Cathy Hunt On How Female Founders Are Leading Cross-Sectoral Social Impact

Cathy is a successful consultant, business woman and festival producer, with over thirty years experience providing research and advice to governments, architects, arts and cultural organisations and artists in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong in her role as co-founder of consulting company Positive Solutions.

Cathy is a Global WOW Advisor and the Executive Director of the cultural enterprise Of One Mind, producers of WOW Festivals in Australia. Cathy has overseen the development of WOW across the Country since 2013, but more recently focused in Queensland. Following the success of the international WOW Festival as part of the 2018 Commonwealth Games, Cathy led a team to develop and deliver WOW Australia 2020-22,

Cathy is a Board Director of the State film investment agency Screen Queensland, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Queensland Government Women's Strategy and in January 2023 was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant services to arts and culture and women.

Cathy discusses creating a collaborative, gender equal world through an action led movement driven by creativity, cultural dialogue, debate and celebration.

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

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are today?

[Cathy Hunt] - I suppose my life work has been across two streams really. One has been as a Creative Producer of cultural events and activities, the other as a consultant and businessperson. I developed my own consultancy in a specialised area and built that up into a business. Those two experiences started in the creative space. That's where I came from; the Arts. I started as an events producer and moved into what was a burgeoning area at the time. This was back in the UK, where the professionalisation of Arts administration and the cultural sector were growing. That led me into creating one of the first Arts management consultancies in the UK in partnership with an Australian, somebody who ended up being my life partner for many years. My story weaves in and out of those two areas, I was maintaining engagement with the actual content and understanding what it is to be an artist or a creative practitioner while consulting in the world of business development and learning the best structures and financing models to make it work.

On your journey, have there been any significant milestones for you?

The first was understanding the power of culture and creativity. I spent a lot of time working in Liverpool, in the UK. There I saw culture and creativity be such a vital part of regenerating a place, by focusing on a strengths-based approach to revive the culture of Liverpool. Liverpool is where the Beatles came from, that's where the poets and a lot of comedians came from. I was the first Director of the Festival of Comedy in Liverpool many years ago. Using that place based approach, celebrating your stories, life, culture, and then look at how that leads into being part of an economic solution for a place.

That was one thing, but the other thing I wanted to mention was the experience of growing as an organisation. There is this whole pressure often you think about when you start a company or a business, where you must grow it. You think the only way to do it is to get bigger and bigger and employ more people. We started doing that in the UK and got to a point where we were managing people, not doing what we were doing! We hadn't quite gotten big enough to have a middle management team, but it made us question at that point why we are doing this? We went back to our why and asked how do we grow the scale of what we're doing and the impact of what we're doing without having to necessarily grow our own entity? We started then working in partnership with other smaller organisations to create larger entities when we needed them to deliver bigger projects and a bigger impact. One of the things I get very frustrated about, particularly within the rhetoric of growing the economy, is thinking we must grow single businesses to employ more people. It was out of date when I was doing it, it's not the model for growing an economy, and for most people it’s not the business they want to run.

We must focus on good; you don't have to grow, but you must be sustainable. How do you build sustainability into something that will exist long-term?

What does a sustainable impact and business look like for people? How can entrepreneurs grow their income or impact without more people on board?

By the nature of what we are doing, if we wanted to grow, we would have to build a business with more specialties. We would directly be doing the employing of people. But you don't have to do that. You can do that in a much more flexible contract way while you build relationships with a range of different partners who can come together to deliver something bigger. That's what I like, but I'm also talking about a different aspect, where growth is the only thing people want to invest in. For governments, venture capitalists and other investors, it's often about growth. I've been involved in trying to bring new models of financing and thinking into the social and cultural sector over the last decade. I get very frustrated by investors using the same models and ways of thinking as you would within the broader commercial sector. There is nothing wrong with making sure in a community the small and medium scale family-led businesses also get the chance to receive investment, to make change and do things differently while growing a little bit to be able to deliver returns. I'm not saying you don't get it all for nothing and you won't deliver returns, but it doesn't always have to be at a grand scale.

Would it not be better to have a community of 30-50 thriving businesses all working off each other and maintaining some form of longevity because they built risk, sustainability, and other things into their business, rather than one single mega organisation which will potentially close the next time a new technology comes along?

It's a different way of thinking, almost a constellation way of thinking. I often think about how this would be better than just saying the future will be in big things.

As Executive Producer for Women of the World (WOW), can you tell us a little bit more about WOW and the impact you and your team are generating?

