Transcript

Brook:

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach,  trainer and speaker  living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia.  In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money,  magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do.  We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.  

So I am extremely excited to be introducing Kylie. Kylie Flamant is the CEO of the Social Enterprise Council of New South Wales and ACT, otherwise known as SECNA. She’s also the chair of charitable social enterprise People for Nature. And she previously ran a large social enterprise, Green Connect, which employed young people and refugees to do environmental work. She’s also won a bunch of awards and it would take me too long to list them out here. So you’re just going to have to take my word for it. And hopefully if you’ve never heard of Kylie before, you will be Googling her name after this conversation.  It is so great to have you here. 

Kylie:

Thanks Brook. 

Brook:

I had a client who recommended SECNA. She’s like, you’ve got to reach out to Sekna. You got to check them out. You got to see what they’re doing. You should be in there. You should be amongst it. I’m like, okay, okay.  Cool. Absolutely. So I want to kick off with a bigan because you know, we’re here for a good time, not for a long time. So I want to ask you, what does meaningful work mean to you? 

Kylie:

That’s a really good question. Recently, so you’ll see behind me, actually, I’ve got the kids’ Advent calendars up and every year I do it differently. Last year they got a book a day for 24 days of Advent. So I’d, you know, shopped up a store at all the local op shops. This year I’m doing quote and there was a quote that I gave to my son a couple of days ago, which was, challenges make life interesting. Overcoming them makes life meaningful. And I’ll have to come back to you on who said that because I can’t remember, but it really struck me that that is meaningful work, it’s, it’s challenges that matter. It’s overcoming challenges that matter. And for me, those are things that affect people and the planet. 

We are a very globalised world and we know so much now about the effects that we as people are having on the planet and on each other. Um, and so for me, meaningful work is anything I can do to make the world cleaner, greener, fairer, or kinder. And,  um, basically that’s what social enterprises do. 

While I was running one, every day, that’s what we focused on. And now that I’m running the peak body, I get to support hundreds of social enterprises that are doing just that. And if I can help make their lives easier through information or connections or resources, then I’ll do everything I can. 

Brook:

Excellent. Why don’t we take a step back for a moment, because it occurs to me that quite a few people here may not have heard that term social enterprise before.

And while I could mangle an interpretation, I’d much rather hear you articulate it beautifully. Can you tell us what social enterprise means? 

Kylie:

Sure. So a social enterprise is a business that puts people and planet first. So they trade like any other business. They sell goods and services, but they exist specifically to make the world a better place.  

And there’s a global verification for social enterprise now. There’s sort of five things that make you a social enterprise. 

You have a social or environmental purpose is one. 

Two, your operations put people and planet first. So you can’t do good on the one hand and bad on the other. So you can’t say, oh, we exist to support refugee employment. And we do that by making a whole lot of plastic crap that’s going to litter our waterways. That’s not okay under a social enterprise model.  

Three, your revenue mainly comes from trade. So mainly from goods and services that you sell and not donations or philanthropy.

Four, you use at least half of your surplus, so your profit if you’re a for-profit structure, your surplus if you’re a not-for-profit structure, to reinvest in your purpose. So for a lot of for-profits, that means distribution, so they give half their money away to charities. 

And five, you’ve got all of that locked in somewhere in your governing document. 

So it’s been interesting over the years because people pop up. I remember a friend of mine was working at a bank who shall not be named. It was one of the, not one of the big four, but not far off. And he said, Oh, great news. Um, we’re going to be a social enterprise. I was like, Oh my God, this is so exciting. You’re giving away half your profits. This is like front page news. And he’s like, Oh, no, no, no, we won’t be doing that.  And I said, well, then you’re not a social enterprise.  Um, you’re an ethical business and it’s great that you guys are thinking through some of your social and environmental responsibilities, but that’s not a social enterprise

Brook:

And so tell me about the relationship with not-for-profits because you mentioned a while back or fairly recently that SECNA had quite a few not-for-profit members. 

How is that?  Do people start by creating a not-for-profit and then with the view to kind of segue into a social enterprise or why do think there’s so many not-for-profits inside SECNA?  

Kylie:

So approximately 80% of our members are not profit structures, 20% for profit. So you can be any legal structure. 

So to be clear in Australia, and there are a couple of countries where social enterprise is a legal structure, but in Australia, there is no legal structure for a social enterprise. So you can be any legal structure. Right. And so as long as you are doing those five things, as long as you are purpose-driven and most of your income’s coming from trade and you’re really doing it to make the world a better place, you’re a social enterprise, so you’ve got to choose the model that suits you. 

