Mariam Mohammed On Delivering Tailored Financial Education For Disadvantaged Australians

Mariam is an entrepreneur, speaker, and facilitator. She is a Chief Diversity Officer at Super Fierce - advocating to close the gender wealth gap in Australia by making super, simple.

In 2019, Mariam co-founded MoneyGirl – a social enterprise empowering women to become financially independent. She also teaches budding entrepreneurs at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and accelerators around the country, how to go from idea to launch. Mariam coaches changemakers on how to leverage a strong personal brand to amplify their impact.

She has been recognised in the Australian Financial Review 100 Women of Influence list, 40 under 40 Most Influential Asian-Australians, Marie Claire Next 25 List, and 7News Young Achiever Awards. Her work has been featured across Grazia, ABC, The Australian, VOGUE, and more.

Mariam discusses the importance of providing greater financial Inclusivity and education for women experiencing barriers and harnessing diversity in workplaces.

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

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?

[Mariam Mohammed] - It was definitely not meticulous planning, because I accidentally stumbled into social entrepreneurship! In fact, I was anti-business for a very long time until I discovered social enterprises. To give you some context, I am a Pakistani woman and came to Australia almost 10 years ago now for university. I am a survivor of gendered violence, and I was rebuilding my life for the first couple of years I was here. I started working with other survivors of violence and eventually went into the refugee sector where I stayed for a couple of years. As I was rebuilding my own life and becoming more stable financially, money for me was one of the tools that helped me stay safe in life. This is true for everyone.

But, as I was working with other survivors of violence, I noticed a very common story. Money was a tool being used against survivors, or it was one of the reasons that they would keep going back to situations of violence.

I was thinking about long-term safety for myself essentially. I needed a solution, and I was looking around then for solutions for myself and the clients I was working with. At that time, most of the financial education I had access to was from American educators, and there weren’t many resources or accessible resources in Australia. That's what led me down the path of entrepreneurship, creating a solution that me and my peers needed.

As the Chief Diversity Officer at Super Fierce and the co-founder of MoneyGirl, can you share more about these enterprises and how they're helping women experiencing unique financial challenges?

I am so privileged to be working with two social enterprises, both of which are working specifically with women. Super Fierce is a social enterprise working towards closing the gender wealth gap in Australia by specifically tackling the superannuation gap. To put some numbers around that, women in Australia currently retire with about 47% less superannuation than their male counterparts.

Because of this, about 38% of Australian women retire in poverty; that's why women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population in Australia.

That's for a lot of reasons, including we don't mandate superannuation over parental leave, and we still have a gender wage gap of about 20-22%. There's a lot of things that contribute to that, but that's the end result. That's what Super Fierce is tackling, and the way they're doing it is by making financial advice around superannuation accessible to everyone, including young people who can't afford traditional models of financial advice. This is so people can make sound decisions about their superannuation earlier in their lives and set themselves up to retire in safety and independence. MoneyGirl is a social enterprise delivering financial education specifically for young women. Having said that, everybody needs financial education, and we do cater to everybody, but that is our particular cohort. Young people in Australia have the lowest financial literacy, and that makes sense because this is a skill people build over time. Then, particularly for women who have been historically locked out of these conversations, there are additional barriers: cultural, gender, religious, that need to be taken into account. MoneyGirl is working towards increasing young people's financial literacy so that they can make sound financial decisions for themselves and set themselves up for financial independence in the long term.

What is the value created by effectively including people from diverse backgrounds in organisations?

My role, and I feel this is not just my job but what I do in whatever space I am in (including this space), is to talk about the intersectionality of any solutions and problems. If we take the gender wealth gap for example, the numbers I quoted earlier are true for cis able-bodied white women in Australia. Add any intersectionality’s to that, and those numbers of how many women are retiring in poverty get significantly worse. That number is absolutely horrendous for Indigenous women in Australia, significantly worse. People with disabilities, that number is significantly worse. Indigenous women in Australia keep getting put at the bottom of all the solutions. When we talk about diversity or inclusion, that's what I'm doing.

Whether we are speaking in the problem space or in the solution space, these are things for us to consider so that we can make holistic solutions that solve the problem for all people in the long term and are not just band-aid solutions.