I'm the Executive Producer for WOW Australia. The WOW Foundation is based in the UK, set up 13 years ago by somebody I worked for, Jude Kelly. The reason I brought WOW to Australia (which was now about 10 years ago), was it coincided with two things going on in my life and the whole issue of gender inequality. We brought WOW to Australia the same year of Julia Gillard's Misogyny Speech in Parliament. We had seen what Jude was doing, and we thought we desperately needed a different type of conversation here around inequality. What Jude had done with creating WOW, and the structure of how a WOW Festival works was it has a conversation in a different way.

What WOW does first, is celebrate achievement. It comes from the perspective of working with artists and places the whole event within a cultural framework and a setting celebrating the amazing things women and girls have done. But within that, we begin to discuss and dissect the problems that remain and get some of the best local women's input.

We brought WOW out here, it was suggested to the Foundation it should go global, we were one of the people who set it on its global path in Australia. It was Queensland that took the whole thing to heart, and we've been developing the WOW movement here since. I had been in this position of running an organisation doing significant policy work in government, trying to make policy change at a macro level for some of the things I truly believed in (particularly within the cultural and creative sector).

I was becoming very frustrated with the lack of ability for systems change to occur when you didn't have a few people prepared to change themselves.

There was a lack of leaders within the space at the time who also had the capacity to be passionate about change. There were one or two, and I worked with one or two amazing people in government in particular who did have that ability. But I became frustrated and could see it was not going to happen; you can see when something just needs different people, a different environment to make change happen. I decided to go back to basics, because I know what motivates me, and what I see is that if I can get to grips with something back in producing and making things happen on the ground, I know I can shape it. I can't change governments to change big things, but I know I can go back to changing individuals and communities’ lives because of the nature of the work we do. That was seven or eight years ago that all happened, and that's when we started. We created a non-profit to build the WOW movement here in Australia.

How has the WOW movement grown beyond the UK and Australia?

It's on every continent and been in about 17-18 different cities. WOW Australia is probably one of the most progressed divisions, but WOW Rio in Brazil, Harlem in New York and London are probably the ones which have been going longest. Then there is a series of others throughout Asia, and one or two of happening in Africa, including one that's about to start, WOW Kigali in Rwanda. That is also being driven by my senior producer here in Australia, Joe Pratt. We all came together in London for the first time in March this year to talk about how you can use a global movement to create change. We brought one of our co-patrons in Australia, June Oscar, the amazing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner to London. She came to speak at WOW London and addressed the global WOW movement on the work she's been doing through her incredible Wiyi Yani U Thangani Women’s Voices Report and talked about where First Nations women sit globally. This is in the context of the change we need to make to be truly intersectional within our feminism and pursuit of change.

How can we utilise culturally aware, creative frameworks to help us solve problems? What examples or suggestions would you offer to people who are ready to start looking at problem solving differently?

One part of my background is in being a strategic planner, and I love this subject. What I always say to people is before you even start thinking about solving a problem, you've got to know why you're doing what you're doing. One of the biggest problems individuals and organisations, regardless of who they are themselves into, is even when they think they've got a problem, they forget why they're doing what they're doing in the first place. That is a big issue for all of us, teaching ourselves as individuals and organisations to think about the why rather than the how and the what. There are plenty of examples you can go to, the obvious being Simon Sinek who created the whole concept of thinking about why. It is so true, and you see it all the time, particularly with purpose-driven organisations in the cultural and social sector; including those businesses trying to be more purpose-driven. Thinking about why you are doing what you're doing should be done first, many get so bogged down in doing the day to day they forget to do that. Think about why you're doing what you're doing, and that might create the change. I also say to people everywhere to look to a different sector for inspiration. I would say to somebody in the private or corporate sector look to the Arts. I think we get sector bound; we get content driven. If you've got a particular problem, don't look at necessarily how your peer group or neighbour solves that problem, look somewhere else and see where and how that problem was solved in different places. Finally, there is the issue of deciding where creativity and culture can help.

I have this mantra; you cannot get social change without cultural change. You must have cultural change within an organisation or within the thinking about a problem to get the real change on the ground you want to have.