So generally the trade off, if you like, if you’re a not-for-profit, you have to have a board. So there’s a loss of control there. So if you’re a social entrepreneur, you want to start a thing. Sometimes people go, no, no, no, I want to be able to control it. Yeah. It’s okay. Maybe for-profit structure is more for you.  Not-for-profit, you do have to have a board, you,  if you’re a charity, that means you don’t pay income tax. And also you can get DGR1 status, means deductible gift recipient status, which means people can get tax deductions for donating to you. 

So even though as a social enterprise, most of your money needs to come from trade, some sit down the charity end of social enterprise and are going to have some portion of their income coming from donations and that’s okay. 

And so you sort of, it’s a real spectrum. So I get the very charitably minded social enterprises that are really trying to work out the commercial model that suits their organisation. And then you get the very commercially minded social enterprises that are trying to work out how they measure and articulate their impact in the world. And so it’s a, it’s a big mix. And for people who’ve never heard of social enterprise, I usually say if a business and a charity had a baby, that’s a social enterprise and people get it. 

Brook:

Yeah. I look, I think that’s a really good analogy. And I first saw social enterprises in Cambodia. So was a good 24 years ago now. They weren’t called social enterprises, but it made a lot of sense because it was a country that had a lot of tourism and a country that had a lot of devastation, a lot of social issues, a lot of problems. And so why not marry these two things together? 

So a couple of ones were a bakery where they trained people with quite severe physical disabilities to become bakers. Uh, and it was very, you know, Western-style bakery.  

And, uh, another one was a restaurant again, quite Western-style food, very unusual at the time. Like, you know, you couldn’t get much apart from maybe a steak at an overpriced French restaurant in Penampen. Um, but this, this did really good quality Western food and they took street children and trained them in hospitality, gave them a place to live, know, education. Two really smart businesses that were very, very, very successful that just kind of got on with it. They saw a need, you know, they saw a need in the market and they saw a social need and they married them together. So yeah. 

So tell me a little bit about what you’re excited by lately in the world of social enterprise. 

Kylie:

Ooh. So much so obviously my role covers New South Wales and ACT. So that my focus, there’s a lot happening federally as well, but New South Wales government committed to buying from more social enterprises in December 2024. 

And so we’ve been working with New South Wales Treasury on how they do that. And they’re really pushing very strongly into this space, wanting to buy from more social enterprises, wanting to have that list available to all of their buyers. So that’s super exciting to know that the government is really taking notice and it makes sense. Iif you’re a government of any level, if you can spend, you know, if you’re spending $10,000 anyway, to spend $10,000 with an organisation that’s making the world a better place. you know, you’re in that example, if you’re getting your catering from, you know, McDonald’s, you’re getting your catering from McDonald’s and someone’s making a profit somewhere.

If you’re getting a catering from one of those restaurants that lives impacted for the better and the ripple effect of social enterprises is incredible. So all of the positive externalities. So that’s really exciting. I think this year, you know, I almost fell off my chair watching Australian of the Year awards and two of our amazing entrepreneurs from Canberra, Vanessa and Hannah from Stepping Stone won local heroes of the year. 

And we actually had three social entrepreneurs up for Australian of the Year. Wow. Yeah. And, um, another one of our members has just taken out ACT Young Australian of the Year.  So, um, Cedar Sergeant will be one to watch at the national awards in a month or so. Yeah. There’s just, there’s more and more people and it’s been this way for years now. Going, Hey, our current system is not working. Like we cannot keep creating these companies that keep all of the positive things like profit for themselves and push all of the negative things like waste and pollution and, you know, treating their suppliers or their employees or both terribly onto society to fix for government and charities to mop up. 

So always I get filled with joy and excitement at every person who has that aha moment and goes, there’s got to be a better way. And then discovers social enterprise and goes great. There’s a whole movement of people using business for good. Um, so yeah, those things excite me every day. 

Brook:

The work with the new South Wales treasury, can you tell us just a little bit more? You don’t have to tell us anything that’s confidential or still a work in progress, but I’d love to better understand, you know, how SECNA is helping New South Wales Treasury there in procuring social enterprises for government services and presumably government goods as well.

Kylie:

Yes, absolutely. So New South Wales Treasury reached out to us early in the year to say, Hey, we’ve been tasked with buying from more social enterprises. You know, we’re going to need to pick your brain about a few things, which was great. And, um, they engaged us to run some workshops to help them to figure out what their definition of social enterprise would be. 

There’s been a few definitions flying around and it’s only, I think early last year, early 2024, that even the seven state and territory peak bodies and the one federal peak body for social enterprise all got together and agreed on a definition for social enterprise. Cause they were all slightly worded slightly differently.  So in May, New South Wales Government announced that they would adopt the five global standards as their definition. Which is great, you know, provides a bit of consistency. 

