[PROFILES:PEOPLE]
Since meeting Rebecca Scott from STREAT, I have had a different perspective on life. We originally met for a coffee with Rebecca in July for a casual discussion in relation to STREATand the new venture we are embarking on together (one week for STREAT). It was quite a meeting. I have since ridden my bike to the city for meetings, avoided taxis on “all” occasions started walking places instead of driving.
We have been amazed by start-up STREAT since conception and follow the business closely. We thought it was time our readers had the privilege to meet Rebecca Scott.
Rebecca determined her professional path by flipping a coin to decide if she should study science or visual arts at Newcastle Uni. Although science won, it only took her a couple of years in the lab to realise she was way better at talking about science and drawing her microscopic specimens than being stuck behind a lab bench. So in 1994 she ran away and joined the Shell Questacon Science Circus as the Slime Queen.
Later she joined the CSIRO, Australia’s premier science research organisation, as a Science Communicator where she worked for a decade in roles including National Coordinator of CSIRO’s Double Helix Club, Manager of Internal Communications and Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics Manager.
Over the years Rebecca’s spare time has been split between undertaking international development or arts projects. These include projects in Vanuatu and Vietnam, founding the Scinema international film festival, helping establish the ACT Film Makers’ Network and being on the Board of the Australian Choreographic Centre. In 2005 she was awarded a Vincent Fairfax Fellowship for ethical leadership.
It was working in Vietnam that Rebecca discovered KOTO, a street youth café in Hanoi, and the wonderful world of social enterprise. So she finally left the CSIRO to study a Masters in international development and work for KOTO as their Vice-President for a couple of years.
Rebecca is now the CEO of STREAT, a Melbourne-based start-up social enterprise providing homeless and disadvantaged youth with a pathway to long-term employment in the hospitality industry. STREAT’s first street café opens at Federation Square in Melbourne in early 2010.
And your generation is?:
Yep, I was one of the ones wearing big hair, fluoro Ts and skinny stretch jeans the first time around. I’ve re-embraced the skinny jeans but God I hope I never have to have my old fringe or flicks again.
OK, so you’re soon to launch STREAT. Give us some insight into the inspiration behind it and the time it took to create it?
I guess although I grew up in the country and spent my early years hiking and climbing mountains, I feel most alive when I’m on the streets of big, sprawling cities and swimming in an ocean of people. It’s what reminds me that I’m human.
If I scour back through the pages of my little black books I can see that STREAT is the product of realisations and epiphanies on streets across the planet. The streets of Hanoi, Calcutta and Siem Reap in Cambodia really got under my skin because of the scale of poverty and youth homelessness. The streets of Bangkok, Paris and New York gave me ideas about the joys of street food. The streets of San Francisco gave me ideas about how to simultaneously combine street food with youth development. And my love affair with Melbourne’s streets started in March when my partner and I bit the bullet and moved from Canberra to start STREAT. And timing seems amazing because there’s a bunch of very progressive people in this city not just thinking about how to build thriving and socially-inclusive public spaces and streets, but starting to do it.
In addition to lots of youth and travel and food my last three years have been filled with researching, meetings, business planning and fundraising that have all culminated in the birth of a new fledgling organisation. And like any proud mum I think my baby is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen (actually it’s second only to my two year old son Will).
What are you expectations for STREAT or, more directly, what is the business objective?
STREAT’s a hybrid organisation – or social enterprise – which uses the open marketplace to bring about social change. So our mission is a social one about providing youth with skills and livelihoods, but we achieve it through our market-focussed business model. So we take the notion of welfare and turn it on its head. We’re not expecting our governments or charities to solve our social and environmental issues alone, we figure we can start solving them on a bigger scale through the buying and selling of goods and services. So we’re creating a platform for our customers to address youth homelessness by eating great food.
As far as our business model goes, it’s kinda experimental. Over time it will become a fleet of street-based micro-enterprises that operates across a city (initially selling street food from around the planet but over time it could be other stuff too). The Holy Grail in the field of social enterprise is scaling and replicating, and we’re hoping we build something that could exist anywhere on the planet, not just downtown Melbourne. So we’re attempting something pretty interesting at the nexus of charity, business, micro-enterprise and potentially social franchising and micro-finance.
