thanks Loretta and Sally. So much to share from your experience there.

I just wanted to note that a lot of my reflections in this process also come from my time leading Pollinate Group across India and Nepal, because that was, to Sally's point, a Work Integration Social Enterprise without us even knowing it. I actually finished my role there before I became aware of the WISE movement, so there's been some reprogramming of thinking to align with how it's talked about now.

The really key thing I'd say first is this: Sustainability, as it comes to me as a practitioner experiencing the conversation with funders, is almost a proxy for talking about risk. We could just have the conversation about risk instead of talking about getting sustainable, especially because sustainability off trade - if we imagine that's the pathway - isn't necessarily a solution. It doesn't remove risk, it doesn't necessarily control the outcome or make things better or more impactful.

I think 'proxy' is a useful term because the broader conversation I'm interested in having is: what's underneath these questions? Why are we asking them? Is there something real to consider about the assumptions we're making on both sides of this partnership about what the future might look like, and what is the right decision for this particular moment?

The other piece I wanted to share is a bit of the storyline of Pollinate in terms of its model. It came from a mission of enabling access to energy in very poor communities through a sales network. The salespeople were initially entrepreneurs. They then graduated to an employment structure because of the nature of the work, and that was a shift we had to make. Then we made quite a significant mission shift, recognising that we could do much more impactful work if we enabled women who lived in those communities to start their own businesses supplying the same product line.

So they became the entrepreneurs. And then there was a really ethical question of how much of a profit margin we could hold from women coming from extreme poverty selling a product.

All through that journey, if I'm honest, at the outset our heads as a founding group were very focused on break-even. It was one of the first conversations we had as co-founders: A sales agent needs to sell 40 lights in a month, and then this thing can scale and will be highly successful.

I'm somewhat surprised at how long it took us to get there, but it did take about five years for me to finally say, okay, we need to let go of that really narrow view of break-even as success, because there are different things here that we now know and are experiencing - other ways we can do much deeper impact if we relieve ourselves of that pressure.

And that's what allowed a complete shift in our mission that then enabled much deeper impact with women. The organisation merged with a Nepal network, which massively expanded its reach. Since my departure they've again shifted to working with other organisations that have women's networks and enabling them to start their own businesses in whatever field - and actually reduced staff count through that journey.

So there's a really interesting exploration there of understanding over time what you're trying to do and what impact you're trying to achieve. There will be variance in your model, variance in your trade, variance in lots of things. The real focus is on aligning around where it is you're trying to go in the partnership, and supporting that to continue.

Loretta Bolotin: Thanks so much Alexie, and thank you for bringing colour with your own experience at Pollinate.

One of the quotes that jumps out in the Learn Book is about abandoning a fixed position around revenue composition and actually zooming out to take a longer-term view of sustainability. One of the WISE leaders talked about approaching that with their funders, zooming out and asking: can we continue to deliver on our mission into the long term? What is that timeframe and how are we measuring success around that? There's a little gem around that within the resource.

Another interesting theme was the relationship between risk and failure. There is a sense - and I have a quote, hopefully within the Learn Book, if not within a notebook somewhere - from someone in our philanthropic advisory group who said: Fear of failure is holding back honest conversations about risk and truly unlocking the role of risk capital.

Alexie, the conversation about risk and failure also connects closely to some of the pressures we heard from WISEs to scale, and perhaps not understanding the different types of scale available to them. From your perspective, what advice would you give to WISE leaders who are weighing up whether, when and how to scale?

Alexie Seller: It's a huge question. And I think there was something in there as well about resisting the pressure - scaling for purpose, not pressure - being really mindful of why that step is being taken and where the demand is coming from.

Is that demand truly coming from the groups who will enable the model to function? Funding is important, but it's not the only contributor to that journey.

I do think - and this is a process I'm in right now at Impact North, which isn't in the WISE context but applies to any organisation, particularly a nonprofit where your funding may be insecure - really focusing on the impact scale first, as opposed to the growth of the organisation. Growth of the organisation doesn't necessarily translate to impact scale. Pollinate's recent transition, I think, articulates that really clearly.

Loretta Bolotin: So by that, Alexie, you mean focusing on the growth of the impact - the number of individuals who can access employment, or the change in the system that surrounds that impact?

Alexie Seller: Yes, and there can be many ways to get there. What's really hard personally, in my experience as a founder, is that you spend the early years setting up and growing your business, and your job is to convince everyone around you that this is a great idea and everyone should come with you on the journey. That applies to staff, funders, people you're working with in community. And there comes a moment where, in my experience, you start to switch over to: Okay, we now have to question some of these early assumptions. Because you do need to, in a way, persuade people to see a thing tested and explored and understood. And then you need to catch yourself as a leader and think about whether you're just continuing down a path you established a long time ago, or whether you're actually listening to what's going on in the current state. That is a really hard thing to do.

