While Purcell was making significant progress in 2001 on defining and refining Westpac’s corporate citizenship prin-ciples and commitments, Sherry, who was by then CEO of Westpac’s subsidiary, The Bank of Melbourne, was starting to consider indigenous issues in greater depth. Westpac had long-standing busi-ness in the Northern Territory and had developed some expertise in providing financial services to remote, indigenous communities. In response to public criti-cism of its withdrawal of rural banking services, it established a Regional Bank-ing Group in 1999 to more effectively manage regional issues and services (Westpac, 2002a). Westpac had also previously sponsored or participated in several programmes to support indig-enous communities.8 Sherry’s next move came against a background of growing organizational responsiveness to regional and indigenous issues.
Sherry joined a group of business people who visited far North
Queen-Case studies – Getting started
Westpac Australia and the Cape York Indigenous Partnership 19
Introduction and Acknowledgments
sland in 2001 at the invitation of local Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson. Cape York is among the most remote and poorest regions of Australia (see Annex 1). Sherry’s attendance at the Cape York meeting was to be a vital step in Westpac’s unfolding corporate citi-zenship journey. She listened closely at that meeting to Noel Pearson, an influential leader who was born and raised in Cape York and argues against passive welfare dependency. Pearson’s book, “Our right to take responsibility”
(2000), laid out a vision for Aboriginal recovery that inspires the partnership between Cape York communities and several businesses,9 including West-pac, run by the organization Indig-enous Enterprise Partnerships (IEP).10
“At that meeting it was obvious that there needed to be a different way,”
said Sherry. “You can’t go into those communities and walk away thinking that it’s okay for a very affluent society like ours to have people who live on rubbish tips. It looked worse than lots of the third world images that we get
… Those things happen in our own backyard, but it’s very invisible. So the visibility of that prompted action, and at that forum, a group of us said: Why don’t we come together and see if there is a different way?”
Sherry established Westpac’s In-digenous Working Group to give focus and profile to the range of indigenous relations initiatives and sought inter-nal allies for an ambitious partner-ship project with IEP. She found ready allies in Davis, Morgan and the then head of the retail banking division, David Clark.
Describing how she introduced the idea of the Cape York partnership at Westpac, Sherry said, “I was probably senior enough just to ram it through myself, but it needed broader support than just me, because otherwise it’s not sustainable inside the organiza-tion. So I got support from David Clark, who at that time was running the retail bank. Between us we had
sufficient influence and authority to make sure it worked across the organi-zation. Leon Davis, the Chairman, got engaged. He certainly understood the community engagement piece of it, and he had respect for Noel Pearson.
The other way I got people on board was to bring Noel Pearson down and have him talk to people. You can’t go away from one of those sessions and not think that we have an obligation to do something different. He talked about the role, the dysfunctional ele-ments, how dislocated this community was, and he radiates the capacity for doing something different.”
In 2001, Westpac agreed to a partnership with Cape York Aboriginal communities that has been its most sig-nificant partnership to date to address human rights issues.
The mind-set for participation in the Cape York Indigenous Partnership The Cape York Indigenous Partnership was authorised by the Bank’s leadership and senior management because they viewed it as an opportunity to simultane-ously address severe issues of inequality in Australia and use the Bank’s unique skill set to maximize its impact on soci-ety. Morgan explained, “We could have a far greater leverage by giving a million dollars worth of our executives’ time to teach a set of financial skills to certain in-dividual households or indigenous small business enterprises. That would have a magnified impact vis-à-vis simply hand-ing over a cheque for a million dollars.”
Davis liked it because it showed em-ployees that Westpac was thinking about its responsibilities as a corporate citizen.
“It’s important for our development of our culture and it is making people proud to be working in our organization and that has a spill-over with our inter-face with customers. I think the employ-ees are going to be better representatives to our customers than they would have been before this experience,” he said.
The Cape York partnership is based on a different way of thinking about the Bank’s relationship with society.
Michael Winer, CEO of Indigenous Enterprise Partnerships, says the Cape York project requires corporations to
“dismount from their white horses”
and change their thinking from a philanthropic mindset to a capacity-building mindset that puts local com-munities in charge.
“Cape York was covered in white-elephant businesses that were hardly a very good idea or the aspiration of the Aboriginal community. It was usu-ally … someone that was visiting that said, ‘Hey, you need a prawn farm’ or
‘We should go and save the kids from petrol sniffing’. How this programme is fundamentally different is people have said, ‘No, we’re going to put the Aborigi-nal people in control and we’re going to support their initiatives and we’re going to help build their capacity to deliver programmes. We’re not going to go and deliver a programme for them’. And that’s a big shift in thinking. It seems re-ally obvious and simple now, but at the time very few people were doing that.”
Sherry wanted the partnership to be a meaningful way to address indigenous inequality. “We tinkered with it at the margin…but we’ve done one-off things.
We haven’t fundamentally changed what was possible...it’s not a natural space for corporations to think about human rights issues that are often on the fringes of communities in which we operate,” she said.