Where are you now?
We’ve spend 2009 building the foundations of the organisation – building the team, putting in place our governance, setting up the Board, getting all our partnerships lined up, bedding down all our systems and processes. We’ve now gearing up for launch of our street food concept and intake of our first 10 young people in early 2010.
Personal interests:
As a former adrenalin junky my life now sounds pretty lame. My paraglider is currently up for sale in Canberra and instead I now spend my spare time with my partner Kate and our son Will. I can’t remember the last movie Kate and I saw but with the warmer weather we’ve just introduced Will to organic veggie gardening. I’m also drawing a bit, planning a bit of street art and I’ve usually got a couple of photography projects on the go. I’ve also got a few new crazy ideas keeping me awake at the moment and maybe we’ll get to explore them with STREAT in the future.
Notable high(s):
Making eye contact with Will for the first time after he was born a couple of years ago. And recently he spontaneously said ‘Luff you Mama’. Getting a 6am phone call from Denmark from our philanthropists who had decided to fund STREAT. Jumping off a bloody big cliff with a paraglider strapped to your back.
Notable low:
The day my immune system finally crashed after I’d totally burnt out in a previous job. I was eating a beetroot salad in a Sydney cafe about five years ago and ended up being rushed to the RPA with anaphylaxis. I had about two years where all I could eat where raw or boiled celery, potato, choko, pear and rice. Today I can eat most fruit and vegetables, eggs and a couple of fresh herbs. But there isn’t a single meal being sold in this city that I could eat and I sure as hell won’t be able to eat any of STREAT’s meals. I find that a bit of a bugger.
Share a three minute inspiring story with us:
The world’s largest social enterprise is BRAC that operates in Bangladesh. It was started by an amazing guy called Fazel Abed who employs 100,000 staff in his organisation. BRAC earns 80% of its $224 million revenue from its own commercial enterprises and has impacted the lives of tens of millions of Bangladeshis.
The world is littered with global charities and global businesses, but there’s pretty much no global social enterprises.BRAC is my beacon showing what’s possible if we harness the marketplace to alleviate poverty and disadvantage. It’s my beacon that shows what’s possible if we decide we can structure society a different way and insist we put some soul back into capitalism and the way we transact with each other.
A quote to live by:
Undoubtedly Mahatma Gandhi’s quote ‘whenever you are in doubt, apply the following test: recall the face of the poorest and weakest person you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to them.’
So what is Rebecca Scott’s Mission:
Use the little time I’ve got on the planet to have the biggest social footprint and the smallest environmental one.
The Best Websites on the planet according to Rebecca are:
www.lomography.com (I love love love lomo)
www.kiva.org (totally daggy site but a winner of a concept)
www.freecycle.org (I hate unnecessary consumerism so I love the idea of people connecting online to share or recycle their stuff)
www.getup.org.au (they used technology to give a united voice to the masses and took political campaigning to a whole new level in Australia),
www.woostercollective.com (I particularly love political street art) and naturally
www.streat.com.au (our current site is small but wait til you see what our phase 2 site will be like in a few months).
My Social Networks:
I’m analogue not digital. Yeah yeah, of course I’ve got a Linked-In account and a Facebook site with a couple of hundred friends (half of who I hardly remember from school). But for me Facebook is just a way to ensure I’ve got everyone’s latest contact details. I don’t email from it, I don’t post up my pics, I don’t have time to write about my favourite movies. Having said that I’ll still hunt someone down online but then pick up the phone to see if I can share a cuppa with them. I figure most stuff you want to achieve on the planet comes down to how you do human relationships. So I’d rather invest my time with the person and not my computer.
Finish this quote:
What the world needs more than anything right now is… A bunch of global citizens who are prepared to use their dollar as their vote. (It’s probably the most power you’ll exert on the planet.)
Thanks Rebecca, to contact Rebecca from STREAT to lend a hand, click here right now really quickly.
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