A Dog Called Diversity
A Dog Called Diversity
The Good Mahi Model......with Haemia Melling
Ever wondered what happens when businesses do good work in their communities, but never measure or talk about it? In this conversation with Haemia Melling, founder of Impact Ink, we dive deep into the world of Environmental Social Goverance (ESG) consulting and discover a revolutionary approach to balancing corporate success with community impact.
Hamia shares her journey from childhood dreams of teaching to banking, performing arts, and finally establishing her own consultancy focused on helping businesses and not-for-profits work together more effectively.
She has identified a crucial gap in the market – while many New Zealand businesses engage in excellent community and sustainability work, they rarely measure its impact or share these stories effectively.
The heart of our conversation explores Haemia's "Good Mahi Model," a pricing structure that subsidises not-for-profit work through corporate client fees. This creates a ripple effect where businesses can amplify their community impact simply by choosing to work with Impact Inc.
Whether you're a corporate leader looking to enhance your ESG strategy, a not-for-profit seeking sustainable funding models, or someone interested in creating more purpose-driven work, this conversation offers valuable insights into building businesses that balance profit with purpose.
Connect with Haemia on LinkedIn or visit impactInk.co.nz to learn more about implementing the Good Mahi Model in your organisation.
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Welcome to the podcast. A Dog Called Diversity everyone. I have been sitting here having a lovely chat with Hamia Melling and I thought I better hit record because it was a cool chat, and then I realised I wasn't recording.
Speaker 2:And we could have kept going. We could have kept going.
Speaker 1:Welcome. Thanks for having me, it is such a pleasure. And Hamia has a business called. What is your business called? I was going to say Impact Inc, but it's not that it is it is. Oh good, yeah, I was confused because we also we were introduced through someone who has a business called intelligent ink oh yeah yeah, yeah, and I and I knew that your business was about impact, but I was like is it about ink?
Speaker 2:I can't remember both impact and telling the stories of.
Speaker 1:Hence the ink oh, yes, yes, yes, and I just I'm going up and down with my I thought you might be with my desk.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we'll get serious any minute. Um, I was going to try something a bit different today. I often asked ask my guests to tell a bit of their story and career. But I'm going to get. I'm going to get you to tell me about your business first, and then I'm going to go back to your career and where you started, because that's such an interesting story to end up where you are, I think okay. Yeah, so I'd love you to tell us a bit about your business. What is Impact?
Speaker 2:Inc about. So Impact Inc, like I said, it's um impact and telling the stories of impact. So I am an ESG consultant and I help businesses and not-for-profits work together successfully or more successfully. Businesses um dive into their kind of corporate social uh responsibility work um helping them be strategic about it in ways that make sense for who they are as a business, what their values are.
Speaker 2:Um because over the last few years in my career I've noticed there are a lot of businesses who do good mahi. They do some really good work, but it doesn't necessarily relate to who they are. And then the big missing piece consistently seems to be businesses in New Zealand are not ready, they're not equipped, they're not interested in telling the stories of that good mahi, and I think there's every reason why they should be um. It helps them know that they're doing the right thing and that they should keep going or they should stop and pivot or they should invest more in good mahi and I'm talking about things like community work or sustainability work, stuff that's kind of giving back to the communities where they operate.
Speaker 2:So they do the good mahi, but they don't measure its success and they don't tell people about it. And the telling people about it is a little bit of the lack of information. They don't necessarily have the data to tell any stories, but a lot of it is. Oh, we just do it quietly and, you know, keep going. But I think that's actually doing a disservice not just to their business but also to the organizations that they work alongside and to their community. Because if a business isn't saying we work with this organization and for this community, for this reason, how does it encourage other people and other businesses to get involved? And then, on the not-for-profit side of things, I'm helping organizations be more strategic as well about what they're doing, and these are organisations who are often primarily volunteer-led or they might have some funding, but it's very, very focused. So having that strategic and this kind of consulting stuff coming into their organization is few and far between. So helping them be strategic, helping them with their impact measurement as well, and then also helping with that storytelling, but a lot of it seems to be.