And then they were looking for someone to help them to figure out who is a social enterprise, who meets the criteria. So they’ve engaged FIFA to do that Social Enterprise Finance Australia.  Um, and they’re using the people on planet first verification, which is that global verification. Uh, at the moment they’re not using social traders, but that might change over time. I’m hoping there’s some consistency that comes into the market and the definition. And I’m feeling pretty positive about that. 

Now it’s about getting all the social enterprises into buy.newsouthwales, which is the procurement database that New South Wales government owns and uses.  And also into their supplier portals like Gateway by ICN. That’s what, when government does very big contracts, like, Hey, we need to build, I don’t know, a new train line or Metro line. Then their suppliers go looking for their own suppliers.  

Then you get sort of your tier ones, the ones that take the multi-billion dollar contracts of government, then go looking for their tier twos, then go looking for their tier threes down to what might be more manageable for a lot of our social enterprises. So you’re sort of hundred to a million dollar contract. A hundred thousand, Sorry. I got lost in procurement land. 

Basically, I’ve set a definition. I’ve loaded in anyone who’s People and Planet First verified now is tagged in bio.nsw.

Yeah. And yeah, there’s actually an email going out today to SECNA members to say, if you want to sell to government, you know, and or government suppliers, make sure you’re, make sure you’ve got these three things in play.  

Brook

Amazing. I am on the buy.New South Wales database. 

Kylie

Good. Oh, not good.

Brook:

No, no.  I mean, most of it, I glance at and go delete, not relevant, delete, not relevant, but you know, it’s exciting nonetheless. And I want to kind of highlight something you just said there where tier one, tier two, tier three,  talking about the size of the contract and you know, the size of the opportunity. And for a lot of small businesses and for a lot of people listening to this podcast, they might be thinking, well,  this is irrelevant to me. I’m a tiny little one-man band. Like how am I ever supposed to get in amongst it?

And I want to encourage people because  I’ve been delivering services, training specifically,  for small business owners where I am the person who I guess is at the coalface interacting directly with the end user.  But, you know, ultimately at the top of the pay hierarchy is the New South Wales government. And I’m just a couple of tiers down where this has been subcontracted to that company and that’s been subcontracted to that company. 

And then I’ve been hired, you know, to deliver the work. Please don’t cat yourself out if you’re listening to this thinking, you know, this is too big and too complicated and too bureaucratic for my tiny business. 

Kylie:

I would also say the smaller the contracts, the less bureaucracy involved for government. 

So for someone who works in government and I used to work for New South Wales health. So I know it well. You want to have small contracts so that you only need one quote or three quotes, not whole process. So having small suppliers on their matters.

New South Wales government also has a whole lot of benefits for small and medium enterprises, SMEs, so faster payment terms, for example. And for certain contracts, they can just come to one supplier. So getting listed on there so that when they say, you know, some little team in your local area needs to run a strategic planning day and they need a facilitator, it’s going to be easy for them to find one through there. Or they need a caterer or they need a marketing consultant just to look at, you know, this one little website, is within, uh, you know, a tiny team within a large department, but they, you know, the smaller the contract value, the easier it is for them to engage. 

Brook

100%. 100%. And I’ve worked, I’ve had training done, facilitation and training for federal government as well. And, know, it was pretty straightforward. It was not a complicated bureaucratic process at all by any stretch of the imagination.

So what are some of the kind of easy high value things that you think government could be doing, whatever level of government, let’s, let’s stay with state government that the state government could be doing to make their operations more people and planet friendly. 

Like easy wins that you’re like, you know, why don’t they do that already? That should be a no-brainer. 

Kylie:

There’s so many facets to this because once you get into large organisations, and New South Wales government is a very large, they have the highest spend of any organisation in Australia. Wow. New South Wales government spends more in procurement than the federal government. Wow. Let that land for a second.  

Brook

Why is that? that?  

Kylie:

Well, they have some big infrastructure, you know, transport, health, like these are big, big, big, ticket items and that’s responsibilities. And we have a very large state.  I think.

It’s really interesting because there’s some psychology behind buyer behaviour. So when we buy things for ourselves, we are more likely to take into account the social and environmental benefits of that because we just, we just know it to be good. And the minute someone’s making a decision with someone else’s money, particularly taxpayers money,  they feel like they have to be more rational and just go for the cheapest price. But sometimes the cheapest price is not actually good value for money.  

So I’ve talked a lot about this at the, they, they had a procurement and inquiry into. Elementary inquiry into the procurement practices of New South Wales government and the impact on the social development of the people of New South Wales. I spoke about value for money and false economies. 

So for example, in hospitals, we use body bags. Those that pass away in hospital and NSW Health buys cheap body bags from China and they are the cheapest that they can find. But because they are cheap and not very high quality. So the people in hospitals are using two body bags per body. And so suddenly they’re not even the cheapest, like when you take that into account, but on the, on the quote, they look cheaper than the alternative. And the alternative, one of the alternatives is a body bag made in Wollongong by people with disabilities at Green Acres, disability services.

