M.A.D for Peace founder Gill Hicks
There are inspirational stories. Then there is Dr Gillian Claire “Gill” Hicks, AM, MBE, FRSA. Born in Adelaide and battle-hardened in London, Hicks is the founder of the UK-based not-for-profit organisation M.A.D. for Peace and the owner of the Australian consulting firm M.A.D. Minds. To help pay the bills, Hicks is also a highly sought-after motivational speaker, as well as an author and the trustee of several cultural organisations.
The peripatetic Hicks, who returned to live in Adelaide in 2012, started on the lucrative speaking tour after the shocking terrorist bombing attack on the London train she was taking to work on July 7, 2005. Instilled with an incredible life force, Hicks, who was employed by a British government quango, the Design Council, was the last living victim rescued. With her legs amputated below the knee and other severe injuries, Hicks was not expected to live when admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital without a name and identified only as “One Unknown”.
Hicks, who’d never ventured outside Adelaide, trod the familiar expatriate path to London in 1991. While still a teenager, Hicks lost both her parents within a year. It was her mother’s death at 53 from cancer that set Hicks on the road to London. “It was a huge shock, and rather than inheriting anything we had to pay the debt,” she recalls. “That was quite a rude awakening into the realities of life and death at that moment.”
With just enough money for a plane ticket, Hicks admits there was a “level of naivety” about migrating to the Old Dart. “I completely believed that London is where I would find who I was meant to be, and with that the success and I guess fortune.”
Devoid of tertiary qualifications, Hicks, who has an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University, arrived in Britain as a severe economic downturn hit. With employment opportunities slim, she was forced to scribble up the ubiquitous menu chalkboards found outside a bevy of London pubs.
Despite her modest beginnings, she absorbed life and financial lessons. “I was overwhelmed by the amount of homelessness that I encountered. Also I was living in a shared house that had no electricity and no hot running water because there was just no money.”
The optimistic Hicks justified her lifestyle by telling herself that “well, it’s character building, and it’s going to keep me motivated”. At no time did she consider her predicament ridiculous or contemplate going back home.
Apart from the parlous economy, Hicks grappled with a level of employment injustice. The optimistic Aussie was regularly told: “Why should we employ you while we’ve got so many of our people out of work, and your visa is only for two years, and then you’re going?” She persevered and by her mid-20s was the publishing director of Blueprint, an architecture and design magazine, before moving onto the Design Council. Her impressive résumé before the bombings also included a role as a director of the Dangerous Minds design consultancy.
While seeking meaningful employment, Hicks developed friendships with 10 homeless people. She recalls: “I just said, ‘Look, I have no money to give you but I want to do something. Could you come up with an idea,’ and they did.” Hicks’s homeless friends asked her to save money for them. She recalls some of them saying: “If we give you some money every day, could you save it for us so that we’re not blowing it all on substances or whatever.”
Consequently, Hicks accepted her first not-for-profit role as “the bank of Gill” for her itinerant friends, using little envelopes to squirrel away their savings. “It was powerful because all they knew was my first name, and all I knew was their first name. I could’ve just decided I’ll take a different street and pocket the cash.
“That sense of human trust was something that informed my early days there [in London] and gave me a real sense of what’s important. Also, how fragile is the ecosystem that we live in and the fragility of it all.”
Hicks admits she rarely considered the importance of money management until her daughter, Amelie, now 5, was born
“She's got a bank account, and she understands what that looks like with money going in. She understands when we're out somewhere that this all costs money, that everything costs money.” Hicks even counsels Amelie about the influence of television advertising, telling her daughter: “Look, these are fantastic, there are great songs but what they're trying to do is make you buy something.”
The streets of London provided Hicks with her first lessons about the value of money. “My ideas changed – that [money] is not about wealth but about choice and being able to have choices that keep you away from sliding off the edge. That to me then became the drive to make sure I've got a sustainable pot [of money].”
Extraordinarily, Hicks seems to have found a level of peace with Germaine Lindsay, the 19-year-old suicide bomber who transformed her life. Detonating the bomb in his backpack, Lindsay not only mangled the legs of Hicks but he also took the lives of 26 strangers. She remembers: “I was one person away from the bomber, and suddenly there's complete blackness. If you can take a breath and in that space of a breath the world changes and you have no idea what happened.
“I didn't know it was a bomb or terrorism or anything like that until weeks later and I was shocked because that stuff doesn't happen to you.”
Hicks and the other survivors were trapped for about an hour until rescuers reached the shattered train carriage. “I was very conscious in that time, and for all of us who were able to communicate, there was a sense that whatever's happened, that is not what we need to think about. It was about how do we collectively keep each other alive and get out of here.”
Despite her horrific injuries, the clear-thinking Hicks tied tourniquets around her legs, a decision she believes gave her an extra 10 minutes and would prove vital to her survival.
Due to her injuries and blood loss, Hicks was technically dead for 28 minutes. Then the medical staff decided to continue her resuscitation for precisely three minutes and 30 seconds. Providentially, with just 30 seconds of the resuscitation left “there was a heartbeat that came back onto the monitor”. Curiously, despite having no vital signs Hicks was still able to talk with her rescuers.
“So I love that idea that really, it's by the thin margin of 30 seconds that I'm here, and it's given me an absolute appreciation for what can we do in under a minute. If life and death could be that tight, then what effectively can we do that's positive to make a difference in that time?”
Hicks's relationship with money remained unchanged after the bombing. “I always, always stuck to a very simple rule, which was to know where every single pound from the business was going. If I was having meetings with accountants, I'd say, ‘All I want is to be able to track the life of every single pound.' How it comes in, where it goes out and how do we make sure we've got more coming in and less going out. It became a very simple equation for me.”
After 2005, Hicks left the Design Council to launch into the business of peace building. “I must say if one goes into peace building thinking that you'll make a financial fortune you'll be disappointed. So therefore I rely so much now on the wonderful optimism of the world that something will happen, and something will fund this next exercise.”
Since London, Hicks has experienced a financial planning catharsis. “I see the planning of finances as a real luxury, and I've got to change that mode of thinking. For me, it's project by project, and it's just making sure there's enough for that moment. There's never been the luxury of planning, and that's where I'd like to start to shift my relationship with money.”
That admission aside, Hicks consults her accountants regularly. “As an arts person I was always, ‘Oh well, left brain, right brain, and we'll never understand each other.' However, now I have a real appreciation for the creativity and the ability of a great accountant.
“A great accountant can step into a creative world and be able to see where the opportunities are to plan and to make money work better. Because again, for me, it's all about choice. And even more so now that I'm a parent.”
“I rely so much now on the wonderful optimism of the world that something will happen”