From volunteer to CEO: 3 lessons from a decade in the impact investment sector
By Hanna Ebeling, Chief Executive Officer
Becoming a CEO was never my ambition. Making the world a better place was – and still is. So, when the opportunity came up to combine my financial background with doing social good as a volunteer at Sefa in 2014, I jumped at the chance.
I never suspected that a few years down the track I would be at the helm of the organisation, with an incredible team by my side.
I’m so proud of how much we’ve been able to achieve together. From setting up Sefa’s fee for service business and making the organisation sustainable, to paying our first dividend and becoming the leading firm in market with expertise in both deploying capital and capability building. It’s been an inspiring and humbling 10 years.
But it’s also been frustrating and emotionally exhausting.
Because while the appetite and momentum for social impact investing is expanding, some of the fundamental barriers – like stagnant mindsets around structural disadvantage – are holding the sector back from making real progress. And it can be incredibly draining to have the same conversation for years and not see a change in approach.
But if there’s anything I’ve learned during my journey from volunteer to CEO, it’s to never lose sight of your purpose and be relentless in pursuing your goals. While there will be some hard truths to face along the way, with the right people you can create something bigger and better – and continue moving forward.
Here are three lessons I’ve learned over the past decade.
Embrace the trade-off
There is a lingering misconception that we can solve systemic issues and social problems while also reaping high market-based financial returns. And I ask myself – what has created a multitude of systemic issues (and led to the conundrum we are currently in)? Is it that our expectations of returns are based on a broken market? Can we overcome these challenges by flipping engrained expectations, measurements and perceived value on its head?
The reality is we still can't have it all, all the time. There is often a trade-off between social outcomes and financial returns. So instead of denying it, we need to make it part of the solution.
We need to leave all our assumptions and ways we've worked in the past behind. To put the current system and how it has been operating to the side and open our minds to new approaches. To live with uncertainty and embrace the known unknown or even the unknown unknown.
Everybody wants to have certainty around impact and what's going to happen. But it’s just not the way things work. If you're trying to take a problem and make it part of the solution, you’ll be forced to think outside the box. To be creative and challenge the status quo. And this is often where the ‘gold’ that leads to a brighter future lies.
2. Be in it for the long game
The social impact investment sector doesn’t provide quick financial or personal satisfaction returns (if that’s what you’re after, you’re in the wrong place). It takes incredible courage, resilience, tenacity and patience to create meaningful change. You need to be a dog with a bone – once you clamp down on your goal, you cannot let go until you get there. Even if it takes years.
And believe me, it often does.
I first met with the Yass Montessori Preschool in 2017 about a loan to help the centre serve more families in the region. I was the Head of Portfolio Management at Sefa at the time. Over the years we have had to iterate multiple deal structures to manage Covid-19-driven cost increases and changing development plans. After years of hard work and persistence, we are now finally ready to start disbursing a loan in a few months that will see a new building double capacity in the region.
Tender Funerals was Sefa’s first blended capital deal, partnering with the Vincent Fairfax Foundation in 2016. A couple of weeks ago, it opened its third franchise in Canberra, backed by the Snow Foundation. But getting funding across the line for its first location was a capital puzzle. I had to take it to our former credit committee two or three times before they even considered it.
Nightingale Housing got knocked back by 34 lenders before they came to Sefa. We believed in the organisation’s vision since day one, so we wanted to make it happen for them. It took us two years of working very closely with NAB to get there with a fit-for-purpose capital structure that supported scale and replication.
It’s a hard road. But if you persevere, stay resilient, and try new avenues you will find a way. Always together, never on your own.
3. You can’t create social change without changing mindsets
The social impact sector is operating in an extremely challenging context.
We had the pandemic, now we’re grappling with inflation, political polarisation and in Australia, we went through a referendum. The environment is complex, and the need is urgent. And this urgency means we need to go about addressing challenges in a different way. Shift our behaviours and our values, changing our processes and how we work.
And that's hard to do. But we must try because if we don’t change, nothing else will either. We won’t be able to unlock impact or shift structural disadvantage in a meaningful way.
From an investment lens, we should start by changing what we consider valuable assets of an organisation. The biggest assets for social purpose organisations are often things you can't see on the balance sheet. The inner drive of the management team. The trusted relationships with volunteer networks or business communities. The tenacity of the people that work on the ground. Today, these are not accepted by the mainstream industry. But they should be.
And by shifting its approach, philanthropy has the potential to make game-changing impact in the sector. By exercising urgency, running foundations like an enterprise, using all tools in the kit (i.e.: investing into social impact with both corpus and grant and transitioning grantees to investees), and supporting organisations that are more resilient, philanthropy could make itself redundant to some extent.
Change – whether its structural, social or a shift in mindset – is only possible when we focus on what matters: people. People are at the centre of both problems and solutions. As long as we don’t lose sight of them and are able to inspire change in thought and enable action, we’re heading in the right direction.
We are ready to talk and take action on social impact with different players and help expand the sector, inviting new organisations to make a difference. If you feel the same, reach out to the Sefa team today. Because the only way we can create a new future for the sector is by working together.