Now dollar for dollar, know, dollar for dollar, they are cheaper anyway, cause you only need one. But even if they were the same price, the dollar goes further, right? So you’re importing something from overseas, a lot of that money’s going to the transport and the fossil fuels that are needed to get here, et cetera, versus a local person who needs a job. All of the benefits that flow from that in terms of financial independence and wellbeing and, and social connectedness and competence and purpose for people here. 

So there’s a lot of, I think if we let our government buyers take into account the social and environmental benefits of any contracts and social enterprises are obviously going to sort of float to the top because that’s the whole reason for being, but other businesses should be thinking about talking about proving how they are, basically what all of the cost and benefits are, not just the dollar on the contract. 

The ACT government’s definition of value for money is actually the total cost and benefit to the territory as a whole, which I think is incredible because that means all of those externalities, all of the things that flow on from that food or service should be taken into account. 

Now, how they do that, they haven’t quite figured out because we’re not seeing the contracts flow to social enterprises. So something’s going wrong in the mechanics. But certainly one way they can fix that is to offer the same mechanisms to social enterprises as they do to Australian disability enterprises within government, which is lowering the bar. So you only need one quote from an AE. 

If we could have, you only need one quote from a social enterprise, then suddenly it makes it a lot easier to buy from social enterprises. And we know that, you know, all of these flow and effects will then come. 

Brook:

Something that I see every single day in my business pretty much is I tend to attract really good humans  who hop their heart in the right place. They’re in business for all the right reasons. They, you know, feel things very deeply and they take their civic duty and their responsibility to other people and to the planet very, very seriously. And yet oftentimes these people tend to be very inhibited, like an inhibitor doesn’t really even cut as a word, you know, really, really stymied by their own values and their own ethics. 

And especially when it comes to promoting themselves, talking about the good work that they’re doing. And, you know, pricing accordingly, there’s often times, I think a, you know, a bit of a confusion that happens between all that is wrong with late stage capitalism and, you know, the soloist who’s in business for all the right reasons. And oftentimes is in business for themselves because they don’t have any other options. They have very, very few other options for a multitude of reasons. So they’ve kind of been forced into business oftentimes and, you know, they really struggle feeling like they are capitalism. They are everything that’s wrong. 

So what would you say to that person who, you know, really feels this kind of burden of responsibility very deeply and finds it really, really difficult to actually market and sell their business?  

Kylie:

I get it. I totally get it. And I’ve heard it called necessity entrepreneurship. A lot of people with disability, neurodiversity, et cetera, find themselves in a situation where they would love to work with someone else than have someone else take care of certain aspects that they’re not good at or don’t enjoy, but they can’t.  

So necessity entrepreneurship was uh a term I came across last year and thought, yeah, actually that fits.  I know because I experienced that. Like I’m, I’m so bad at selling myself. So bad at it. Hate it. Don’t like the hard sell. What I found was I’m really good at selling an organisation that I believe strongly in or a product or a service. 

And so I guess my advice would be if you can separate yourself from the organisation. And even if you’re a sole trader, if you’re, if your sole trader has a name, then you can separate those two things and talk about when you, when you can talk about this in the third person, because you’d know, you know how genuinely good this social enterprise or, you know, your, your sole tradership is. 

I find that an easier way to do it. Um, so I, I would knock down doors for Green Connect. I would talk about the value of what we did. I would talk about the young people and refugees that we were employing and you know, the ways that we did things to be as fair as possible, as kind as possible, as clean and green as possible. 

But I remember someone nominated me for a young business leader, outstanding young business leader of the year for Illawarra. And I was mortified. Like I had to go to this interview with all these judges and talk about how great a leader I was. It was horrible. Hated it. Yeah, not, not, yeah, not my thing. And so I completely understand business people, particularly when you’re good at a thing and that thing is not selling. 

So you have to be good at the thing and then sell the fact that you’re good at the thing. And that’s a hard, that’s a hard thing to do. So I would also say sometimes outsourcing that stuff to someone else because someone else can talk about you and, and, know, shower praise upon you and sell your thing so that you can get on with doing it really well. 

The third thing I would say is there are some really interesting collaborations that I’m seeing spring up amongst micro entrepreneurs, micro enterprises. You know, something like Brand Kind, because they collects lots of freelancers and the branding and marketing community. And then they do the selling and they do the briefing up. So they deal with a customer like me that says, Hey, we need some brand assets for the social enterprise festival. And this is how much we have to spend. And this is what we want for that. They go, Hmm, that’s not realistic. How about, you know, how about we either increase your budget or decrease your expectations? Okay. That sounds like a project. And then they go out to their freelance community and say, Hey, here’s the project. Here’s the brief. Here’s the budget. 

