A power of good
Grace Brennan created Buy from the Bush from her kitchen table, showing us the power of purpose-driven social media. With a new generation of business leaders focussing on social impact, can technology save us from ourselves? By Victoria Baker.
a stock picture of an egg became the most ‘liked’ image on Instagram, after a viral campaign to beat its nearest contender, a post by Kylie Jenner. At that point, it was not unreasonable to feel some level of despair about humanity. Was this what we had come to? Had we really created all this technology only to squander it all on short-term lols?
Just nine months later, Grace Brennan, sitting at her kitchen table in Warren, a small town in country New South Wales, picked up her phone and started a new account on Instagram. She called it @buyfromthebush. The driver was drought, which was affecting her own family – her husband is a farmer – and all the families and businesses in her local community. “I had been stewing on the impact of drought on our local community and on my friends and the people around me for some time, and feeling quite helpless,” she says.
The plan was simple: to introduce her own network to the local businesses she loved, and encourage them to do their Christmas shopping with regional retailers. “I was confident, having grown up in Sydney, that people in the city did care about drought, and did care about rural communities, and wanted to help, but possibly weren’t enabled to. Charity is hard for people in difficult times, but I think Christmas shopping was a more fun way to introduce these businesses. It felt like the right time; like there might be an appetite for people to buy from these people and know that they were making a real difference in their lives in a very tough economic climate.”
And appetite there was. If there was any doubt about the power of social media to build a community behind a good cause, it dissipated fast. The Buy from the Bush idea hit our collective consciousness hard: the account had 10,000 followers within five days, and 100,000 within a month. Having worked in community development in the past, and as an entrepreneur herself (Brennan is a co-founder of AgDraft, an online employment platform for rural and regional workers), she understood the value of this following. While her initial aim was to create immediate revenue for the regional businesses she championed, she knew it also presented a larger opportunity to develop her audience’s understanding of the impact of drought beyond the cliched images of emaciated sheep and dry dams. “We are used to seeing and hearing about what drought does to agriculture and to farming,” she says. “It’s almost like you can write the script in your head, and I think people disengage from that because it’s so cliched. The reality is that there are families and households that don’t own land, and don’t work in agriculture, but
IN JANUARY 2019,
are hugely affected by drought. They might be butchers, or lawyers or hairdressers or teachers, all of whom are suffering this experience of drought, and that is a much easier story to connect to for people in the city. Everyone understands the nature of working hard and trying to create a brighter future for yourself; most people understand debt and the stresses around debt.”
Brennan also felt a female-led perspective was missing from the story. “What I was seeing all around me was the female experience of drought. Women, who might be partners of farmers or farmers themselves, holding up their homes, trying to keep spirits high, and
often running side businesses and that income becoming increasingly important to their families. Everywhere around me I see incredible hustle and ingenuity and creativity that rises up in the quest to make a dollar at a time like this, and often it’s women getting shit done for their families, which is so inspiring.” Buy from the Bush has been entirely volunteer-run so far, and makes no income of its own. The challenge now is to create a sustainable business out of the movement. “The big-picture aim is to achieve long-term investment and sustainability in rural communities and connect the city with country,” says Brennan.
By Christmas, the drought had been knocked off the front pages by its ugly twin: fire. With bushfires burning across the states, some at catastrophic level, Australians rallied to the cause, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to aid relief. Actor and comedian Celeste Barber raised more than $50 million via a Facebook appeal, and while she has attracted criticism over the details of her campaign, it is by any reckoning a stunning demonstration of the power of social media influence. It sometimes seems that our social media feeds are a place for virtue-signalling chatter without any practical action, but the last 12 months have shown us that individuals will respond to immediate need, especially when it’s local and relatable. But is short-term action the best we can do, with our short-term attention spans? What about driving meaningful change in the longer term?
One way to think about tech as a driver for social impact is education. Alexandra Clare founded nonprofit Re:Coded with her partner Marcello Bonatto in 2016 with a mission to prepare conflictaffected youth to enter the digital economy as software developers and entrepreneurs. Currently operating in Iraq, Yemen and Turkey, Re:Coded runs coding bootcamps, an accelerator and a coworking space. “We wanted to focus on preparing youth for the future of work through high-end technical skills and imparting a life-long learning mindset,” says Clare. “Coding also happens to be a skill that enables youth to transcend geographic boundaries with just a laptop and an internet connection and work remotely in the digital economy. But our ultimate goal when we started Re:Coded was for our students to become leaders in their communities. And that is the most powerful multiplier effect.”
Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Australian multi-billion-dollar design platform Canva, also emphasises the value of tech education. “Earlier this year, we launched Canva for Education and opened it up to all students and teachers worldwide for free,” she says. “Education is just one example of how we are using the best of Canva to support our future leaders with much-needed digital literacy skills.”
Today’s biggest businesses are tech businesses, with younger founders who think differently to traditional industry leaders. Google’s Gen-X founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin famously adopted the company motto “Don’t be evil” and wrote, at the time of their 2004 IPO: “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains.” This combining of profit with purpose was against the view that had prevailed since the 1970s that companies should focus on maximising profit for their shareholders, rather than any perceived ‘social’ causes. Since Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, was founded in 2005 with a percentage of Google’s profits, it has worked to share expertise, technology and cash with nonprofits working to change society for the better, including around $100 million of cash grants annually.
Locally, our best and brightest tech companies and founders are also ‘baking in’ their desire to be forces for good. Atlassian, headed by founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, was a co-founder of the Pledge 1% movement, which encourages early-stage corporate philanthropy. Under their model, companies pledge to donate 1% of their equity, time, product and profit to the causes and nonprofits they choose. The idea is that the pledge is made as the business is founded, when perhaps the stakes are low, but the outcomes are really felt when the business becomes successful. By setting the intention early to give back to society, it is hoped that it will stay top of mind as companies grow.
Melanie Perkins recently announced Canva’s commitment to the Pledge 1%, motivated by her and Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht’s desire to bring a little more equality to the world. “Years ago when I was backpacking with Cliff in India, we met a young man who was working at a tiny internet cafe,” she says. “He was living away from his family and working around the clock seven days a week. He slept there each night and made a dollar each day. Meeting this young man made me realise that while I do work hard, there are so many people in the world who work just as hard. The vast difference between us lies in the opportunity that I was given: being born in Australia, getting a good education, having a supportive family – yet there are so many people who are just as deserving of a good opportunity but have no means to make it happen. We want to bring out the best of Canva to help solve global challenges in the most impactful way possible.” Already providing its paid product for free to more than 35,000 nonprofits around the world, Canva has also recently provided every team member with three days of paid volunteering leave each year to make a positive impact for a cause they believe in.
Is this the beginning of a new, more integrated age of philanthropy? Technology has meant our work and personal lives have become entwined. It makes sense then that we should want to see our personal ideals more closely reflected in our workplaces. As humans we strive for meaning and purpose. As disaster after disaster unfolds in 2020, we are re-focussing on community, both local and global. “I think it’s important to recognise the role we all play when it comes to shaping our future,” says Perkins. As business leaders, we are in a unique position to kick-start a movement and accomplish real change – it’s a huge but worthwhile responsibility. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s also an opportunity we all need to embrace if we are to lead boldly and make a real difference to the long-term success of our community.” Vogue Codes will take place later in 2020. Visit vogue.com.au/voguecodes for more information.
“As business leaders, we are in a unique position to kick-start a movement and accomplish real change … it’s a worthwhile responsibility”