Program

Is collaboration the most overused word in our sector? Maybe, but it’s also necessary to achieve our big, hairy audacious goals. And it’s hard. It takes trust, intention, patience and funding.

In this interactive session explore the challenges and opportunities of collaboration through the experiences of Moving Feast and Advance to Zero Homelessness. Walk away with practical insights and some common principles to strengthen your own collaborations and start to shift the dial.

Shifting your mindset from social to business is hard when you're close to a cause. But it's critical to building a large-scale, profitable jobs-focused social enterprise.

In this session, Luke Terry from White Box Enterprises lifts the lid on strategies that have worked and not worked when building respective social enterprises. Everything from capital raising, cash-flow and getting comfortable with debt, to wrap-around supports and the power of community partnerships.

Luke will be joined by special guests — Alexie Seller (Social Enterprise Australia and Impact North), Allan English (English Family Foundation) and Coralie Nichols (Ian and Shirley Norman Foundation) — who will share their own experiences and insights in building start-ups.

What makes a good transition from a jobs-focused social enterprise into mainstream employment? We know it’s not a one-size-fits all approach. These experienced speakers will share the different ways that are working for their contexts and their cohorts.

Access to capital is consistently one of the highest rated needs of social enterprises. But not all capital is created equal. 

What types of capital make sense at different stages of a social enterprise’s journey? And how can you wean your organisation off grants and onto borrowing over time?

Join this session and learn how to find the right capital at the right time.

What does good support look like and how do we fund it? Wrap around support is a critical component of a WISE yet rarely discussed. Some organisations manage this in house and others are at a size where support workers are key. If no two organisations do this in the same way, what can we learn about the principles and approaches that best support participants and their goals? 

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." But what if today demands we do both? While collaboration is widely valued in principle, it often falters in practice, not because of people, but because of the systems we’re working within. This session explores how we might harness developments in the digital commons, open-source design, data sharing, and interoperability to build new enabling infrastructure —unlocking social enterprise data and transforming how we connect, learn, and drive impact across the ecosystem.

Are there industries where running a sustainable jobs-focused social enterprise is easier? If yes, what are they? 

In this session we’ll explore the characteristics of the industries where jobs-focused social enterprises are most likely to thrive — and those that tend to be trickier. 

Find out what you should look for and how you can find the right market for your idea.

The APY Art Centre Collective (APYACC) is a group of Aboriginal-owned and governed enterprises based on the APY Lands in remote South Australia. Since launching in 2018, APYACC has supported over 500 Agangu artists and returned over $13M to Aboriginal-owned art centres.

APYACC has faced intense public scrutiny and external investigations in the past two years, and emerged without findings of any wrongdoing. George Cooley and Skye O'Meara share their learnings and insights on surviving an unexpected crisis.

Place-based work has experienced a renewed focus over the past decade in Australia and there is a natural interface between the aims of place-based approaches and social enterprise. 

Join this conversation to explore where the opportunities might be for social enterprise, in this current moment of place-based policy and action focus.

Think speed dating for business advice. If there are people you’ve heard about, read about, admired from afar, now’s your chance to pick their brains. 

Register for a 10-minute 1:1 at the summit welcome desk.

An interactive session exploring how we can avoid seeing young people we work with as beneficiaries and instead as agents of their own change. Be prepared to share your own thoughts and examples as well as hearing from Pat and Nathaniel.

In this session we will explore challenges and opportunities in bringing about greater engagement between mainstream employers and jobs focussed social enterprises. We’ll hear from two employers about successes and challenges in recruiting people through social enterprises — particularly in moving to scale.

We’ll ask what it might take to encourage two way learning — so some of the inclusive employment practices that social enterprises apply might be adopted more widely by mainstream employers.

We’ll be asking audience members to share their experiences of building partnerships across social enterprise and mainstream employers to support transitions and two-way learning.

Acquisition is a genuine model for starting a social enterprise — discuss. Dig into the challenges and opportunities of mergers and acquisitions and think about what great outcomes look like.

Professor Erin Wilson from the Centre for Social Impact will share a short update on the remit of the new Centre for Inclusive Employment and how jobs-focused social enterprises can interact. 

We'll hear from Mohammed Yassin, co-founder of refugee-led social enterprise Value Nation, on how we value people with lived experience and their leadership in design, delivery and evolution of employment support programs that target them.