Alumni

I never planned my career, but I couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out. I studied mathematics because I enjoyed it and most people didn’t. There was a shortage of maths teachers and I thought that qualifying as one would mean that if everything else went pear-shaped, I would always have a job. I loved teaching, but maths set me up to do a whole heap of other interesting work. I’ve found that when the work involves helping people, quantitative skills are scarce. Being confident with numbers has provided me with really great opportunities to make a contribution to community services.

Probably the biggest thing I learnt at UWA was how to make things happen! I helped organise so many parties, meetings, camps and other events that I thought it was normal. When I started working, I continued to organise excursions, networking events, conferences and competitions. My colleagues found this kind of thing difficult, but venue, invites, food and entertainment had become second nature after all my practice in the Arts Union, Student Guild and St Columba (now Trinity) College. In fact, the Social Impact Festival is the brainchild of my friend from uni!

Because analytical skills are scarce within organisations that deliver social services, they only process and use a sliver of the information available. One way to solve that problem is to build analytical capacity. Another is to provide information that can be accessed by anyone, without advanced technical skills.

Community Insight Australia takes all the publicly available data about Australians and plugs it in the back end of a map. When people designing services need to know about an issue or a place, they can just go to the map and get it. In this way, we’re designing a solution for people’s current ability, giving them access to more and better information, right now. You can sign up for free access at communityinsightaustralia.org

Community Insight Australia provides information to target communities in need and then tailor services to them. This was the focus lot of the work I’d been doing on social impact bonds. Social impact bonds are a type of outcome-based contract where private investors fund the gap in working capital for social services and projects until outcome payments kick in. Then investors are repaid and rewarded on the basis of outcome achievement. They can be used as a policy tool to accomplish a whole range of things. Some social impact bonds have encouraged new services, some have tested a successful service in a new place, some have gathered information about new service spaces and some have aimed to increase the rigour of measurement. I like the way focusing on outcomes forces governments to ask difficult questions of themselves, then improve their data analysis systems to answer these questions.