Social entrepreneurship is on the rise in Australia and women appear to be leading the charge.
Many are modest women, like Marylou Verberne, who won’t publicly label it “an epiphany”, but who acknowledges a distinctive “aha” moment that catapulted her from a safe salaried position into a cacophony of social business craziness.
Marylou’s not-for-profit social enterprise, Play for Life (based in Melbourne) is a venture forging a powerful new conversation around the value of injecting ‘play’ back into our social discourse, and building social understanding that play can be a powerful “mental health immunisation”.
“Play now sits alongside diet and exercise as recognised key ingredients for wellbeing. It has been proven that play is essential to continued wellbeing, resilience, adaptation to change and social cohesiveness,” Marylou says.
Prior to Play for Life, Marylou’s 20-year career included a chapter working as a lawyer in Asia, various roles with state and federal politicians, arts projects with youth and a myriad of not-for-profit board roles.
It was during her last role as Victorian director for Social Ventures Australia, (where she sat across a portfolio of education and young people), that Marylou and ‘play’ collided. The questions being considered included: were today’s children getting enough play to help them thrive in the 21st century? Would the omnipresent and solitary nature of the digital age continue to ransack our innate human need for play? Would this era of parent-prescribed, structured play ultimately squash children’s need for self-directed play?
Within 12 months of considering such issues, Marylou and her research colleagues had not only discovered a generational shift towards less constructive play in Australia’s primary school children, but they also unearthed an innovative concept in the UK that reversing such a shift.
Encouraged by her CEO, Michael Traill, to not “die wondering”, Marylou gathered her own stores of funding, resilience and tenacity, and over the last two years has been helping primary schools around Australia to transform children’s experience of school by installing a Play for Life Pod in their schoolyards.
The pods are modified shipping containers full of clean, safe scrap (fabric, tyres, milk crates etc) and the simple approach is fostering more creative, equitable and physically active interaction at lunch times in schools across Australia.
In the UK, research on the pods has found a reduction in bullying, boredom and anti-social behaviour, and an increase in school attendance, social cohesion and brain development within children. Some are even heralding the pod concept as the most powerful advancement in play since the invention of the swing.
For Marylou, it’s philanthropy at play in its most pure form:
“The essence of philanthropy for me is helping to birth innovation and social change through seed-funding projects of progressive organisations, lead by social entrepreneurs, which may not attract funding from traditional philanthropic sources.
“I believe social change happens at the edges of civil society and this is where strategic investment from “engaged philanthropy” can help bring about this change,” she says.
Indeed, as opposed to charity and philanthropy, social entrepreneurship can provide dynamic entities for corporations to collaborate with. At its best, this form of “engaged philanthropy” is underpinned by a robust, sustainable business model, with a community reach that provides a strong value proposition.
And there’s always scope for more women to get involved, such as through Social Ventures Australia and the School for Social Entrepreneurs in Melbourne and Sydney.