Andrea Kanaris On Supporting Purpose-Driven Professionals With Practical Tools To Embed Social Impact

Andrea Kanaris is a social scientist, social impact professional, and founder of All Things Social Impact—a platform that equips businesses and professionals with practical strategies to embed social responsibility and drive long-term value.

With over 20 years’ experience across Australia and internationally, Andrea has worked with government regulators, engineering and environmental firms, and project proponents to navigate complex social risks and support sustainable development.

She is the author of A Practical Guide to Social Impact Assessment for the Real World, a hands-on manual that reframes social impact assessment as a strategic business asset rather than a compliance exercise.

Andrea also hosts a YouTube channel featuring honest conversations with early career professionals and experienced practitioners, exploring their challenges, insights, and pathways to purpose-driven work.

Her mission is to make social impact work accessible, actionable, and empowering for those committed to creating meaningful change for people and planet.

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Andrea discusses how professionals can reframe social impact as a core value driver, the importance of early and integrated assessment in business strategy, and the practical tools and skills needed to succeed in a purpose-led career aligned with personal values.

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

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to this deep interest in social impact?

[Andrea Kanaris] - I was a late bloomer; I didn’t go to university until I was 30. I was travelling around America and had a couple of early lives working in casinos, laser bureaus, and forms design. This was fun, but none of it truly interested me.

I was a bit lost, and it was actually a friend’s mother who said, “When you go home, you should do something. Go back to university.” When I returned, I followed her advice., explored my options, and found myself in the social sciences.

Of course, I had no idea what social impact was; like most people, I had no clue. I was introduced to it by one of my lecturers, a professor at the time, who said, “I think you should come over and do this. I think you might find it interesting.”

He was right. I did my first social impact assessment as an undergraduate, which then convinced me to pursue a postgraduate course in social planning and development. I was sold, so I did my second assessment as a postgraduate. I didn’t jump straight into social impact work per se, it was more about applying it in government.

I started off in Queensland Health, doing a lot of health service planning. I worked on policy and across various government sectors. When the oil and gas boom was happening, I got an opportunity to move into social impact assessment within that sector.

Then the boom turned into a bust, and I ended up back in government. I’ve also worked internationally, particularly in public health, and I think my government and public health work has definitely spilled over and merged into my social impact work.

I re-entered the social impact field when I was in government, writing the social impact assessment guideline for the Strong and Sustainable Resource Communities Act in Queensland. That led me back into the consulting world, where I’ve been working with large-scale projects across all industries in the private sector for over ten years now.

That’s where my passion comes from, and it resonates with me because I get to speak with communities about what matters to them and work with the proponents (big companies) to bridge that gap.

It’s like being the person on the ground who listens and hears what the community wants, then translates that to government departments who make decisions, and to the businesses that need to build long-term relationships with these communities. I help both sides understand each other’s needs and work towards a compromise that’s a win-win for everyone.

As the Director of All Things Social Impact, can you tell us a bit more about what it's doing to equip businesses and professionals to embed social impact and responsibility into their work?

This is my baby; it's what's taking up all my time and interest at the moment. All Things Social Impact has multiple components. One is my consulting work, which is obviously still active, and that’s where businesses come in directly. It involves the traditional consulting I've been doing, being that conduit between communities and business.

I’m also focused on the subscription side of All Things Social Impact, which provides tools and templates. It’s designed to support people working in social impact, whether they’re early in their careers or transitioning with transferable skills and just don’t know where to start.

It offers all the tools and support they need, and it includes a professional community for them to learn from and join while on their social enterprise journey.

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Social impact professionals often find themselves in small teams (usually within environmental or engineering firms) or working solo as subcontractors. That means they’re often surrounded by people who don’t speak their language. They become the awkward person in the corner that no one really understands, because others just don’t get what they do, and his is something I hear all the time, not just from early career professionals but from people who’ve been in the field for years.

