The co-founder of Perth’s Minderoo Foundation has allocated $160 million to philanthropic organisation Co-Impact to tackle the root causes of gender inequity.
Now is not the time to rest on our laurels, according to some of the greatest forces working to tackle gender inequality.
“If we’re going to take anything from what’s happening globally around the pushback of women’s rights, it’s that this is a really important time to make sure that some hard-fought progress does not continue to stall,” Olivia Leland, the Founder and CEO of Co-Impact, tells Forbes Australia.
Leland’s London-headquartered organisation is a pioneer of collaborative philanthropy and is committed to advancing gender equality and women’s leadership globally.
“This is a problem that will continue to persist for generations if we don’t tackle it at its root causes now,” says Leland. “Not just the US but elsewhere as well. The rights that we have sometimes taken for granted can actually be challenged, and we should see this as a warning sign and be even more determined than before.”
I interviewed the philanthropist in a Melbourne highrise building in the CBD, while she was visiting Australia to meet with other changemakers looking to advance health, education, and economic systems. The Minderoo Foundation, a significant donor and partner of the Co-Impact organisation, hosted roundtables and intimate lunches with Leland to introduce her to leading gender equality advocates.
Mecca founder Jo Horgan facilitated a lunch for Leland and the Co-Impact team in Melbourne, and Australia’s Governor-General Sam Mostyn co-hosted a lunch with Minderoo co-founder Nicola Forrest in Sydney. The Forrests have now committed $160 million to Co-Impact, making it their largest partner.
“The team had looked at a few different gender funds, but it was Co-Impact that really stood out in terms of its vision and being very outcomes-focused as well,” says Jacqui Joudo Larsen, the Minderoo Foundation’s Executive Director of Gender Equality.
The Co-Impact philanthropic model is unique, Larsen says, and fits well with Minderoo’s overarching objective to tackle entrenched, global systemic challenges.
“Co-Impact’s trust-based, partner-led, but outcomes-focused approach was really compelling for us. It allows for flexible, long-term funding – and those are two really critical things when you’re looking at big, tough issues like this that have persisted for generations,” says Larsen.
The enormity of the problem
“It is estimated to take 134 years to achieve gender equality at the current rate of progress, which is far too many,” says Larsen.
“Deloitte estimated that addressing gender norms and labour force participation and productivity would add $128 billion annually to the Australian economy. So while there is a case to be made from a human rights perspective, it also makes a lot of economic sense.”
The Perth-based executive is not perturbed by the scale of the gender inequality problem and is committed to addressing its fundamental root causes.
“We’re talking about needing to do some really, serious social norms work,” says Larsen. “In sports, the media, in workplaces – all of these places where we’re constantly getting messages about gender norms from.”
Minderoo has projects based on the financial inclusion of women, entrepreneurship, and equal economic opportunity, as well as combatting human rights issues that have less visibility in Australia.
“We’re doing work with communities around forced marriage and how to better protect against that. People think doesn’t happen here,” says Larsen.”We also do quite a bit of work in Australia on modern slavery and policy reform.”
A philanthropic model decades in the making
The first time Andrew and Nicola Forrest worked with Olivia Leland was 2013, when they were the first Australians to join the Giving Pledge. At that time, Leland was the founding director of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s initiative to encourage ultra-high-net-worth families to commit the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.
Leland left the Giving Pledge in 2014 and set out on her own to discover how to derive greater impact from philanthropy. The outcome of that investigation is what formed the basis of her current non-profit.
“Our whole model and the whole reason that Co-Impact came into being was I spent three years going and talking to people from around the world saying, what do you need from philanthropy to see more impact in the world?,” says Leland.
The feedback she heard was that change needed to take place at a systems level, not just on the surface, and that philanthropic capital needs to be patient rather than committed to a one to three-year timeframe.
“Our approach is very much partner-driven. It’s based on what those driving change are saying is needed. Our funding supports local change makers to partner with others – whether that is organisations, government, the private sector, to address issues at the scale of the problem,” says Leland.
Today, the specific areas of gender equality that Co-Impact addresses are early childhood education, secondary school completion and health, reproductive rights, maternal health, economic opportunity and sustainable livelihoods.
That focus, coupled with Leland’s unique approach to philanthropy, is what attracted Minderoo to become its largest funder.
“After several years of doing diligence on Co-Impact and what it is that we were bringing together, the Minderoo Foundation decided to become one of our key funding partners,” says Leland.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Founded in 2001 by the Forrests, the Minderoo Foundation targets three systemic problems: gender inequality, natural ecosystems, and communities.
“There’s quite a lot of overlap between the areas,” says Larsen. “For us, while gender equality is one of the three focus areas, it’s also a cross-cutting lens.”
When it comes to what Australia does well, Minderoo’s executive director of gender equality says childcare is a bright spot.
“In Australia, we have seen some good progress in the policy space around childcare, women getting help to return to work and increase workforce participation,” says Larsen.
Homegrown successes like that can be replicated in other territories, according to Leland, the CEO of Co-Impact.
“One of the things that’s been most exciting during these conversations this week in Australia is to understand, okay, what are you seeing around for example, early childhood development that could be applied to say, South Africa and vice versa?” says Leland.
An enormous challenge Australia must address, however, is gender based violence.
“Challenging attitudes that condone violence is a pretty important one in Australia,” says Larsen. “There’s so much that we want to do around gender-based violence – that’s a really live issue and one that we need to tackle the root causes of.”
“It is estimated to take 134 years to achieve gender equality the current rate of progress, which is far too many.”
Jacqui Joudo Larsen, Minderoo Foundation
A central focus of the organisation is to challenge social norms around gender roles, particularly as it relates to gender-based violence.
“You can’t change attitudes and norms overnight. You can’t change them in three years. These are long-term projects to remove structural barriers and effectively shift power and resources. That also involves working with business and government,” says Larsen.
Partnering with Co-Impact and other entities enables Minderoo to increase the scale and impact of its work.
“The world is so connected these days, particularly on this issue around gender equality. For us, it made a lot of sense to look internationally for a partner to take learnings and knowledge from the way Co-Impact has worked in other countries and bring it back to Australia to execute philanthropy far more effectively,” says Larsen.
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