An Epic Year of Impact
2022! What a year. A year of growth and impact for StartSomeGood, made possible by great collaborations.
Woh.
What a year.
All of us at StartSomeGood are proud and exhausted by how much we did and what we achieved this year.
It was, like most years, full of steps both forwards and back, but now it’s over we can look back and see how far we’ve come, and feel really excited about what’s next in 2023.
We started the year in a challenging position, battered by two years of COVID disruptions during which our main source of revenue, custom programs for foundations and brands, almost went to zero, and our team shrunk down to co-founders only.
Now we’re a team of eight, our new impact investment platform LendForGood just hit $1M raised in the first year and picked up the Market Builder Award at the Australian Impact Investment Awards last week — which is a great way to finish the year!
We hosted (or are currently hosting) 9 capacity-building and accelerator programs for social enterprises and community initiatives this year, with more than 250 participants, including 100 in our Good Hustle, SHIFT and emerge social enterprise design programs, 13 enterprises in the Heaps Good Hustle Circular Economy Accelerator and 7 enterprises in the Indigenous Crowdfunding Program.
We also had 40 founders and enterprise leaders join us on the SEWF Roadtrip, a three day “moving conference” as we visited social enterprises and learned from each other on our way to the Social Enterprise World Forum in Brisbane in September. This was the highlight of the year for all our team members who were part of it.
We hosted 21 live calls with leading social entrepreneurs, 21 small group coaching sessions with founders and 6 mastermind sessions, most of these exclusively for members of our StartSomeGood Community.
We helped ING engage and curate great social enterprises for the Good Finds Market and can’t wait to share some great new opportunities in partnership with ING in the new year.
And we overhauled our website to give a better overview of the various ways we help people start good today.
None of this would be possible without great partners and collaborations.
We need to say a few thank-yous.
For LendForGood we are truly blessed to have the best joint-venture partner a social enterprise could possibly wish for in Red Hat Impact. We are incredibly grateful for the collaboration of Red Hat Impact’s founders Cameron Neil, Paul Howorth and David Carbines, along with Greg Peel, former CEO of Community Sector Banking, on the five year journey to get LendForGood to this point.
Huge thanks to our initial funders and investors including Karrikin Foundation, June Canavan Foundation, English Family Foundation and Snow Foundation and also to all the intermediaries, lenders and enterprises who have joined us and helped catalyse the first $1 Million of impact funds raised through LendForGood, a milestone we reached two days ago.
Thank you to ING Australia for trusting us as the Social Enterprise advocate and coordinator for the Good Finds Marketplace and other social enterprise support programs. Thank you
Thank you to the Queensland Department of Employment, Small Business and Training for their funding of the emerge program, making it free for Queenslanders, through the Social Enterprise Sector Development Grants
Thank you to the great host partners who have joined emerge and are hosting local in-person groups as they go throgh the program: HOST International in Brisbane, Desq in Roma, the Hervey Bay Neighbourhood Centre, GC Hub on the Gold Coast, Impact Community Services in Bundaberg and the Goondoowindi Community Hub. Thank you also to Sponge for their design work on emerge.
The SEWF Roadtrip would not have happened without the support of the City of Parramatta, City of Sydney, MinterEllison and Future Super. Thank you also to SEWF and White Box for their endorsement and enthusiasm for this concept and to Social Change Central for their promotional support, The Social Story for social media production and support and Sourdough Business Pathways for co-hosting an event with us in Byron Bay as the Roadtrip came through.
Thank you to Public Interest Registry, June Canavan Foundation and Equity Trustees for their support of Good Hustle and funding of scholarships which remove the financial barrier for emerging founders to get the help they need making their idea happen.
Thank you to Green Industries SA and Collab4Good for inviting us to be part of the Heaps Good Hustle Circular Economy Accelerator.
Shout-out to Lucy Brotherton at the City of Parramatta for being an amazing partner not only with the SEWF Roadtrip but also the Parramatch and Pitch for Good Parramatta programs, and to Greg Hodgkinson from First Innovators with whom we loved collaborating on the Indigenous Crowdfunding Program.
To all the presenters and speakers at our programs and events this year — we are so grateful for your generosity in sharing your stories, insights and advice with our community.
Thank you also to the conferences and programs that invited us to present at your events — we are always grateful for the opportunity to share what we’ve learned.
And last but most importantly of all, to all the courageous founders who allowed us to be part of your journey by participating in our courses, joining our community or raising funds on our platforms — thank you.
It’s an honor to serve you.
We’ve loved watching members of our community like Elato Ice-cream, All Of The Good Things, Xstatic Sunsets, iYarn, CoWork CoPlay, Reconnect Project, Verge Collaborative, Cinch Textiles and many others continue to make great progress and positive impact this year.
You are the heroes and we are proud to be a part of your journey.
We can’t wait to meet more amazing founders developing new impact ideas and help more impact projects and enterprises raise the funds they need to make a difference in 2023.
Onwards!
But until then, have a great break.
From Tom, Renata, Nimmity, Gabriella, Rabia, Cameron and all of us at StartSomeGood/LendForGood.