Speaker 2:There's work coming through where I'm helping not-for-profits work alongside businesses better. How do we talk to businesses? What language do we need to use when we're engaging businesses and why would we? A lot of not-for-profits over the last few years are finding funding really challenging. Our funding's being cut, so they have to work harder than ever to seek funding to be funded, which is taking them away from actually doing the really important work within the community. Yeah so, yeah so. I've got business not-for-profits throwing in my hat to to help them, help people, planet prosperity in Aotearoa, new Zealand, and it's a lot of fun and really, really satisfying work yeah um, that wasn't very succinct, was it?
Speaker 1:it was great. There were a few things I wanted to pick up on. So the first one if people don't know what ESG stands for, it's environmental, social and governance work, and usually bigger organisations, bigger corporates, who are usually listed on a stock exchange and they have certain requirements around public reporting, usually will have to report around environment, social and governance work. Also, everything that you've said that applies to New Zealand, I think, applies beyond. The thing that I think I've noticed in New Zealand is, maybe more than some other places I've lived, is the, the want to do things for the community just because it's the right thing to do yeah, um, and I really love that about New Zealand, but then I love what you're doing in around.
Speaker 1:How do we measure that impact and how do we tell the stories about the impact, because it's the stories that connect to the people, and I think that the how has to be understood after the why.
Speaker 2:Why would you do impact measurement? Why would you tell the stories of it? And that's that's. The missing piece really is organizations not having the time or the capacity or whatever to think about the why. They're just doing which is which?
Speaker 1:is awesome.
Speaker 2:But when things get stretched or stressed, the good stuff, that's not your business. You know the primary business purpose. This community good or environmental, good, kind of just it risks being set aside or not grown.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love that you are tackling a problem in corporate which some corporates are doing the community work, the social work to tick a box, and so they do have something to put in their annual report. Um, and when they go to write and I have been here when they go to write the annual report and they're scrambling to find, okay, what did we spend and what impact did we make? And do we have any photos of our staff doing stuff, so I like that you're for corporates.
Speaker 1:At times you're taking their tick box and go, actually, that money you're spending is having this impact and being able to define that in a much better way and for not-for-profits anyone who has maybe tried to work for a not-for-profit and found that it can be challenging because they're not sometimes they're not set up to work with corporates or to work with volunteers as effectively as they could be, and being able to show them that impact. I think that's fantastic as well. I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes me feel good. I love this work. I think that's fantastic as well.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, makes me feel good. I love this work. It's so, so cool and I want to come back to this work. But I know you've had, you've had such a varied background to get where you are. I know you've you've been a performer, you have been a teacher. Will you talk a little bit about that journey that's got you to where you are now? Yeah, sure I. Yeah. You talk a little bit about?
Speaker 2:that journey that's got you to where you are now. Yeah, sure, I, yeah, um, when I was five. I'm not going to give you my whole life story, but I will start with being five. Um, I had this very vivid memory and I talk about it in um, my workshops, um fairly regularly. But when I was five, I remember sitting you know, it's mat time in the classroom, yeah, and everyone's sitting up with their straightest backs and the highest crossed arms yeah, because we're all so well behaved. And I remember looking at my teacher, mrs Watson, sitting in the teeny, tiny child's chair with her huge reading book because they were always oversized books for the classroom and I remember thinking, oh, I'm going to be a teacher one day. So I was, I've always, I was always always going to be a teacher. That's just what was how things were going to go.
Speaker 2:When I was 18, I had my one interaction with my career advisor at school, who didn't know me at all. I think I'd spoken to her maybe once or twice before and I told her I was going to be a teacher and she said oh no, and suggested something else which I was like well, that doesn't make sense. I can't even even I can't remember what she suggested. All I can remember was her saying no, you won't be a teacher, um, and then I left school and I was still going to be a teacher, but I felt too young to go straight into um my degree and you know all the study and stuff like that to be coming out at age 21 as a qualified teacher teaching 18 year olds. I just didn't feel ready. So I worked for a little bit and that was when I first started working at Westpac. So I started um with being a customer service, opening accounts and, you know, doing some lending and things like that, and discovered I really quite liked it um, so I stayed. That was in 2007 and on and off I've been.