We’re all constantly looking for networking and a sense of community, and I believe this platform provides this. Because of the dual components, I can also leverage this to work with companies and say, “We can upskill your staff to understand social impact better. We can help you build better internal systems and tools.”

Whether you're working with a contractor or hiring someone internally, they can be supported by this network. We can bring those people together and manage them in a cohesive way. Just like when I serve as a conduit between businesses and communities, I can also serve as a conduit between professionals and businesses by helping them understand each other a little better.

What tools and approaches are you incorporating from your social science background into your impact activities?

The inspiration came from when I was building a business within an environmental firm. I had a lot of graduates on my team, and they were all asking the same questions, things like, “where can I find this tool?” or “where can I get that resource?”

They’d completed their degrees and understand the theory, but then came the real challenge: how do you actually apply that knowledge in the real world, on a live project?

When you layer that with increasing government demands for rigour and regulatory compliance, it adds another level of complexity. Even within the social impact profession, there's an ongoing debate around accrediting social impact professionals. These discussions and challenges have been building over a long period of time.

Internationally, we’re also seeing a rising requirement to address the “S” in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and a stronger focus on social performance. But how do you actually implement that? The field doesn’t fit neatly anywhere; it's quite a disparate group of practitioners.

For me, it became about solving multiple problems at once. If people are going to do this work, and they’re not necessarily social science practitioners, how do we ensure they still have access to the tools? It's about removing some of the gatekeeping.

What if you haven’t got the time to go back to university? How can we support someone who is sitting inside a large company that suddenly finds themselves responsible for their organisation's social performance? Isn’t it better to equip them with the tools, the skills, and the rigour they need to do the best possible job, and support them in learning along the way?

Hence All Things Social Impact's subscription site. I’ve structured it so people don’t have to find time to attend a workshop after hours, especially when they might not have the capacity. These days, we all have competing priorities—families, obligations, and everything else pulling at our time.

While workshops are still incredibly valuable if you can attend them, they’re not always practical for everyone. What the platform offers is the ability for people with limited time to learn at their own pace. I’ve broken everything down into bite-sized activities.

For example, how do you write a fee proposal? Even as a trained social scientist, you're often not taught that. Then there are budgets, timelines, and all those details where people say, “I don’t even know where to start.”

I’ve broken it all down into separate lessons, so if you’re confident in certain areas, you can skip those parts. Everything is there; explainer videos, tools, templates, and checklists to guide you.

Whether it's selecting the right sample size, choosing appropriate methodology, or writing a winning report that grounds itself in strong data and resources, it's all broken down into actionable steps. You don’t need to follow a linear path either—you can jump in wherever you need to.

I was also focused on transparency. No one likes signing up to a subscription site only to find out they have to keep paying for extra features.

With All Things Social Impact, you pay an annual subscription and that’s it. You can access everything on the site as often as you like, including bi-monthly online sessions with me to discuss current issues.

Why do you think social impact assessment is not only a strategic asset, but crucial for social enterprises? How would you recommend people begin implementing assessments within their own organisations?

For me, social impact often gets overlooked. It’s fundamentally a social risk, and I think it needs to sit within organisations from the very beginning. It should be embedded in business strategy, right alongside financial and operational planning. Often, when businesses are in that planning phase, they focus on the economic aspects and a variety of other risks, but they tend to forget about the social risks.

When you look at most ESG strategies and the “S” in ESG, most of them are assessing the impact on the business, not the impact their business has on the communities in which they operate or their supply chains.

Some may consider supply chains, but many don’t. That’s where social impact fits in, by helping organisations ask, “How do I avoid problems and risks?” When you use a risk-based framework, businesspeople start to understand it, because they’re already familiar with risk management.

Impact practitioners can help businesses think more broadly about social risk, especially in relation to the communities they engage with, whether those are the consumers of a product or the people affected by operations. Take the example of smartphones for children. There are both policy and product-level implications. Had the social risks been considered earlier—before global consumption reached its current scale—we likely would’ve seen more safeguards built into the design from the outset.