And so I find  sometimes, there’s some communities that help you to skirt around the things that you hate doing and are not good at you know, digital accounting, because you’re good at running a business, doing a thing. Like so, so many tradies are terrible at chasing money. Terrible at keeping their accounts tidy, terrible at chasing out customers who haven’t paid. And sometimes it’s worth outsourcing that. 

Brook:

A hundred percent, but humans have been trading goods and services for thousands of years now. 

Kylie:

Yeah. Evidence for tens of thousands of years on this continent. Yeah. Tens of thousands of years. Thank you for correcting me. A hundred percent.

Brook:

And, you know, and money, think oftentimes we, we project a lot of energy and stories and, know, we make it magical or mystical or all kinds of, you know, weird and wonderful emotional things rather than just recognizing it’s a simpler way than going, I’ve got a chicken and you’ve got a goat, you know, should we trade? The goat seller says, no, I’m not trade. Oh, I want to keep my goat. I don’t want your chicken. 

So money was just the stand in to make it easier for the goat, you know, the goat person to get the apples,  you know, rather than this kind of very complicated thing, which I think oftentimes it’s, you know, it’s made out to be.  

Kylie:

It’s a really big, I talk about this a lot actually, that money was never designed to be a goal. No. So it is a tool to enable us, my, when my daughter was seven, her friend wiped out one day and said, “Oh, I get it now. Money gives you options”.  I was just like, Whoa. Yes. That’s exactly what money is. 

It gives you options. So people I think have mistakenly thought, then the more money I have, the more options I have, the more happy I will be. And that has been disproven over and over again. So yes, you need enough money to meet your basic needs and there is an upward trend and happiness. And then it kind of plateaus and you know, you see people with lots of money who are desperately unhappy, completely miserable or lost.  

So there’s, there’s not a connection between more money and more happiness after a certain point. Money is the tool that enables us to make choices, gives us options, but it’s not the goal. 

The goal is way more important than money. Like the goal, you can choose your goal, but for me, it’s cleaner, greener, fairer and kinder. I want to live in a community that looks after each other. I want to live in a community where we know each other, where we care deeply, where we have hard conversations. I want to live on a planet that is thriving, that is regenerating, that we are not seeing everything around us as a resource, but seeing, but, sort of giving back to nature because we are in symbiosis with nature. We’ve kind of lost that, but you know, we need nature to give to us, so we need to give to nature. It has to be a two way relationship. 

First Nations cultures all around the world know this deeply. You know, the, of the greatest sins you can commit in most First Nations cultures, possibly all of them is greed. Taking more than your fair share or more than the community or the environment can provide. But in Western capitalist society, we celebrate greed. We put billionaires up on a pedestal. We, you know, like we’re soon going to have potentially the first trillionaire in the world, which boggles my mind. 

There’s a really interesting thing to look at. You know, a thousand seconds ago was yesterday, a million seconds ago was 1967 and a trillion seconds ago was the edge of the dinosaur or something like that. Like a trillion is crazy business. No one needs that much money. The system is broken. Yeah, no one needs a billion dollars. No one does. 

I saw a great t-shirt. There’s a guy called Cam from Red Hat Impact and he wears “billionaires are a policy failure” to every conference and I love it. So yeah, we need to reset our relationship with money. And also I think our relationship with all sorts of things. And for me, that’s about going,  I am stepping away from the more, more, more mine, mine, culture of capitalism and into enoughness. 

So I don’t need more money. I need enough money. I need enough shelter. I need enough social connections.  Um, and, and I am enough. That’s something like all the marketing messages are aimed at telling us that we’re not enough. We need to be richer, skinnier, prettier, faster, smarter, et cetera. Just take this pill, just buy this thing.  

When you switch that off, it’s so freeing. Uh, it’s a really nice feeling.

I have enough. I am enough. And I’ve been working on, I do enough. not, I, they’re probably, I, I don’t know that I will ever get to, I do enough because I constantly want to do more to make the world a better place, but work in progress. 

Brook

Yeah. I think that’s quite innately human though, to want to produce and create and do something with your hands, you know, and I don’t disagree that we do probably work way too hard and it does feel strange to sit and not have any device or entertainment and just stare into the void. 

You know, but there, there is something I think quite human about wanting to, you know, produce and create and do stuff and do it in groups, you know, do it together, do it towards a shared, a shared purpose. 

But, you know, I think you’re also totally on the money with that enoughness.

And you know, something that I talk about in my business is the money goal that we set for ourselves is elegant sufficiency, which comes from Monty Python.   It thrills me that it comes from Monty Python, you know, but this idea of like, well, let’s actually name a number that is not like, okay, I can just get, can just scrape by on that. 