Speaker 2:I'd been at Westpac from 2007 until October last year um dipping in and out while I go and do some other things um, including university, drama school teachers, college. I did do it, yeah, um going moving over to Australia to um date my boyfriend, my, who I met at school in year eight um. We then went off and did our OE, where I finally taught in the UK the most stressful and anxiety ridden period of my life, teaching these kids. Yes, yeah, yeah. It was amazing and, reflecting back, I learned a lot. Thank goodness, you learned something from the hard parts.
Speaker 2:But I came back to New Zealand, my now husband and I. We came back to New Zealand and we ended up in Blenheim and there was no, nothing but teaching. I was still going to be a teacher, but the work just wasn't there in Blenheim at the time teacher, but the work just wasn't there in Blenheim at the time. And so I decided, actually maybe it's time to go back to the bank and think about banking as a career, because previously, up until that point, I'd never considered it as a career. It was a job I enjoyed doing, but I was going to be a teacher. So then I went into banking and enjoyed it, fell into a role that was looking after Westpac's financial education program, and that was this happy marriage of education and all this banking experience that I had and it was also my first introduction to social sustainability, which then became the area of work that I have discovered is what I love.
Speaker 2:So over the last few years, social sustainability, this realm of modern slavery, human rights, community investment all of that I've been able to get into at Westpac and it was awesome working in that space and discovering a couple of years ago I was doing my CV for some reason't tell the bank, um and and I yeah, it's not like this is going public.
Speaker 2:Um, I was doing my CV and I realized that over the last five or six years there had been this common thread. While the work I was doing was quite different, there was a common thread of improving equity for groups of people, and that is what helped me know that this is the the type of work that I will find fulfilling. So all these other years of dipping in and out of banking and customer service and teaching and things like that, yeah, all well and good, but the common thread amongst it all is being able to help improve outcomes for people that helps them get ahead. And that's when. So, come October last year, I was made redundant and I, you know I was looking for work and things like that.
Speaker 2:But I live in Cromwell and part of what is amazing about Cromwell, being where we are in central Otago, makes it quite difficult to find the type of work that I was specifically looking for that and this bananas job market. So I decided to start my own consultancy and build the work that I want to work, and this experience of working alongside community partners in a corporate setting helped me kind of find my niche and this expertise of social and governance um consulting. So that is my, from five years old to how old am I? Nearly 40.
Speaker 1:There's my career journey for you. It's funny where we land and how we can thread together the learnings, the hard bits. It's often the hard bits where we do learn stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm really putting my English and drama and high school teaching degree to good use. It's all learning right You're, right You're right, it's all fed into where we are now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I once worked. It was actually my first corporate job. I first interviewed with the CEO and I, up until that point, I'd been working in retail and. I wasn't even sure how I got the job interview and the CEO was he just wanted to employ people with a degree. So I had a degree but I didn't have any of the experience. And I found out later, after I got the job, that all the applicants, usually apart from me, had some experience in what I was applying for.
Speaker 1:The point of this is when he said I just want to employ people with a degree. And I was like oh, that that's. I don't know if that's right. Like I, you know, I really questioned, even though I had studied a degree, why would every job in our company you would need to have a degree? And his answer was that, um, doing that type of study teaches us to think critically and to research to find the information we're looking for, and that's always stuck with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I still don't think you have to have a degree for everything. That's not my point. But like you learnt so much from doing those degrees.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking. Actually, probably growing up in the family with the parents I did, but also doing the degree helped me really explore empathy and kind of global views and global experiences and being introduced to the idea of experiences not my own, of experiences not my own um, how, how you have to be open to it and the benefits of being open to experiences that aren't your own to really help you grow and expand your blooming horizons. And yeah, I loved uni for that. I think it has really probably influenced, yeah, how I think and certainly how I creatively operate too, even though I'm doing strategy and project work and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, the critical thinking and the, the creative thinking practices that you just kind of inherit through study, yeah, be pulled into what I do now, which is great yeah, have you got any um like really cool projects that you might have worked on recently that you could share, and maybe not the company names if you can't do that, but like to give people a flavor of?