A process of active listening and dialogue with indigenous communities enabled the communities to describe their needs and establish their own strat-egy for improving their circumstances.
Sherry spent a year attending meetings with indigenous communities. “Now, that’s quite a tortuous process for people like me,” she said. “I’m in action mode all the time, and sitting back and listen-ing and trylisten-ing to work through problems that are multi-generational, that have their genesis–some of them–100 years ago, and that require long-term invest-ment, they’re not easy conversations to have and they’re certainly not easy to sit and listen to.”
Case studies – Getting started
Westpac Australia and the Cape York Indigenous Partnership
Introduction and Acknowledgments
Westpac decided to focus on two programmes related to family financial management and small business devel-opment in response to hearing directly from indigenous communities about their needs. “They had already thought about things like the fact that nobody understood how to read any bills or save any money,” explained Sherry. “You can’t build an economy in a remote area if people don’t know how to work money, and that’s our business. If all the busi-nesses that start fail, you can’t build a sustainable community,” she said. But the early days of the partnership were experimental. Sherry said, “Let’s just do it and see if we can make that work.”
Westpac’s commitment to the Cape York project
Westpac is partnering with two Cape York organizations, Indigenous Enter-prise Partnerships and Balkanu, to par-ticipate in two programmes delivered in 16 communities. The programmes are:
• Family Income Manage-ment, which works with families and clan systems to help them develop family or individual budgeting skills to cover short-, medium- and long-term financial needs.
• Business Facilitation, which provides support for finan-cial and business manage-ment, such as feasibility analysis of either new busi-ness proposals or existing businesses.
In mid-2003, Westpac also com-menced supporting the Computer Cul-ture Project (now known as Every Child Is Special Project). Computer Culture aims to have Aboriginal school children as part of their school curriculum, and to capture and record Aboriginal culture using digital technology. The cultural aspect is seen as the key to engaging the students and their families with the education process.
The partnership supplies 50 people a year from Westpac’s workforce to work for a month-long period with indigenous
communities on one of these projects.
Westpac meets the salary, travel and ac-commodation costs, and pays a modest allowance. A full-time manager, Vit Koci, is based in Cairns. He recruits and manages Westpac’s volunteers and liaises with local organizations on behalf of the Bank. In addition, several people have participated in year-long fellowships. During this time, Westpac shares the cost of their salary and travel with the Aboriginal organization they are assigned to.
The IEP’s Chief Executive Officer, Mi-chael Winer, says Westpac provides “the foot soldiers” for the programme, but also “brings mainstream economic think-ing to combine with Aboriginal economic aspirations and thinking to help our community develop a real economy.”
Recruitment and induction of volunteers
Westpac’s Cape York Programme man-ager, Vit Koci, has worked for Westpac for 30 years and had extensive regional banking experience prior to beginning the Cape York assignment. He says he is
“at pains to ensure that our guys come up here understanding the agenda and not having their own conflicting agenda.” The
“agenda” is set by the Aboriginal organi-zations with which Westpac partners. “I don’t think it’s up to white middle class people like me to be setting the agenda for the strategy in Aboriginal affairs.
The strategy and agenda is set by local Aboriginal people, and we have a belief that they have the right to set the ap-propriate agenda to bring about positive change to their circumstances,” he said.
For example, Westpac calls its volunteers
“secondees” rather than volunteers. This is an interesting choice of terminology.
The people are “seconded” to work for Ab-original organizations, but while on the programme, they must also place them-selves mentally “second” to the Aboriginal communities they work in.
Recruitment criteria place a heavy emphasis on the attitudes and aptitude of volunteers. Recruitment and induction processes aim to weed out those who can-not embrace the mindset required and
ensure those who participate “are going to get into the environment and into re-lationships that exist in various organiza-tions that we work with.”
Presentations to groups of Westpac employees are supported by an intranet site that outlines the selection process, skills required for each of the projects, and mandatory reading material. Increas-ingly, word-of-mouth from returned volunteers drives new applications. Cur-rently, around 280 people have applied for a one-month position.
Purcell says the programme is widely supported by managers, who must give permission for their employees to be away for a month. “When the next 20 go up, we’ve got 20 holes in the orga-nization, and we’ve got to match all those positions or make do without them, while they’re up working in the Cape. But no one is pulling away from that programme, and we’ve still got a queue a mile long of people wanting to go,” he said. According to Paterson, the programme is popular with employees because “it’s an opportunity for a lot of our staff to step into the unknown, to challenge themselves and learn a lot more,” he said. “There’s a lot of positive feedback that comes from our staff. They get very, very involved, and it is a life- changing experience for many of them.
They come back with very positive stories that encourage others to want to get involved themselves,” he said.
Craig Andrikonis, a Business Banking Manager from Tasmania, has participated in both the one-month and year-long pro-grammes. He says he was “excited” by the opportunity and welcomed the chance to
“hopefully make a difference.” “My view was that the Bank has got the expertise to be able to really help some of the people in these communities and…believed this was an opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone and experience something different. If my skills could help is some way, then that’s fantastic.”