There's no better way to change the culture of your thinking or the culture of your organisation as to how it tackles a problem than by using storytelling, culture, and creativity. That's where I pull in the issue of the Arts. One of my great life experiences, just in terms of thinking about why I became so passionate about this is that I had the opportunity in London many years ago to take members of the Royal Ballet to one of the poorest housing estates and a community arts centre. This was for young men to see these dancers, to see their power, athleticism, beauty, grace, and interpretation. To see the look on those boy’s faces, the power that can change something in somebody to think, "I can do something differently. I can make something different happen." People often think about the arts as being used just to talk about social issues. But sometimes, it can be about the sheer beauty and impact on your mind and emotions obey listening to an incredible piece of music played live for the first time, seeing a dancer do something you cannot believe, or seeing something beautiful created visually in a film as well as the traditional narrative that might go along with that. It could be anything and everything. You get examples of where the arts have engaged with specific issues, and that's what we do. We commission women artists who are tackling a particular issue through their poetry, music, visual art or other medium, and people can see something that moves them in a way makes you think differently about something. But we know there are many ways in which people can practically use the arts to change their thinking. You should be thinking about getting creative people on your board. In the Arts, you're always forced to get businesspeople on your board, and my big belief is we need more creative people on business boards. The nature of some arts businesses, which are very big businesses, is they manage very complex situations. They must balance both the people with money and the content they're creating by taking risks. They do all these things, and they have experience with that way of thinking about problems. Putting that at a board level is one thing, but then obviously to use principles of the Arts is the other way of doing it. Engage with your workplace, your people with the Arts, an arts organisation, or an event. We worked very closely over the last few years with QSuper, and that was a rewarding experience. They as an organisation were involved with us and what we are doing, and we were involved with them and the development of their women's strategy for superannuation.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a powerful social change?

I mentioned June Oscar's work before, the Wiyi Yani U Thangani Women’s Voices Report. She had a conference in Canberra this year, which was very much like a WOW Festival. It included a thousand First Nation women from all over the country. In that were examples of the most amazing First Nations women led initiatives from all over the country, be they in health, culture, economics, and finance; projects making a significant change in their communities. If people go to the Australian Human Rights Commission website and search for Wiyi Yani U Thangani or June Oscar's Women’s Voice Report, you will be able to see still the details of that conference and some of the businesses showcased there. One of the projects we've worked with quite a bit in WOW is Didge, Deadly Inspiring Youth Doing Good. It was created by three young women working in the community in government public sector type roles. They knew the nature of the work they were doing was not getting to young people and making the change that was needed. They have created their own non-profit to make that change. It's a brilliant initiative, and you'll be able to see Samara from Didge be involved in our Voices Shaping the Future event at QPAC in October. Another project which will be represented there is Isabelle Reinieke from Grata Fund. Grata Fund is this amazing initiative funding legal action for climate change from First Nations people, traditional owners, and Torres Strait Islanders. That's not the only thing they're doing, they are raising money to fund class actions which individuals and communities cannot take on themselves. They've already had some good wins in the housing sector, and they're working now on this huge project where they're challenging the Australian Government about its climate change policies on behalf of traditional owners. Isabel will be with us in October. Then, a project that's coming up in development which we will be working closely with over the next few months is a creative project which has come out of the story of the Biloela family.

There is a significant project in development there which will be telling the Home to Billow story. People should watch out for that over the next few months, that will be developed and end up being a major project for our festivals probably in 2025.

That's a community and story-driven narrative idea that is fabulous. Created by the Blue Creative Company, a Brisbane based company, we will be working with the community to tell that story. We all followed that story ourselves and we've been involved with the women who created that campaign in the community and then Priya and Adez and their family when they came back. They were a part of WOW in Logan last year, and just to see the impact of that story, how that happened in their community, and how women in that community came together to create change is fabulous. It’s an amazing example, and now to be creating that story and pulling it into a bigger narrative is fantastic.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I listen to things that have often been recommended by other people. I spend a lot of time having to listen to and see things involved with what I'm doing. On leadership, I recommend Julia Gillard's book on Women and Leadership that came out about 18 months ago. She wrote that with the Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. She is the Director General of the World Trade Organization now, and together with Julia Gillard, they both wrote a book on women's leadership. The book contained interviews with all the big women leaders from across the world, looking at their journey, story, and the narratives behind their success. That is a fantastic book to read as a woman, and as somebody aspiring to be a leader, I would go for that. On the impact side, I often pick up on the Dumbo Feather Podcast, it's about Small Giants and what they're doing. I was listening to one recently, on the Global Happiness Index. I am passionate about changing the economy in relation to anything, so anything about rethinking the economy is something I listen to.

A great book I've just read was written by Michelle Bowers, and she is coming to do workshops for schoolgirls as part of our event in October. She’s a financial journalist, and she's created a book for young women called Money Queens: Rule Your Money, and it's fabulous. She's coming to do workshops as part of our Voices Shaping the Future for School in October. It's a great tool for young women, and she is quite serious about focusing on young women and how they think about what their money story is, and how you're going to take that with you into the rest of your life. It's a fun little book called Money Queens, anybody out there with kids should check that one out.