Sisters are doin’ it for themselves as Mandy Richards works to end economic insecurity for women

When did you start Global Sisters?

I began working on it about 13 years ago, but 2016 was our official start date, so next year is our 10-year anniversary. That’s when we got serious. I was working at Social Ventures Australia when I first started developing it, and then I was working at Sydney Community Foundation, running a place-based program, and kind of just doing Global Sisters on the side. But then it got to the point where I couldn’t really do it on the side anymore. It just got bigger and bigger.

What does Global Sisters do?

Our overarching focus is economic security for Australian women. The idea was always to have a very scalable model, across Australia, but also something that could be scaled internationally. Our foundations were in self-employment, helping women set up micro businesses, because self-employment gives flexibility to women around their circumstances. It’s not an easy journey for anyone, by any means, but it is very possible with the right support. There are so many women who are restricted and trapped by their circumstances who need to generate an income, and they can’t because of what they’re dealing with on the home front, which is generally beyond their control.

That can range from being over 50 and no one will give them a job, to living in a regional area where there are no jobs, to being a migrant, or Aboriginal, or a refugee, a woman with a disability. Caring responsibilities obviously is a huge one, especially now when women have got that ‘sandwich generation’ thing going on where they're caring for parents and kids, and kids with disabilities as well.

For all these reasons, there are a lot of women out there who really need flexible employment, or they can’t work, so Global Sisters started off as a one-stop shop to help women start and grow micro businesses, as home-based self-employment.

Through all that work, we were increasingly seeing certain issues that were stopping women from achieving long-term economic security, so we’ve now developed an impact roadmap with the aim of, on one hand, helping them to generate an income, but then also looking at systemic barriers and what we could do to remove those and join the dots, so that this money that they are earning can then actually be leveraged to create long-term economic security and achieve assets in the family.

What sort of impact have you had?

Next year is our 10-year anniversary, and we’ve got a few big numbers that we’re aiming for, but it’ll be 10,000 women supported, and it will be over $10 million of pro bono support enabled. Part of our program that’s quite unique is we have a lot of partnerships with big corporates, and they provide a lot of support to our sisters through business coaching, sales opportunities, pro bono services. Also, lawyers providing legal advice, accountants providing financial advice, branding agencies or creative agencies helping the sisters.

We’ve got some incredible impact stories from collaborations with corporates. Like, at the moment, one of our women, Angie, who is a solo mom, domestic abuse survivor, and lives with a severe physical disability, she and we have just gotten her products into Mecca, one of our partners, which is pretty mind-blowing, because if someone like Angie can get a product into Mecca, then honestly anything is possible. She has faced every barrier there is that a woman can face.

Is that what drives you?

I’m just driven by doing something that matters. I always have been. I can’t work doing something unless it means something. You know, human rights is a big thing for me. Solo moms, particularly for us, are a real focus, and the reason for that is because if you can stop poverty in its tracks, for a solo mom, then you’re impacting her in her older age. Older women are the fastest growing group in homelessness and have been for some time now, but, also, you’ve stopped that generational impact of kids growing up in poverty and having a much harder trajectory through life.

We like to be really efficient. We’ve always had a real focus on impact and optimising everything we’ve got. That’s the business side of things, and then there’s the systems change work. The women we find who are welfare-dependent, none of them wants to be in that situation. We want changes to the welfare system that genuinely support self-employment as an option.

We’re also working to make sure that there are financial services and products to help women leverage their assets or leverage their income to obtain assets. You know, the women we support, on low incomes, they don’t get access to financial planners, they generally don’t have superannuation, they don’t have savings. We’re working to change that.

We’ve got some major plans in housing too.

Why the name “Global Sisters”?

It comes from two places. Our community is incredibly diverse. It’s such a mixture of migrants, refugees, Indigenous women, second generation migrants. I mean, Australia is just so multicultural, it really is, so our community is a complete, absolute melting pot of any woman you can think of from age 20 to women in their 70s and spread right across the country. The other part was we always wanted a model that was scalable and that could be taken overseas. We’ve had interest but there’s just so much to do here that every time we start looking at it, we kind of come back to what we need to do here.

What gets you up in the morning?

I have the attention of a fly, so I wouldn’t still be here if there wasn’t something keeping me here. But I think what drives me is the women that I meet every day and just hearing the stories, and they’re just so incredible, so resilient. What we do has evolved so much since I started that there’s always something new driving me or that I’m driving.

Is the work stressful?

Not really, apart from HR, but we have a manager for that now. Global Sisters has always been quite unique, from the start. It has always been super flexible. We’ve always worked from home. Most of the team are mums and they are there. We have a small team, probably around 20 to 25, and it genuinely is flexible – it’s not just a thing that we say. Everyone gets close to six weeks holidays a year and there are a bunch of things that are quite unusual in the way we operate, but it works because everyone loves working here.

You once took an invention to a TV show called Dragon’s Den. What was that all about?

It was an idea for a five-star pet retreat, or pet hotel, as a replacement for kennels. It was in Waterloo, Sydney, and was three levels, with a pool on top. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it was the biggest learning curve I’ve ever had in business.