But also it’s not, you know, this constant upward trajectory where every time you scale the mountain, there’s another mountain beyond that to scale. Like, know, there has to be a voice of reason that says, you know, this is to be enjoyed. You’ve worked hard. You know, you’ve done stuff. You’ve, you’ve achieved great things together. You know, you’re not a person living in a silo, even if you think you are.  

You are part of a system, a collective. And you know, you can, you can relax a little because that yeah, there’s always another mountain to climb, but you know, you’ve reached a state of elegant sufficiency.  

But I think also when we’re talking about money, we’re also talking about safety and security and especially for women, you know, and you said earlier about the seven year old saying money gives you choice. Like for women, this is a really very real everyday thing. And I know, you know what I’m talking about here.

You know, like for women to have their own money and to have savings and to have the security of that savings gives them options to leave, you know, a dysfunctional relationship, to move if they need to, you know, to invest in their kids’ education because the child needs extra help. You know, and oftentimes I think you’re younger than me,  but you know, when we get to a certain age, we’re looking after kids, but we’re also looking after elderly, elderly parents.

So I think for, you know, for a lot of women, we’re, receiving very different messages than what men are receiving in relation to earning money. You know, and the socialisation. The socialisation that we receive is, oftentimes about saving money and managing money, you know, and being good at budgeting and being good at allocating, you know, the money. 

We’re not necessarily socialised or encouraged still in 2025 to go out into the world and to make money and to feel good about that. 

Kylie:

Yep. I just finished Hannah Ferguson’s book, Taboo, and she talks about this. I love her. Yeah, yeah. She talks about this in there is that the financial advice to men is make money and the financial advice to women is save more. 

Yeah. And I would say, so wealth is the difference between earning and spending. And I have watched friends spend like. I remember being in my twenties and a friend of mine worked at a very large, different friend and a woman worked at a very large bank and she was in the exec team and she was earning crazy amounts of money and they did not have any savings. She would turn up to barbecues. This is in our twenties, turn up to barbecues with an $80 bottle of wine when the rest of us are buying 12, 15. She, you know, she would buy, I, her kids were older than mine. And so I got a lot of handy downs and they still had their labels on them. Like she was just in the consumerism spiral.  And so there is something to be said for savings. 

But there’s a lot to be said for, well, that’s all well and good, but you’ve got to have more coming in than going out. And so you’ve got to look at both sides of the equation. 

Um, my mom always modeled to my sister and I that she had control over the family’s finances and she had her own bank account always so that dad didn’t have access to so that, she said to us openly, if I want to buy a dress, I don’t want to have to justify it. And he should have the same. So there should be shared money because you know, we, we have a shared relationship, we have a house together, we have children together, but there should be separate money and you shouldn’t have to answer to each other for that.

I’m separated and divorced. So that was messy and hard and, and separating the finances was difficult. But what struck me was despite being a strong feminist, despite everything I had learned, I had fallen into the same trap as all women. 

So on average, after the birth of your first child, a woman’s salary drops to 55% of what it was before. Um, and sure enough, when I was like, we did better than that. And then I looked at the numbers and went, Oh, shit, no, no, I’m basically exactly on that curve because I dropped part time because I moved into not profit. Yeah. You know, and those were choices that we made as a family and  I don’t regret it, but what’s interesting was that my now former husband’s salary continued to slowly creep up. Mine dropped and it was interesting to me because he went to four days a week. 

We had a big, I had a big thing about each of us will stay home with the kids one day a week. He dropped four days a week, but his boss just let him do that within a full time capacity. There was no impact on his earnings. Whereas I had to go back to work from maternity leave and negotiate that day. 

So there’s all sorts of systemic things. I would say, think before invested like it’s a cliche these days, but it is the best book on money ever. I read it and went, oh great. I do all of those things and I would. I wish I’d written this book. It’s a great book. You know, when I was in my twenties and started earning, my former husband and I, we were very good save bits and we would say, okay, you know, 30% goes into our long-term savings, 30% into our fund fund, holidays and stuff, and 40% on day to day. And so if you wanted that pair of shoes or whatever, it had to come from the day to day. We lived like students until we were about 30 and that has set us up well now and it means that I have options. 

I can do work like take on the SECNA role, which where the board was like, Hey, we’ve got two and a half days a week for three months worth of salary and then it’ll be volunteer. You cool with that?  Like,  uh,  I believe in this, so I’ll give it a go. And we managed to, you know, find the funding to, to keep me on part-time, but it means that I have options now and I’m really grateful for that.