After obtaining approval from their manager to apply for the programme and forwarding their resume and reasons for wanting to participate, participants must
Case studies – Getting started
Westpac Australia and the Cape York Indigenous Partnership 21
Introduction and Acknowledgments
go through an extended and intention-ally confronting interview run by Koci.
Andrikonis said he was given a number of extreme, hypothetical situ-ations and asked how he would react.
“It wasn’t around the knowledge fac-tor, being able to write business plans or understanding balance sheets; it was really around personal situations and how you would react to them.”
he said. The hypothetical situations typically deal with family conflict, breakdown and problems arising from alcohol abuse. “If you are sitting in the interviewer’s chair, you can get an idea of who would be suitable, through their responses, to come up and work in an environment like Cape York. You need to know that whoever goes up there has the capacity to be able to cope in potentially very dif-ficult situations,” he said.
Once accepted, volunteers are rostered into groups of 12 that rotate through the dry season (April–Octo-ber), as during the wet season, roads in the Cape are impassable. Each volun-teer completes an intensive, mandatory pre-reading programme that includes a community profile and local eco-nomic strategies, Noel Pearson’s book,11 which outlines the philosophy under-pinning the partnership, alcohol and substance abuse management plans and strategies, and guidelines pub-lished by Aboriginal groups on how to consult with Aboriginal people. Groups fly to Cairns to begin their induc-tion programme run by Koci and the Aboriginal groups. Cultural sensitivity training is a key feature.
The groups are then ready for their journey to the Cape, a two-to-three day overland drive during which the group camps out and begins to bond as a team. They then break into smaller groups or pairs to begin their assign-ments in one of the 16 communities.
Working for indigenous communities
The early days of Westpac’s volun-teer programme were experimental,
according to Sherry. For example, the decision to send volunteers for a month was a trade-off between having people in the Cape long enough to make a difference, but not so long that it would be disruptive for individuals or their work groups. “We knew we were putting people in quite different personal circumstances. We weren’t sure how they would cope … in some cases with very rough conditions that people went to live in, way outside their comfort zone, and we had to balance people’s safety as well on that.
And the final thing that we had to bal-ance was the capacity of the Cape to manage them,” explained Sherry.
The first group to go up faced an unexpected problem in its first week.
One of the communities that Westpac had previously had no contact with, Wujal Wujal, went into liquidation.
Because assets are community-owned, going broke means virtually all facili-ties and infrastructure close down, including shops. Westpac immediately moved one if its volunteers from his planned destination to Wujal Wujal.
“That was actually a good learning for us,” said Sherry, “because as much as you try to plan and organize and negotiate with communities how it’s going to work … it’s been quite a common experience that something unexpected happens and we have to do something different. That tested our organizational capacity to flex as well as individual capacity to flex.”
The Westpac volunteer spent a month working through the com-munity’s books and restructured the community’s finances. Unused earthmoving equipment was sold; the community got its money back and was able to continue. However, deci-sion making of this nature is relatively uncommon. Westpac volunteers are required to facilitate and support decision making by local people but not to make decisions for them. For example, Andrikonis, who worked for Balkanu in the business development programme, said, “I saw my role as
not simply writing business plans and presenting them to people, but rather to get people involved throughout the whole process … and help to transfer skills and knowledge. It’s not a matter of going up there and saying, ‘Tell me about your business idea’, then going away for two weeks, writing a busi-ness plan and sending it to them. This would be of no real benefit, as there is no knowledge or skills transfer that is sustainable. For a business to be sus-tainable, its proponents need to learn and maintain basic business skills, and that’s what I tried to achieve.”
The problems Westpac people work on during their time in the Cape are generally long-standing and complex. Winer says being able to deploy “a critical mass” of people to work on simultaneous projects is a key to achieving progress. “You can’t just tackle one issue at a time. The issues are so interrelated and intense that going and just setting up a busi-ness is almost dooming that busibusi-ness to failure because of the social sur-rounds that it’s trying to function in.
Likewise, if we’re not dealing with lit-eracy and numlit-eracy and youth devel-opment, who’s going to come forward and benefit from these things? If you don’t have family income manage-ment– you’re creating more wealth in the community–where will that money end up being spent? Probably to fuel a greater alcohol epidemic. A crucial element of our programme is a critical mass of projects and people supporting indigenous initiatives so that we can tackle the problem on a number of fronts all at once, but a coordinated approach so the youth programme, social programme, the economic programme, the health programme actually interact with each other.” Winer co-ordinates the activities of several corporate part-ners wherein each “takes the baton for a period of time, but they’re all facilitated and controlled by the Ab-original people.”
Case studies – Getting started
Westpac Australia and the Cape York Indigenous Partnership
Introduction and Acknowledgments
Debrief and re-entry to the workplace
Volunteers have a formal debrief session
Volunteers have a formal debrief session