It's actually only happened for me, in both of my CEO roles, through some kind of external force that's pushed me to take a different look at where we're going and what we're doing. It's not an easy journey. So for WISE leaders out there: Many of us are having that conversation amongst ourselves. Finding a safe place to genuinely question - you probably have doubts about your model. I do. I've had doubts about everything I've built across these organisations, all the time. I have very few people I can voice those doubts with. I usually find peers are the best because there's a common understanding that, yes, we all know we're navigating something difficult and trying to make sense of ideas in our heads and see how they land in practice.

It's really important we continue to have those honest conversations. And the more honest we are with ourselves as leaders and with our own teams, the more we permit that conversation to happen, where different ways of thinking can be uncovered.

If everyone thinks you know what you're doing and you're 100% certain the outcome will be achieved, people start to follow that message and there's no space to say: hey, this could be done in a very different way, or I genuinely have fears and concerns about the direction we're heading. It does require some vulnerability from leadership.

And I'm laughing at myself at the moment because I feel like I'm on the second run of this journey and I still fell into the same trap. I was like, I thought I knew how to do this, and I've just completely ignored my earlier learnings - which is another part of learning.

Your staff are really critical in this too because they will usually be the source of the great ideas that support different thinking and scale. For all the controversy around that word, it's useful to think about. We have big problems in the world. Everyone in this room wants to see solutions to big problems. It's quite hard to hold yourself to a place of, I'm not going to scale because this is just practical and real. A lot of us might feel disempowered by that. We want to see ourselves as being able to work together to create collective impact, and saying 'just don't scale' limits our vision and our motivation to carry on and navigate these hard things.

My advice is: scale with nuance. Think about all of the options. Consider how you can do it differently. Let it be an open-source collaboration so that different ways of thinking can come in, because there is more than one way. But as a founder, I've found you tend to lock in to an early model from the beginning, and it's quite hard to move away from that.

Loretta Bolotin: Thank you Alexie. I really appreciate that, and I appreciate the call to reflect. I think the new phrase is: Doubt out loud, alongside your peers and funders, as you're planning for scale.

Sally, through Green Collect's story and case study, you've experienced firsthand that intersection of risk, innovation and scale. When plans shift or assumptions are tested, what can these moments reveal, and how can funders and WISE leaders respond better? We've just got a couple of minutes, so if you can keep your answer fairly succinct.

Sally Quinn: Alexie touched on that ability to have the real conversation, to be vulnerable and to just say how it is. And there are lots of reasons why sometimes we don't want to do that.

I had a conversation just yesterday with the bank - a traditional bank business services contact - and talked about some hardships. The person on the other end of the phone, who was not part of this sector, just said: Oh yeah, that's happening for businesses all the time, we can defer a payment for three months. And I felt normal. It really normalised something for me. I'd had so many of these conversations that week and to get the response, oh, we can do something about that for you today - that was significant.

That's probably not the main point I want to make, but I think it speaks to how the way you anticipate being received shifts the way you position something. I think it stems back to some of the assumptions underneath. If you're still relying on 30% external funding, there can be a sense that you haven't quite made the gold standard - that you're in a deficit position - rather than thinking: Wow, you're covering your charitable purposes through 70% earned revenue, and philanthropy or government only needs to supplement 30%. Those underlying assumptions then shape how we feel in a crisis too.

What happened to us is that we really needed immediate action. Things were not going to plan. We quickly identified the internal levers we had to shift things. But we knew that restructuring would cost money sooner, in order to achieve sustainability in the short to medium term. We couldn't get anyone to contribute to those costs, so we sourced friends and family loans to enable the restructure. We achieved everything we needed to through that process.

There was some really significant funding that came from the WISE Grant, and I want to genuinely acknowledge that group of funders who responded to enterprises like ours. But for us, that came nine months after we actually needed to act. We weren't able to access any assistance in the immediate moment, so we drew on people who believed in the mission. There was something really missing in being able to have the honest conversation and activate external levers quickly enough to enable that.

Loretta Bolotin: Thank you so much, Sally. 

I encourage everyone, once you get the Learn Book in your hands, to jump into the Green Collect case study. Sally, you're so generous with your feedback and advice, having been through the roller coaster that is running any kind of business. There are some key learnings at the back for not only WISE, but for funders as well. Thank you for being so candid in sharing your story. Thank you both and I wish you both the best of luck with your enterprises and the support you're offering. I'll hand over to Nina now so we can bring in a wider conversation on anything that's bubbling in the chat.

Nina Yousefpour: Thanks, Sally and Alexie.

Just to round that off: Most major industries in Australia are subsidised. So we apply different mindsets to different things, and sometimes the logic doesn't translate cleanly across sectors.

There are a couple of questions in the chat. The first is from Adam Ognall at Gandel Foundation. I'll also add a connected question of my own. The first part is around the fact that not every funder has the capability to do the kind of due diligence required when it comes to WISE or social enterprise - it's a bit different from straight charity initiatives. And Adam's question is around risk: Can you share an example of a risk you took with a funding relationship that you're most proud of, and whether it paid off?

