Karen Mahlab AM On Growing The Social Economy And Running A Business For Good

Karen Mahlab AM is a passionate believer in the power of community and connection and serially ignites projects that build both. She has been an innovator in opening the channels of connection between communities, not-for-profit organisations, volunteers, philanthropy and business.

Over three decades she has been a Publisher, Media owner, business proprietor, social entrepreneur and board member, concurrently sitting on a wide variety of commercial and not for profit boards.

She founded one of Australia's first and best known digital social enterprises: Pro Bono Australia - Australia's foremost media organisation for civil society organisations serving 1.9 million visitors annually and 70,000 News Service subscribers.

Karen has also co-founded The Public Interest Journalism Initiative, PS Media, Macro Melbourne and a host of other social enterprise and philanthropic startups.

Karen has a deep interest in energetic and psycho-therapeutic processes and has studied them over many years. She incorporates the insights arising from them into her work.

Karen was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia received 2015 for services to the Not for Profit Sector and Innovation in Philanthropy. She was also named in 2012 as one of Australias top 100 Women of influence.

Karen discusses what to consider when scaling your business, the growth of the social economy and communicating impact to audiences effectively.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Karen, could you please share your background and what led to your interest and work in media?

[Karen Mahlab AM] - There is a long answer to that question, but in brief, I came from a business and social activist family. My mother was very involved in the second wave of feminism, I grew up in that environment and I attended a school that made me not only educated, but an independent thinker. I studied economics but also did visual arts, so I always came from one discipline and stretched across a divide to another. It seems to always be the way that I've worked. After that, I travelled for a year, and ended up working for big corporates in marketing and advertising. Specifically, this included Unilever who have done a lot of work in CSR and an advertising agency called Ogilvy Australia. I was working there in the eighties, and I don't know if you have seen the television series Madmen, but even though it was the eighties, it was seriously filled with characters straight out of that series! The atmosphere and the general work was for Shell, Barbie and all different clients which were interesting.

In terms of understanding how corporates work, the clients and the people in the agency that I loved working with were actually those involved with pro bono cases, like the Mental Health Research Institute.

Looking back, that was a real awakening for my desire to be working on issues with people who held values and changemakers similar to them. The agency in the recession lost a lot of major clients, and then I lost my job. After licking my wounds, I was invited to work in my mother's directory publishing company, which I then bought from her and grew. My kids were young, I was running the company, and after a number of years I became really dissatisfied with the notion of business for business's sake and outcomes around profit. I took a three-month sabbatical, and it was at the beginning of the 2000's which was an incredible time for technology because it was the birth of the internet. It's hard to picture looking back now that there was no Facebook or Google and not many people had emails. I started to read work from people like Anita Roddick, who started The Body Shop which made a tremendous impact.

I read books on technology and decided that what I really wanted to do was to start up an organisation that would build and help community organisations use technology.

I called this idea Pro Bono Australia, and I flipped what was The Guide To Giving (which we still have) into a new business. At that time, social enterprise wasn't a term. I was really struggling to describe to other people what the ethics, sense and purpose of this new organisation was that I was starting up. I remember driving along and it came to me that I actually was a "social purpose business venture." That was the term I used to describe myself to other people, and at that point, there was very few people around who were setting up businesses for good. I had no idea I was eventually going to create a media organisation, which at its front end is what Pro Bono Australia is now. The other thing about Pro Bono Australia is I'm still holding this bigger picture of not just being a social enterprise but continuing to support the emergence of the social economy as a whole.

By the social economy, I mean people who are engaged in Australian civil society, whether that be not-for-profits organizations or charities.

This also includes individuals who incorporate social responsibility into their lives, want to invest in impact and want to volunteer and give their money through philanthropy. Pro Bono Australia really stretches like an umbrella over the social economy and delivers services to grow it to become a bigger proportion of the global economy.

As the founder of Pro Bono Australia, how have you seen this social enterprise sector grow and develop since you started?

It's actually really funny, because Pro Bono Australia had its twenty-year anniversary last year. We were going to have a big event, but because of COVID-19 it didn't happen. What we did is we wrote a series of articles on the last twenty-years, pulling together a timeline of articles that we've written over the past twenty-years. You can find on our website timelines, and we've created those for each section of the social economy. The timeline of social enterprises begins in March 2001 when the first social entrepreneurs’ alliance launched. I can see from the articles that it was by approximately 2005 that social enterprise was starting to be used more widely as a term. Now, we have state government funding and a national alliance of social enterprise practitioners. It's been absolutely incredible to see the growth of everything purpose and impact driven.

I have to say, as someone who started a social enterprise with no network in Australia, I went to a conference in America probably fifteen years ago and met all these people who understood what I was saying at that time when I was using the term "social purpose business venture.” There was a network of people in America for that, and I felt I was with kindred spirits and had found my tribe, but they were in America. If I had been able to start Pro Bono Australia here and have that, it would have been so much easier because people literally did not understand what you were talking about.

People didn't understand your motivation, as the profit motive in business and the charity not-for-profit sector for good were very far apart.

There was very different language then, and the language between the two was not understood. It was seen as jargon in both the business and not-for-profit sector. There's been a tremendous emergence of not only social enterprise organisations, but the language between sectors and alliances as people. All of that creates an ecosystem, and now there are so many that we've got a whole ecosystem of social enterprises.

What needs to be done in Australia right now to further grow and develop the business for good movement?

