Jan Owen’s first business venture came at the age of 11 and involved catching cane toads.
The second eldest of five children, she ‘managed’ her younger brothers and their friends to catch the toads at night, providing the live creatures to the University of Queensland.
“When somebody told me you can make money from toads (a pest in Queensland), I thought this is great! And so I would instruct my brothers like a military sergeant.”
It was a taste of the entrepreneurial and leadership career that was to come for Owen — although much of it would be in support of young people rather than leading them to catch live animals. Decades later, that career saw her awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney, at a ceremony earlier this month.
“I’m a serial high school and university drop out, so it’s a bit stunning for my family to see me end up with an honourary doctorate,” she says.
But as Owen notes, history is littered with plenty of so-called ‘drop outs’ who created their own opportunities – serial entrepreneurs like herself who decided to just get on with it.
Owen’s also an author and social worker who started working with young Indigenous people on the streets of Brisbane as a teenager. Later, after having three children, she established CREATE, helping to empower more than 20,000 kids in foster care. She’s worked on a number of social change start-ups as well as different not-for-profit boards. Currently, she’s the CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA).
She’s come a long way for somebody who never completed formal education. “I’ve always had the view that education failed me I didn’t fail education,” she says. “I was massive trouble. I was off the grid. That was how I grew up and where I came from. There was a whole set of expectations on me that I was never going to achieve.”
So instead of following a traditional career path, Owen created her own. Indeed, following a less traditional career path helped cement her view of young people in the world today. She saw first hand how not waiting to be told what you could and could not do allowed her to create opportunities and to initiate the change she desired. That’s why she’s adamant the best thing anyone can do for young people or the disadvantaged is to give them power.
Since taking the helm of FYA in 2010, the organisation has more than doubled in size and seen its reputation enhanced as an advocate for encouraging the corporate, government and NFP sectors to back young people in Australia.
Asked what are some of the main issues affecting young people today, she believes it comes down to the complexity of our globally connected world.
“What I find more interesting than ever is that young people often say their mentors are the people closest to them,” she says. “Previously their mentors and those they’ve admired were people who were unreachable.
“More often than not, you’re now hearing young people say the people they admire most are their mums or parents. People have come closer to home. They’re more disillusioned with leadership figures or sporting figures. Familiarity breads contempt.”
Young people are also looking for a place to belong — whether that’s online or off. “One of the outcomes of having a globally connected world and being able to engage with people around anything you desire with the click of a button is that you then look for your tribe,” she says. “The human condition has this absolute desire to belong, and connect and to love and be loved. It’s unchangeable. But our context changes, and so we do it differently.”
Meanwhile, she believes women are being presented with more options than ever before, but are still encountering too many barriers in the workforce and struggling to balance family and career.
Still, Gen Y women have something she believes her generation missed out on — a decade before having children in which they can get an education and kickstart their careers. Owen was married and pregnant at 24, an age that would seem young by today’s standards.
“Gen Y have their twenties,” she says. “The average marrying age is 30 now. For having a child, it’s 31 or 32. There’s this whole decade for women that actually wasn’t there before.
“Basically you have an opportunity to get some strong foundations down: to take some risks, try things and do things. That’s a gain for Gen Ys. It didn’t exist before.”
The honorary degree is one of many accolades Owen has accepted in recent years. She received the Order of Australia in 1999, and was named the inaugural Australian Financial Review & Westpac Group’s ‘Woman of Influence’ in 2012.
However, she’s not always comfortable with the attention. “One half of me is deeply embarrassed about the attention. I’m good, like lots of people, at giving other people attention rather than taking it myself,” she says.
“But I always remember that people in the education and social fields don’t always get a lot of recognition. I don’t take awards personally. I see them as something that’s of huge benefit to the work I’m doing, to help everyone have a sense of achievement and accomplishment.”
And having started but never finished a number of university degrees, she’s pleased to have been formally recognised academically for the study she’s done via her work, rather than in a classroom.
“I’ve had 30 years of learning,” she says. “I pay huge tribute to the university for what they’ve done with this [honourary degree]. It says there are many forms of learning and that learning is lifelong.”