Brook:

100%. And I think there’s, you know, the funny thing about not saving anything is you’ve got, you know, you’re putting all this effort in it and you’ve got nothing to show for it. You’re like, yeah, well I’m living my life, but I’m not, you know, I don’t have anything to kind of point to and go, okay, well there’s progress happening and I’m building towards something. And, know, for, for many of us, most of us, I don’t know  that something that we’re building towards is our children. 

We’re trying to kind of make the path a little bit easier. I say to my kids, you know, I want you to be better than me. I want you to be smarter than me and wiser than me and kinder than me. You know, I want this to kind of move in an upwards direction. I, you know, I hope that you’re better humans than I am.  

Kylie:

And you want your kids to have options and you want to have options yourself in later life. Cause we don’t know what’s coming around the corner.

The other thing I’ve done that I would highly recommend to people is I have housemates.

So when I got divorced, I bought my own house. you know, when we split the family finances, I got half of that. And so the house is not the same. You know, it’s not as nice as what I was living in before, but I, um, I have three housemates and I love it. Yes, it means shared spaces and sometimes a little bit of negotiating, but, um, it’s very different to when you’re flatting cause it’s my house, my rules.  

Its not quite the same negotiation as when you were 20, but it means that I can pay the mortgage much more easily. It means that I have people around me at all times. So my kids come and go from here, but there’s always someone if you want to catch up on the balcony for chat.  

It’s a, it’s a beautiful thing. And I think we’ve lost the art of sharing. And if we brought that back, we’d be a whole lot better socially and financially. 

Brook:

100%. My parents have tenants and it’s the best thing ever because, you know, we moved out, had four children and we all moved out and then they had this empty house. And I’m like, why don’t you fill these bedrooms? 

And they did. And they have done, you know, for 15 or 20 years and it’s been the best thing. In fact, my brother-in-law was a tenant. 

We’ve currently got a Peruvian woman who is young, studying early childhood education. It’s the best thing ever. We’ve had people all over the world stay with mom and dad. 

Kylie:

And for my kid, like the conversations we have at the dinner table, like our tenants at the moment is an Iranian couple and an Australian guy and we’ve had a Nigerian woman, a Brazilian woman, two French ladies, so many different cultures. And so we have conversations about geography and politics and history and value systems and so many things.  

My life and my kids’ lives are so much richer for having all of these very different people coming into our lives. 

Brook

So good. So good. So good. I want to ask one final question before we sadly say goodbye, although I’m seeing you tonight, which is great. 

I’d love to hear from you what advice you would give people in relation to a future, which is looking increasingly scary where, you know, we’ve got rates of change that just keep getting faster and faster. You know, nothing seems certain and everything feels a little bit shaky or wobbly under, under your feet. 

What kind of words of wisdom could you share in relation to somebody that might be feeling very discombobulated or uncertain about the future? 

Kylie:

It’s not you. It’s real. I think there’s a tendency to put the label anxiety on it, but anxiety is when you’re worried about things that you shouldn’t. Well, don’t you like you’re overthinking things actually the future is very uncertain and very scary in many ways.

If you’re early on this journey, I would say there is hope in action. So whatever you are worried about, find a way to take action on that thing and you’ll find yourself getting more hopeful.  

If you are fairly informed about what’s happening socially and environmentally and economically, I would suggest having a look at a paper called Deep Adaptation or listening to anything by Jem Bendel.

I put it off for many years. I wasn’t ready to hear what he and others and many, many, many others now were saying. And so if you’re not ready for this conversation, I’d say turn this podcast off now, um, and just focus on what you can do wherever you are with whatever you have with the people around you. If you’re ready for a deeper conversation, there is an emerging field of science called collapsology and it is noting that not only is collapse inevitable, but actually we are in a state of collapse. 

So our social structures are collapsing. Our environment is collapsing. We have surpassed every planetary boundary except one. And that’s the ozone layer, which we managed to fix sort of, uh and we are in a state of economic collapse, which is normal because our entire economic system was built on fantasy. A house of cards, you know, infinite growth on a finite planet. Like of course it’s going to collapse. 

All of those things are collapsing, but when things collapse, there is not nothing. There’s not a void. Things come out of that void and, and those things are often better.  And so a lot will change a lot will shift and because of the way things collapse, it’ll maybe in spurts and quite sudden and and it will feel out of control. 

Once you understand that and do your grieving, and that took me a while, probably took a year of emotional turmoil. I’ve spent over a decade trying to turn the climate ship around, trying to turn the waste ship around, trying to close inequality gaps. When you realise that a lot of the things we’re fighting to fix.

It’s like, it’s too late. We’ve hit 1.5 degrees warming. It’s not going down. It’s only going to go up from here. And 1.5 degrees warming. I feel like most people who don’t know climate science well are like, what does that even mean? What that means is it’s like us walking around with a 38 degrees fever. 