Sally McGeoch: I'll jump in first, and Lisa, feel free to add after me.

On Adam's question around risk: There have been many instances where our partners have approached us with significant cash flow issues requiring flexible or new funding to support them through a considered plan out of that situation. It's difficult to mention specific enterprises here. But as a funder, you could look at a situation and think: Even with what we can provide, it's not going to serve the needs of that organisation right now. That's a real risk.

But the way we've approached it - and it's something we've really cultivated over the past five or six years as a relatively small funder - is to ask: Who else can we bring in around this? Who are the other funders of this organisation? How can we convene a collective approach and use our commitment as leverage to bring others in? That's how we've tried to work in the sector. We haven't always been able to play that role, but where we can, it has been effective.

So I'd call out to other foundations on the call: If you've got partners who really need support, bring in others around you and build the case. It definitely takes more than one funder to wrap their arms around these organisations.

On due diligence: we were very fortunate as a corporate foundation to be able to draw in risk and finance experts who helped us with that process, which we then shared. But the WISE Grant is another model worth knowing about. Nine foundations worked collectively to combine due diligence, and that process is documented in the appendix of the Learn Book, in the Grant Making Guide. Even as a small funder, pooling resources as part of a collaborative really helps leverage expertise across foundations. And the benefit of a collaborative approach is the shared learning and capability-building that happens in that forum. For those funders who haven't heard of it, the WISE Grant is a fantastic way to share risk and share the load around due diligence. If you want to follow that up, get in touch with the Greater Melbourne Foundation.

Lisa Waldron: I'll just briefly add.

Adam, we also structured the case studies around an analogy that came up at the Jobs Summit last year: The iceberg and the Titanic sailing to America and trying to avoid the icebergs along the way. The case studies in the Learn Book showcase that social enterprise sustainability isn't just about avoiding risk. It's really about having the right capabilities, the relationships and the funding structures to navigate it.

For us as funders, the role isn't just to fund success above the waterline - it's to understand and support what sits beneath it, and to help organisations that can see the icebergs navigate around them. Some of our proudest stories are of organisations we supported as they navigated those icebergs, not just at the very start of the journey. And the case studies do include some that unfortunately did hit that proverbial iceberg as well. We hope they give you a sense of both kinds of stories.

Nina Yousefpour: Thank you. Lisa and Sally, there are a list of questions here. We unfortunately won't get time to go through them all, but if you reach out to us separately we can answer them directly.

I do want to go to Richard's question, which I think is directed again to Sally and Lisa: What have you found connects with those outside of the WISE sector in terms of garnering broader support from people who aren't already in the know?

Sally McGeoch: Great question. Loretta really touched on this strongly in her opening: one of the key insights from the Learn Book is that WISEs produce a wide range of social, environmental and economic outcomes for communities, so people can approach them through many different lenses.

Just off the top of my head: There's real interest in place-based approaches right now, and a cohort of funders interested in those sorts of approaches. A lot of what social enterprises do is respond to disadvantage or job exclusion in place. So that's one entry point.

I also think philanthropy needs to do better at cross-pollination. We can get quite siloed - even within Philanthropy Australia there are all these separate networks, and we need to get better at sharing models and innovations across groups. Collective funding approaches can help here too: people can come in even without strong knowledge of the WISE community, test out a role, learn and get involved in networks. I'm conscious of time, so I'll leave it there. Lisa, anything to add?

Lisa Waldron: There's also the IDAC collaboration - the Investment Dialogue for Australian Children - so that's a good additional tip around funder collabs.

Nina Yousefpour: Thank you, everyone. I'm going to hand over to Jess Moore to wrap us up.

Jess Moore: Thanks Nina, and big thanks to Sally, Lisa, Loretta, Alexie and Sally Quinn for sharing such valuable experiences with us today.

All people who want access to decent work should be able to choose it. But that's not the case in Australia currently, and WISEs have a distinct and critical role to play in changing this.

My key thought during today's conversation is that WISEs provide a service for which they're not currently paid. WISEs run businesses, often selling services and products into the market, but they are not paid, for the most part, for the contributions they make around employment outcomes. And that has to change if they are to scale, if they are to realise the contribution that's needed.

I do use that word 'scale' intentionally, because ultimately we do want WISEs collectively to scale their contribution in Australia. We just don't want it to be for perverse reasons.

If you work in government and you're on this call today, your government has the power to change this. If you work in philanthropy and you're on this call today, you have a catalytic role to play in showing and testing how this can work and change.

I want to thank everyone for joining the call. A huge thanks to the Westpac Foundation and GoodWolf Partners. Westpac Foundation: I admire and am so grateful for what you have done in your strategic shift, ensuring that the learnings from this space are shared broadly so that they can be built on.

I want to say thanks to the Social Enterprise Australia crew in the background who do a lot of invisible work to make events like this happen. And huge thanks to all of you for joining today's call.