The way I describe running a business for good is like riding a horse where you've got two reins. One is the impact rein, and the other is the financial return rein. Your aim as the head of a social enterprise is to keep the horse moving forward. I feel as though with the two sets of reins, the ability to measure impact and make yourself financially resilient are important and still being developed. In terms of measuring impact, there's a lot of organisations which are still developing how to do that. Pro Bono Australia is now an accredited BCorp. BLabs have an international accreditation process. When we first started with them as an early adopter in 2013, they didn't value intermediary organisations like us but they have adjusted as they've learned and grown. That reflects the whole measurement of "Impact". It's growing increasingly sophisticated.

There still needs to be work done in how social enterprises measure impact, and particularly when the impact involves intangibles. If those intangibles are connection, compassion, kindness or a sense of belonging, what value do we put on that?

Impact measurement still needs working on. What is now happening is there is a whole number of organisations that have been set up to financially invest in and support the early days and provide seed funding for the sustainable functioning of social enterprises. I can see lots of impact funds starting up in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Impact clubs are starting up, and so I think all of that speaks to the growth of business for good profile. More media organisations are featuring and discussing the work of social enterprises across Australia.

You have extensive experience in media, and you've helped spotlight different organisations over the years. What are your key tips for social enterprises who are looking to gain more exposure and connect with our communities and target audience?

I have been so proud of the movements that we at Pro Bono Australia have featured and grown over time. I think we've maintained a very valuable role in amplifying all those movements. Your question is more of a marketing and communication question but in general terms..

In general terms, you need to figure out who your stakeholders are, what is the best way to access the news, what is the message you want to convey and what do you want them to think? You always ask them to reflect back on what they want from you, and I think having the people that you're talking to feel seen, heard and connected too always is the key. Sending out external communications to media organisations is really important, especially on social media. You need to work out what you're saying and who are your audiences.

What advice would you give to other social entrepreneurs in that scaling stage who are working to grow their organisation further?

The advice I'd give them is to work out what you want to do by scaling. What is it that you want to achieve by growing bigger? How do you better serve your audiences and how are you going to get there financially?

I think not everything scales, and importantly a lot of ideas shouldn't scale, as they should go deeper with what you are trying to achieve rather than necessarily become bigger.

If you do grow bigger, how do you hold on to your core principles and values moving forward? How do you not sell the idea out? I think that notion of integrity in your social enterprise and how you maintain that is really important. In terms of getting the financial support you need, if you do want to scale, you need to scan the numerous impact investing funds and fund managers to see if any of them will fund you, put together a business case, and make sure you're doing something unique. If it's not unique, you should partner with other people who are offering similar value. Ego should not be at the centre of wanting to scale, but rather your view is to the impact that you want to make and how best to do that and then look at your finances to scale if that's needed.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that you believe are trending and creating positive and deep social change?

If you're asking about initiatives that I'm involved with personally, PS Media is a new organisation. I have a number of partners: Simon Crerar who was the editor and general manager of Buzzfeed in Australia, Rob Wise who owns a company called Be Collective and Margaret Simons who is one of Australia's foremost investigative journalists and academics in the media field. I started a local media organisation with them, and that is because local media has fallen into a crater in Australia. For example, last October during my local council elections, there was no local paper, so I had no idea who was standing for council or that there was an election until the moment I received my postal vote. On the postal vote were eight self-described blurbs written no doubt by the candidates themselves, with no objective coverage available through the Media as the local paper had closed.

We are wide open for disconnection at a community level and local corruption without local media. I don't know if your audience is across what's been happening with media, but the business model is being disrupted by the internet.

All the classified advertising that used to be at the back of newspapers that paid for the journalists to write at the front of the newspaper has gone to SEEK, Facebook or Google. People can't afford to pay for journalists anymore, and that has had the most impact at the local level. PS Media is a really exciting project, and it comes off the back of The Public Interest Journalism Initiative that Allen Fels is now chairing. Mannifera is a really interesting group of philanthropy coming together to address democratic issues in Australia, and I have to say that Pro Bono Australia runs the Impact 25 awards and the people who won the judges choice awards last year were amazing. Two of the winners were Sharing Stories, who create digital presentations of Indigenous Stories and The Home Stretch Campaign was raising the age of children moving in out-of-home care from 18 to 21. Amazing work.

Then, there are organisations like the Community Council of Australia, which are really at the forefront of representing sectoral issues on all fronts to the Government. The Impact 25 awards really display some amazing projects you can see on our website, pbaimpact.com and that lists all of those people doing incredible work.

To finish off, what books, blogs or podcasts would you recommend to our listeners for them to learn or grow?

There are a few books that I've read that have really shifted the way I look at things. One is funnily enough called Klara And The Sun, and it's a fictional novel about AI and it was written by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is a fabulous read that takes you into the realm of AI. The other book I've just read is Apollo's Arrow by Nicholas Christakis, an American professor at Yale discussing post pandemic issues. The reason I like his work is that he talks about social structures.

He really addresses that we've always had this Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, but he counteracts that notion through demonstrating we survive when we connect.

He has the evidence-base and has performed the studies to show what that looks like in our social structures and that it is in fact already present in every human. I find that a very hopeful book, and it is good to model on and change that competitive framework. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but unfortunately, I do listen to them at night and sometimes they put me to sleep (which means I miss half the episodes)! I love the Coronacast and On Being which is Krista Tippett's podcast. There is another podcast called Exponential Wisdom, which is American and talks about what is coming in the future. If you enjoy meditation then there is a woman called Tara Brach, and she is wonderful for listening to late at night.