So at 1.5 degrees warmer, the human body feels a little unwell. And you might need to take a panadol. At 2.5, you’re in bed feeling very, very unwell and at 3.5 and above, you’re in the danger zone of dying. 

Like if you think about it in that way, then you start to realize that the 1.5 is not good. So once you get through the grief of all of that, there’s joy in figuring out what you want to do with that. What you think is important. If everything’s going to collapse in our lifetimes, then what do we want to hold onto and what can we let go of? And who do we want to be in those moments? And what most environmentalists and collapseologists get to is everything’s hyper local.  

So what are you doing in your street? Like within walking distance of your house, what can you do to  grow food, to connect people, to upskill in all the ways. And for those who are not ready to think it’s sort of a global collapse level,  I generally say what would happen if the internet were to stop working for a month? What would you need? How would you find food? Cause Coles will stop. Yeah. Just stop. Like everything’s run on the internet. Who has the skills in your street to repair things? Who has first aid or doctoring skills? Who are your community organisers? 

And when you start to work hyper locally, it’s such a joy. Um, finding other people within walking distance of my house that are doing some of these things, some of them because they understand collapse and some of them because they just care deeply about this one thing. 

Yeah, it’s really lovely. And then my final piece of advice would be get off tech. A week ago, I finally made the commitment to myself and will, you know, eventually post something on LinkedIn about it cause that’s where I do my only social mediaing. I have decided that news, emails and social media, I will only touch within business hours.

Been a week.  I’ve noticed myself getting very twitchy. What do you when you’re waiting for someone at a cafe? 

Brook:

You have to replace it with something. 

Kylie:

Well, the quiet has been quite lovely and the reflection time and like waking up this morning and going, I’ve got an hour and a half before work. My kids are at their dad’s, my partner’s in Canberra.

Gosh, an hour and a half feels like such a luxury. Like normally I’d just grab my phone and start scrolling. But this morning I was like an hour and a half to myself, and I went for a run to the beach and I started cooking and there’s so much time in the day when you’re not scrolling. It’s amazing. So you don’t need to know all the news from all the corners of the world at all times. You can catch up on that once a day or never. That’s also okay. And just start getting back to what you know to be physically true and right.

Oh, that went big. 

Brook:

I love it. I really, really love it. And it reminded me of a book, How To Do Nothing. I was like, when’s the name of that book?  How to do nothing, which is actually the opposite of what it is. It’s how to do everything. And there was the chapter that I loved the most. It was a very deep and interesting book and it covered, traversed a lot of ground. 

But the chapter that really stuck with me was the kind of hyper local chapter about. It wasn’t just about your neighbors. It was about the topography of the land immediately around you. And I just, feel that so deeply. Like I just love where I live. I love the topography of it. I can, I visualise it.  I drive around all the time and walk around and imagine what it would have looked like without, you know, houses and buildings and roads. 

It’s just a stunning little corner of, um, Cameraygal and, north of Sydney Harbor Bridge. Uh, with lots of green and you know, there’s a creek, is complete, you know, crap, but there’s a little creek that kind of runs down and under, you know, into the ocean, into the harbor.

Kylie:

I used to live around there and I only discovered it six months before I moved. lived there for almost a decade. I’ve been talking about like round Lane Cove, that beautiful thing. 

Brook:

No, no, not even, um, I live in Willoughby. Yeah. You know, there’s a lot of peninsulas that come into Sydney harbour around that area. There’s Northbridge peninsula, then there’s, um, you know, middle, Casa Craig, middle Cove, Castle Cove, and they all come in and out. And apparently the local Aboriginal people were very big in fishing as you’d imagine. But you’ve got this gorgeous topography of, you know, like little hillocks, you know, coming down and creeks coming into the mangroves and then into the harbour. It’s just, it’s stunning. 

Kylie:

Amazing. Beautiful.

Yeah. Thank you. How to do nothing. I needed a good book recommendation. I’ve just started reading hoodie economics. That’s another good one. 

Brook:

Which one? 

Kylie:

Hoodie economics.  Manning Bancroft. Donut economics is obviously amazing with Kate Rayworth, but yeah, hoodie economics. Just, all of the things that we’ve been talking about, you know, money being a tool, not a goal. You know, what are we here for? What do we value?

How, how come our economic system doesn’t value that? How could we change that? It’s amazing. 

Brook:

Fantastic. There’s been lots of different resources mentioned, so I’m going to make sure I find them all and link them up in the show notes. Awesome. Kylie

Kylie:

I’ve forgotten that we were even doing a podcast. It’s been nice chatting. 

Brook:

It’s been such a pleasure. I’m sure we could keep talking for hours and hopefully we will.

But thank you so much for your time and attention  and you know, everything that you’ve shared today, it’s just been so, so useful and valuable. Thank you. Thank you so much.  

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review?

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