That would be great. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

Yeah. We are looking forward to meeting you Audrey. Richard Bartlett described you as the smartest person he’s ever met. I look forward to having more conversation.

That’s the event coming up. It’s been a huge piece of work for us. We always intended it to be. It was never about an event. It was always a sector building play. The activity that’s going on, up to date, the energy, the alignment, the conversations, the connections, the ...

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

In social procurement, where bigger private and public sector organizations may have preferred supply status or want to procure for social or community benefit within their procurement causes, how can they do that in an efficient way, where they may not have that capability within themselves to raise social impact. ...

Here it’s specifically around transactions. This is less around capability. You’ll get more successful social enterprise activity if you get more trading activity. That trading activity comes from a lot of people, which aren’t actually directly connected to social enterprises and may not know. Things like how do you give ...

It could be a new legal form, which can act as a shortcut. It could be some kind of national body doing some kind of annual accreditation. It’s really try to make sure how you manage risk, but enable scale.

Quality should be something across the board. Where you’ve indicated it on there, that’s talking around, as this gets to scale, if you want to get scaled market transactions, how do buyers know that they’re actually dealing with a real...? It could be things like B Corp certification is an ...

A big part of this is not just enabling individual organizations, but making sure those are healthy and support a peer network between those support organizations. We will smooth out their practice through interaction.

Yeah. Trying to drive uniformity is an antithesis to enabling innovation. You want diversity. What you don’t want is variability in quality. While you want to celebrate diversity, your counterbalance is actually connectivity between peers.

We fully recognize strategically that success after three years is this network of support, rather than just a McDonald’s of business development.

Because one of our problems, we do work in the regions, but we’re in that old age problem of development where we fly in and we fly out, or we drive in and drive out. We’ve tried to correct that, but inevitably, if you want to have really successful local ...

At the end of three years, a success might be a network of 20 different support organizations across the country, which were embedded in their place, their communities, their thematic areas of specialization, their cultural orientation, and we’re there all the time.

Yeah. What we’d want to see, as there’s momentum, we are seeing local hubs, cultural, thematic support organizations pop up. Our role would, rather than delivering stuff ourself, would be to try and identify those capability-building organizations, and help them develop effective practice and connect them to each other.

Again, we had the advantage of, although it had its challenges, that we created quite an integrated model which made sense. Going forward, if we got this work, it would effectively move away from being a retailer and look to become more of a wholesaler.

Because if you wonder, like you were at the edge, or if you do up here, that you don’t get enough deal.

In bigger ecosystems, you have more specialized intermediaries. Because we’re quite small and there was nothing here, we have to do everything.

We’ve got workshops. We’ve got community development models. We’ve got accelerators. We’ve got growth services. We’ve got investment readiness.

What we mean there is actually developmental IP. For the last five and a half years, Akina has been delivering development programs and services.

The second one is enabling finance environment, and the third is this market access, be that around consumers, procurement, or this more nuanced area of payments for results, or impact payments.

The point of this slide was just to inform MPs that this, again, hasn’t just happened. There’s been a progressive story. This outlines basically our roadmap. We’re basically saying a three-year program. You would have four work streams. Three of them are the trifecta, thinking around building capability and supporting ...

Because this is such a systems issue, it really has to come from a cross-agency place.

That’s actually framed this in more of a holistic government approach, which stops further down the line one agency saying, "I have to own this completely, and it should be done with our interests in mind," and other agencies going, "Well, this has nothing to do with us, so we ...

Yeah. I actually think we kind of got lucky here -- and we may not. Government is very good at snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Because we got up to the most powerful level, we got ahead of the bureaucracy.

The advantage here of going all the way up the PM was it was the PM who directed the spend, so it doesn’t belong to any agency. There is a lead commissioning agency, but it is doing it on behalf of whole of government.

If you could convene informed, progressive senior officials to that table who could actually then drive stuff through government in terms of what comes out of that kind of adaptive governance start, I think you’d get a really good result.

If I had at least off the top of my head a perfect world, I might go for three deputy chief executives. You won’t get a chief executive but you could get three DCEs, maybe one from an environmental, one from a social, and one from a cross-agency, be it ...

Yeah, I think you’d probably want it monthly. I think you’d want it quite close, and I think what you would want to do, you would actually try and identify senior officials who can effectively be champions within the system.

I think that adaptive governance model would actually give rich learning to government and give it a far better input into the policies or levers that it can pull to do more public good.

But what we will angle for is to say, "Let us set up the governance of this three-year program on a basis where we set out our high-level strategic objectives and then we have a policy of complete transparency, but an ability to change our plans and our approaches based ...

Absolutely. If we won the contract to be the supplier, right from the beginning we’d be wanting to set up an adaptive governance model, which would hopefully -- I’m not saying we’re going to achieve this.

I think there’s a sense of there are so many upside for government not being in that position, although it finds it difficult to let go of control sometimes. There’s a much bigger prize if it can.

Whereas if it enables another party to lead, it can actually go through its own design process and actually be part of a learning journey to understand its role rather than to be seen to "We’re going to do A, B, and C."

This may be different depending on the capability within government, but there’s a sense if government has to lead it almost has to assume it knows what to do.

If government turns up everyone will be pointing the finger and wanting something from it. Whereas if an independent party does it, it can reframe those relationships.

A third independent party kind of leverage. The other thing is around, effectively, credibility, independence, and I think also the convenient power. Government always should be at the table in a capacity, but it cannot necessarily be the convener because it compromises its own position.

Beyond that, I think there’s some really good strategic government...why governments shouldn’t do it. One it misses the opportunity for leverage. Very rarely would philanthropic be willing to give money government to do something.

Yeah.

We said, if we were the steward of that resource, we could multiply that by three or four times, to increase the war chest up to about 15 to 20 million over that time period. It may not be the philanthropic sector, for example, pay it in in one lump ...

We were keen to say that that 5.5 is not a finite amount. We believe that 5.5, if government basically, as it has, puts it down, that will facilitate co-investment from the corporate, philanthropic, local government sectors.

Yeah, to be a primary intermediary effectively. Without doubt, we see ourselves as that organization. There will be a competitive tender process. There might not have been, if we hadn’t been so close to an election. Everything becomes politicized before an election. There will be, very shortly. There will be ...

No. It’s an external investment. It is there for a strategic partner to be resourced and resource key sector development, key activities related to sector development.

Yeah.

"You benefit from it. You are fully engaged in it. You do not have the capacity to coordinate and lead this. If you invest into sector development and work with a strategic partner, not only will you build a sector out there. You’ll also enable government to build or determine ...

That investment came as a direct result of us beating a path to the prime minister’s door and pitching him and saying, "Your government departments, across-the-board, are increasingly interested in this area. But you have a coordination and an implementation problem. You cannot lead on this."

Which is bigger than anything that’s been on the table before. But it’s still relatively modest. It’s still small. It’s still peanuts really, compared to...That is really over three years, but over four financial years.

The government, two months ago, announced an investment into sector development of 5.5 million.

That’s right. We know how many we’ve worked with. We know we can’t reach everyone. We know we don’t know everyone as well. There’s who we work with, those that we can’t work with and then those we don’t even know of. It’s that sense of there’s real capacity and ...