The same logic applies in policy. There are already mechanisms in place to protect underage individuals from harmful behaviours: we don’t let them drive, drink, or smoke. Similar frameworks could have been applied proactively to prevent some of the negative impacts we’re now witnessing.

Social risk is about understanding how your business poses a potential risk to the community and recognising that this risk will inevitably circle back and become a risk to your business. Projects have been stopped because businesses failed to consider their impact on communities. Even individual actions, like those currently seen in examples such as Tesla, can lead to broader social unrest. That’s why early consideration of social impact is so vital.

That’s where social impact belongs in business. The earlier you bring it in, the better the outcome will be for your company. You’ll see the maximum benefit, particularly if you integrate it at the design phase of a product or a project. When you consider social impact right from the beginning, you can embed it into the core of what you’re creating, rather than retrofitting it later. That’s where the greatest value lies.

What do you envision the future of purpose-driven work looking like and how can emerging professionals ensure they thrive within this sector?

One piece of advice I have is to arm yourself with the real technical skills and knowledge to move forward and be purpose-driven. Once you set yourself up with these technical skills and knowledge, what you want to do is free yourself up to apply them, because that's when you are going to have a big impact.

At the moment, the most important technical skill has got to be AI. Be aware of how you can use it to free yourself from the kind of work that is time consuming, but not value add. That's where AI shines, taking something with a lot of processes that would normally take you days to do, but not without a watchful eye over it, of course.

While AI has done that mundane work, you’ve been freed up to do the important work of making a difference; that creative thinking and applying of your knowledge and skillsets.

AI frees you up to do that, and I think that's the future of the social impact space. For social impact in particular there's a lot to do. We're a niche area, and when you're in a niche area, that means you're in demand, which means you've got limited time. This is how you free up your time to maximise the work you do and impact you have.

If someone is looking to make that leap into living a more purpose-driven life or pursuing a purpose-driven career, what advice would you give them?

That’s probably the nuts and bolts of how to do it, but I think there’s also a step before all this. It’s about knowing what’s important to you.

If you can find a place where what you do for a living doesn’t feel like work, then you’ve hit the nail on the head. You’ll go to work not just with your knowledge and skills, but with energy and passion, because you care about what you’re doing. It’s not going to feel like work.

Now, that doesn’t mean every day is perfect, or that you’ll be happy all the time. There will still be around 20% of your work that involves tasks you don’t enjoy. But if 80% of your time is spent immersed in things you care deeply about, things that align with your values and that you know are making a difference, then you’re in a great position.

Whether your impact is one-on-one, with groups, or at a broader societal level, it’s important to recognise the kind of person you are. Maybe you’re someone who wants to see immediate individual change, or maybe you’re happy to play the long game with policy or strategy work, which often takes longer to show results.

Once you figure out who you are and what issues you’re passionate about, throw yourself into it. Learn who you are, understand what matters to you, align your work with your values, and find that place where work no longer feels like work. That’s when you’re best positioned to create real impact in the world.

What inspiring projects, initiatives, or resources have you come across recently creating a positive change?

I have to say firstly get a hold of my book A Practical Guide to Social Impact Assessment for the Real World that is coming out next month. It’s a comprehensive, end-to-end guide on how to conduct social impact assessment, so definitely keep an eye out for that. The subscription site will give you a supportive community, practical tools, and ongoing guidance.

Beyond that, I admire the work that Impact Boom is doing more broadly. It’s hard to choose just one initiative that inspires me because I’m fortunate to be surrounded by so many people in the social impact space doing incredible work.

I’d also encourage people to get involved with the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA). And if you’re looking to keep it more local, there’s the Environmental Impact Association for Australia and New Zealand as well. Align your efforts with your passion, connect with people who share your values, and get involved. There are endless positive initiatives out there, and it’s really rewarding to be part of that community.