Three social enterprises set to fast-track impact with support from Westpac Foundation

Three social enterprises with big ambitions to amplify their positive impact are each set to benefit from an extra $100,000 funding boost via a ‘Strengthen Grant’ from Westpac Foundation.

The three growing social enterprises – BackTrack Works, Hotel Etico and Plate It Forward – have very distinctive operating models but share a common mission: to support people experiencing complex barriers to work by generating meaningful employment and training opportunities. 

Not only have the enterprises shown promising early outcomes since being founded within the past six years, they’ve also made substantial progress towards dialling up their social impact, prompting Westpac Foundation to “help them strengthen their foundations for growth”, says the foundation’s CEO Amy Lyden.

“It’s been wonderful to see the huge difference BackTrack Works, Hotel Etico and Plate It Forward are making to the lives of so many people by offering meaningful work opportunities,” says Lyden, noting the three were previously among almost 40 businesses to receive early-stage funding in 2022 via an ‘Inclusive Employment Grant’ from Westpac Foundation.  

“We can also see the solid groundwork they are laying to scale their impact to benefit even more people in need. We’re delighted to be able to continue to walk alongside them to help get them there, offering both the financial and non-financial support that comes with our ‘Strengthen Grant’.”
 

BackTrack Works: getting young people back on track 

Social enterprise BackTrack Works was set up in 2018 as an extension of BackTrack, an organisation that since 2006 has been supporting young people doing it tough in the New England region of NSW. 

Building on BackTrack’s initiatives to help young people develop life and work skills to plan a better future, the social enterprise provides vocational on-the-job training and jobs deliberately aligned with the region’s job market. The team is contracted by customers predominantly in the local agricultural sector for projects such as asset maintenance, farming and construction jobs, enabling the young employees to earn wages, experience, qualifications and a greater sense of community belonging. 

“For customers, they get the dual benefit of a job competitively quoted, well done, delivered on time and budget – along with the knowledge that they’re investing in social impact in their local community,” says BackTrack’s CEO Marcus Watson. “And for the young people, we’re here for them for as long as it takes, providing wraparound support so they can succeed. Our goal is that we put everything in place so when they’re ready to go onto other employment, they’ll have all the things they need – somewhere to live, a licence, qualifications and stability – and the knowledge that we’ll still be here whenever they need us.”    

Watson says since 2018, almost 100 young people have been employed through the social enterprise. While there is no cap on the number of new recruits taken on, he expects at least 12 will join within the next year. 

The key to growth, he says, is to expand the team of BackTrack supervisors and invest in their capabilities, along with improving the sophistication of the enterprise’s financial and governance systems – outcomes that will be underpinned by the ‘Strengthen Grant’ from Westpac Foundation. 
 

Hotel Etico: boosting hospitality employment pathways 

Established in 2020 in a grand boutique 15-room hotel in the NSW Blue Mountains, Hotel Etico is a not-for-profit social enterprise which offers luxury accommodation to customers while running an immersive hospitality training and employment program for young people with disabilities.

To date, 28 young people have graduated from the two-year training program and have gone on to be successfully employed in mainstream hospitality venues. Another cohort of 15 are in training and continue to break down commonly held perceptions about what people with disability can achieve while offering luxury guest experiences to customers of the hotel.

Based on its success, CEO and co-founder Andrea Comastri is leading the charge to replicate the model across Australia, starting with a second hotel by the end of 2025, and targeting an increase in the number of program participants to at least 40 each year. 

“The challenge ahead for Hotel Etico is to be able to grow our internal capacity as the business grows,” Comastri says. 

“Therefore, the new funding boost and in-kind support from Westpac Foundation will be a critical enabler, allowing our leadership team to focus on the expansion by backfilling key roles onsite while our focus shifts to identifying new sites and new partners in new locations.” 
 

Plate It Forward: spreading the universal love language of food 

Since its launch in 2020, the Plate It Forward Group has grown into a successful dining and catering social enterprise, with well-loved restaurants across Sydney including Colombo Social, Kabul Social and Kyiv Social. 

Through its unique business model, the Group has offered training and meaningful employment to more than 200 people from marginalised backgrounds including asylum seekers, paid more than $3.5 million in wages, and donated more than 560,000 meals to people experiencing disadvantage. 

And that’s just the beginning for founder and CEO Shaun Christie-David who has big ambitions to further scale Plate It Forward’s positive impact in line with his deep-seated belief in realising the potential of every individual who engages with the Group.   

“What the Strengthen Grant will help us to do is to bring in some really high calibre talent with deep expertise to help us improve our operational efficiency, to build up our frameworks and processes, and get us in great shape to take us to the next level,” Christie-David says.

“We’ve been fortunate to have achieved so much already, but we know where we want to be and we’re in this for the long-haul. By firming up our foundations now, we’ll be able to sustainably increase our impact by far.”
 

Step along Westpac Foundation funding pipeline 

The ‘Strengthen Grants’ are part of a suite of grants offered by the Westpac Foundation in line with its goal to help early-stage social enterprises to scale, says Lyden. 

“Ultimately, our aim is to partner with high potential work integration social enterprises through our pipeline as they mature, helping them transition to become sustainable in their own right,” she explains. 

“We think about the ‘Strengthen Grants’ a bit like a second stage of the pipeline – we’ve come to know the social enterprise from their first stage as an ‘Inclusive Employment Grant’ recipient and see their potential to get to the third ‘Employment Partnership Grant’ stage where we provide funding in collaboration with other funders to support the next stage of growth.    

Lyden says Westpac Foundation has a target to support social enterprise partners to create 10,000 jobs over the 15 years to 2030 and is well on the way, having recorded more than 7,600 so far.