The Getting of Wisdom

• Kate Hennessy
• 12 March 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Photo credit: Isamu Sawa

I started planning my career when I was nine years old. I remember having an image of myself in a red suit. I was in an office, my own office! Even as a little girl, I knew I wanted my own business one day. Of course, that dream became a little submerged over the years, but it was always there just beneath the surface.

Tell your story

My family came over from Egypt in 1977. My father was a wealthy farmer in Egypt, but farming is a volatile business and one year he over-invested. It frosted – (what were the chances of that in a country such as Egypt?) and he lost all his crops. He and my mother were left with nothing.

We settled in the south-eastern suburb of Dandenong, Melbourne. My parents worked at General Motors Holden and within two years had saved enough to open a milk bar in the very Anglo-Australian suburb of Eltham. They owned two milk bars in the area for over 25 years.

My parents came to Australia for a better life and because they weren’t educated, they drilled the necessity of education into us. I often ask myself whether my path towards a doctorate was even my choice. My parents know I’m a doctor and this makes them immensely proud, though they really have no idea what I actually do!

Find your path to good citizenship

In 2002, while working on my thesis, I was employed as a researcher at La Trobe University’s Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights. The Centre was working on capacity-building for non-profit organisations, mainly working with Arab-Australians. September 11 was a recent phenomenon and there was heightened awareness of the Arab world. The Corporate Citizenship Research Unit was just across the corridor and, as luck would have it, I was walking past one day and started chatting with then unit director, Professor David Birch. Out of the blue he asked if I wanted to work as a post doctoral researcher. My wildest dreams had come true, although I didn’t know it yet!

Defend your enthusiasm

Within a very short time I was hooked on this notion of corporate social responsibility, and really believed in it. I loved the idea that business and non-profits could come together for the greater good. More than that, I was excited by the possibility that in coming together, both sectors gained better understanding of each other and, in doing so, helped transform society in some way. I started to come across the work of companies such as Lend Lease and Cisco and was really inspired to see they were doing many of the things I was interested in. They seemed to understand community work was about strengthening the communities in which they operated. My turning point came soon after. I began talking about the work these corporations were doing but my sociologist friends were a bit dismissive. I was in a position where I couldn’t defend my enthusiasm. David Birch and those of us working with him were constantly battling critics who thought CSR was all about public relations. But I had no way to prove that these companies were doing good things. I had no data! I decided it was time to branch out and start up my own business in the CSR evaluation space.

Build your business identity

I set up my business Social Compass in 2004. The first thing I did was find the $1700 to incorporate a company. Then I paid a friend who was doing web design $600 to create a website for me. That exercise really forced me to drill down and enunciate what Social Compass was all about, basically because we needed the web content! The business really developed as a result of that process, and formed an identity outside of me.

Once the website was live, I looked at it as thought, “Ah, here it is!” It was a great moment. We saw our vision of what we wanted to be, there online. Then of course, we set up our emails and so forth. I was surprised at what a kick I got out of being jehan@socialcompass.com.au. The internet really is our business. As a research organisation, I spend at least three-quarters of my day on Google, and we live by our Microsoft Outlook calendars. Our customer service revolves around effective and constant communications, so we like to send our clients frequent progress reports. Emails are a fast and cost-effective way for us to do this. Right now, I am learning about viral marketing so I can better utilise email for marketing our CBR publication. Oh, and I have just joined Facebook and I’m learning how to use it for networking!

Evaluate your partnerships

Today we have three full-time employees and one part-time. My business partner is also my husband John Prince. He also worked at the Corporate Citizenship Research Unit and then later with Transfield Services, a multi-national services company, setting up their community partnership programs, before joining Social Compass full-time in 2006. People often ask me to put the work of Social Compass in a nutshell. In summary, we work across all sectors: business, government and community. We do social research and practitioner work to try to help these sectors understand each other, work together and build partnerships. We then help to evaluate the success of these partnerships. Evaluation has an incredibly strategic role. It provides evidence a program is successful, which can then be used as leverage to continue the program, or gain more resources.

Stick to your guns

A lot of companies at the time were talking a lot about building socially inclusive societies, but they weren’t evaluating their progress. They weren’t measuring what difference their partnerships were making to society. Back then, the concept of partnerships was based on ‘if it felt right’ for the non-profit organisation and the corporate, not on how it contributed to a stronger society. No-one was really asking ‘What does it mean?’ or evaluating impacts on the ground. When I raised the issue, I was told it was too hard to measure and almost impossible to do. I talked to various companies about the possibility of evaluating the impacts of their partnership programs, but I was told ‘It is a great idea but we don’t have a budget for the research.’

In the face of these challenges, David Birch taught me not to compromise ideologically. We were working in an area that was under fire, with people saying CSR was merely spin. So we needed to stick to our guns and really set the agenda. We work governments, non-profit organisations and corporations, in equal thirds. When proposals come our way the first thing we ask is, ‘Are this potential client’s values aligned with ours?’ And that means also asking ‘Why do you want this research done?’ If the answer is so they can use it for PR spin, we wouldn’t be interested.