That is the benefit of having diversity in a room, whether that is your team or at various levels of organisations as well. You need diversity of all kinds at all different levels so that you are able to make good long-term decisions for the solution that you are creating.

Otherwise, you end up with solutions that completely miss out on the crux of the problem or completely forget about a whole portion of the population. Those are all the benefits of having a diverse group of people at the table right from the start when you are creating the solutions.

Where do Australians commonly face challenges with managing their finances, and how can smaller organisations and start-ups provide targeted solutions to these problems?

One of the most common challenges with financial education and financial literacy (not just in Australia but across the globe) is we have a lot of band-aid solutions that are shiny, and so people will get attracted to them.

Because we have low financial literacy, particularly amongst some of the most vulnerable groups like young people, vulnerable groups fall for shiny band-aid solutions. Some of them may be scams, but not all of them are, there are a lot of like genuine solutions out there created with good intentions, but they are not evidence backed. They just give you little how-to’s or tips about your finances. But when it comes to creating long-term change in people's money behaviours or transforming their relationship with money in the long term, you need evidence based, age appropriate solutions throughout a person's life. This is because what they need when they're a teenager is different to their twenties, thirties, fifties and sixties. You need evidence-based solutions that are delivered at the right time in people's lives. At the moment, we don't really have an ecosystem like that in Australia, and this is a challenge across the globe people are tackling. As consumers then, it becomes so hard in an increasingly digital world with endless options to know who to listen to. When it comes to creating solutions, I think it's important to keep in mind why we are doing it. Why are we creating a solution? We must look at the ecosystem more holistically within this country and learn lessons from elsewhere in the world where it has been done better or things have already been tried and failed, so that we don't repeat the same mistakes here. I do feel like even though we have low financial literacy amongst young people for example, Australia is a great place for us to run experiments of what financial education needs to be delivered, in what way and with what model?

What does a holistic solution look like so that solution can be replicated across the globe? Why can't Australia be the place where leading solutions are created for the rest of the world?

I think that's what a lot of good people trying to help miss when thinking about how to solve problems, is to think beyond just their lifetime and more holistically. In the long-term, why are we creating the solution that we are creating? What will help in the next 50 to 200 years?

What opportunities exist to create better support for women seeking to lead social impact through entrepreneurship?

What I learned from my experience was you can't lone wolf this. I learnt you need a very good support system around you to help you as the founder (like your personal self), but also the solution that you are creating. No one person will come up with the solution to these very complex problems we are trying to solve more broadly in the social enterprise space. Also, no one person is going to be the hero at the end either. There's no one saviour, that's the whole point of creating community centred solutions. If I could pass one thing on, that would be don't try to do it alone, because I was lucky to have my co-founder, Mellisa Ma. But we did try to do it ourselves in the beginning until we learned that there is a whole community out there in Australia trying to do exactly the same thing. This is to create sustainable, long-term community-centred solutions to social problems. At that time, we weren't as organised as we are today. Today, we have our national council, we have our state-based social enterprise councils, and those are great communities to tap into, even if you haven't started but want to be in this space. You can know what's going on, what support is available, and you are surrounded by people who just selflessly want to give because they want to create change in this world. There is no community really like the social entrepreneurship community, and it is such a beautiful space to be in. Don't try to do it alone, make use of the community and stay in the community.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

I have far too many examples, so I'm going to recommend the one I've most recently used, although I have such a long list of social enterprises I use in my life. One of them is Welcome Merchant, which is a gift giving platform, and you can buy gift hampers and individual gifts that come from refugee owned businesses in Australia.

I'm going to go ahead and recommend one other I love to use, which is Miks Chai. I am a chai tea person, and Miks Chai is a social enterprise that sustainably sources locally produced chai. 50% of their profits go to mental health organisations in Australia. A cup of tea with a friend is a helpful solution on any good and bad day in life! Those are the two enterprises that come to mind amongst the very many I love to support.

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

I thought about this question, and for some reason I am not sure of, what came to my mind to recommend is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I knew we would be talking about money and the social enterprises I work with, and because we were talking about creating long-term change, this is what came to mind. I didn't want to leave everyone with a band-aid solution, I wanted to plant a little seed of long-term change through this book.