Our History

Around 2010, I was newly retired from full-time work and looking for a role in the NFP sector.  Like many people who spent their whole working life in the corporate world, I knew nothing about how to get started.  I was living in Boston at the time, and a friend brought me along to a meeting of the Boston chapter of SVP.  It was the night a new investee was chosen, and three prospects gave a pitch to a roomful of about 50 people, most late-career professionals or newly retired.  I was very impressed but for a reason I don’t remember, I didn’t join.

In early 2012, a former executive I had known in my consulting days in Melbourne contacted me and asked me to do a piece of consulting work for him.  He was chair of the board of  a charity that had been around for 100 years.  He had learned about the then relatively new concept of Venture Philanthropy and was keen to transform his charity to a Venture Philanthropy Foundation.  My assignment was to research various pathways to achieving that and convince the other board members to come along for the ride. 

The Foundation he sought had three fundamental characteristics that differentiated it from traditional philanthropy:

• Funding lasts over multiple years
• Funders are making an “outcome based” investment
• Funding is for infrastructure support / capacity building.

As I was doing research on the model and some of the existing leading organisations, such as Impetus Trust in Great Britain and Robin Hood in New York, I remembered Social Venture Partners and went back and did extensive research on the model.  I then proposed that the charity “transform” itself to become SVP Melbourne.  (In retrospect, this would have been an ideal structure because it would have started out with a corpus).  The board rejected that approach but eventually did transform itself based on the three fundamental characteristics he had defined. 

So I said, why not do it anyway?  I recruited two friends (one being Marianne Broadbent) to become the other two “founding partners”.  We contacted SVPI in Seattle and had many long discussions with Ruth Jones, who was then ED of SVPI (and is now a Melbourne partner).  We also had many discussions with anyone who would talk to us, including Australian Communities Foundation and many others. 

Our goal was to recruit a total of ten Founding Partners.  It took nine months and many conversations, but suddenly there were ten people at my dining room table, committed and eager to get started.  They included Wayne Saunders and David Green, and Robert Broadbent of course, as well as Marianne.

Then we got the catalyst we needed for a real “kickoff” – SVPI Chair Lance Fors would visit Melbourne for two days in May, and give the entire two days to our agenda.  The founding partners worked tirelessly for three months to plan events and get out invitations.  The events  included a presentation at ACF, a lunch hosted by Morgan Stanley, and a cocktail reception hosted by Leadership Victoria, and  an interview by John Thain on the ABC.

But the crowning event was on the evening of the second day.  This was billed as “friends of the Founding Partners” and that is exactly what it was.  It was held in the Boardroom of EWK (Marianne’s company) overlooking the top of Collins Street, and it was packed.  The excitement was palpable.  Lance was brilliant, and there was a wonderful vibe.  We left that evening with commitments of over twenty-five people, including current long-standing partners Ian Adair, Paula Giles, Paul Higgins, and Mark Jankelson.

Social Venture Partners Melbourne was off and running!