Speaker 2:how you've shown impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, a recent project and actually kind of set me off on thinking maybe I could do this for my work. I worked with the multi-ethnic young leaders network, so they're an not-for-profit organization who they kind of. Their main piece of work is helping multi-ethnic young leaders so aptly named an organization who build connections with senior business leaders. So it's a mentorship program, essentially a mentorship network. Leaders are paired up with an executive, C-suite type person and then they're also they pass on their mentorship by being partnered with a school leaver or a university graduate. So it's kind of this three-layered mentorship program. It's called Three Kapu Kafe, Three Cups of Coffee. It's a very simple program that's really effective for building up young leaders, for building up young leaders helping corporate organisations link in with diverse thinking, diverse age groups as well.
Speaker 2:Anyway, that organisation, the GM acting GM or GM Michelle Huang, reached out to me and asked me to help them design, using their program design, a new workplace program. So that was my first helping a not-for-profit deliver or develop a sustainable funding model. So this is a programme that they can sell to workplaces to help them keep doing the really important connection and whakawhanaungatanga work that they do as an organisation. They're building relationships that are multi-layered, and so, in order to keep doing that, they need a sustainable source of funding. So they called me in to help them with my Corp Speak, and all that experience translate something into a workplace program. So, look, I think they're looking to launch that later in the year at some point, with more details to come, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just wanted to. Oh, there's a couple of things I want to say to our listeners that it's really common in New Zealand for people to work in Māori language and Māori words, and you just said I think it was, whakafanawha, whakafanaungatanga, what does that?
Speaker 2:mean. So that's, that's the act of building relationships, building connection, yeah, yeah so. I will absolutely not profess being fluent or having much fluency in te reo Māori at all, but I do try. And yeah, just be conscious, these are commonly used terms that I use because, yeah, to profess I know more than I do is not going to do me any favours. It's not as genuine. Yeah, I've got some work to do anyway. I think we all do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think we all do, but I think one of the things that I love about the te ao Māori and the language te reo Māori, it's so, um, it's such a layered language and a layered um world view that's so holistically, I don't know. There are lots of bits that relate to one another. From what I observe and the more I learn about it and um, I think it's it's such a privilege to be invited to learn the language and to use it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I love it yeah, no, I love it when people use it too. Now that I'm getting the hang of, what?
Speaker 2:more and more introductions to it yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, I think that example you shared was a great example of sustainable business models and you know, a lot of the work I do is about how do we build sustainable businesses so that we don't have. You know, when things are going well, that's fine, we've got budget, we can employ enough people. When things are not going well, we get rid of people and, like, I mean, I've worked in businesses my whole life like that and I'm more interested in how do we build sustainability, how can we have really strong for-profit businesses that can employ people, can provide an income for families and how can we give back to communities? And I wonder, did you want to talk a little bit about your business model? Because I think your business model is really cool yeah.
Speaker 2:I laugh I laugh because the business model this is, um, it came out of a bit of my husband and I. I say heated conversation between Dan and I. We don't really have heated conversations because we're conflict avoiders. It's more I'm right and he's right and we explore how right we both are.
Speaker 1:I thought you were going to say he's wrong.
Speaker 2:Well, no, this is where the tensions arise is, we're both very right most of the time, anyway. So when I was first kind of exploring what my business would be, I knew that I wanted to work with not-for-profits. And I knew that I wanted to work with for-profits and I knew that I was going to do consulting and that for a lot of not-for-profits a standard consulting rate is just not very accessible for not-for-profits. And so I was telling Dan in the kitchen one evening that what I'm going to do is I'm going to charge for profits, my standard consulting rate, but then I'm going to subsidize not-for-profits and it's important to me that I'm transparent about that. And he works for himself, he is a manufacturer of fancy, shiny car parts, so he's producing, producing stuff. And he, he basically challenged me and said well, if I did that to my customers, they would the ones I'm charging more would choose not to work with me because I'm offering the exact same thing to somebody way cheaper. I mean, do it, he said, but just don't tell people about it. And I remember thinking I'm right, you're wrong at the time, um, but trying to explain, trying to work out why, what, why do I, why do I think I'm right. Um, and why is Dan right for his business? Because that made perfect sense to me. I absolutely get where you're coming from, but I don't think that's right for my business. So I he went back to work.
Speaker 2:I came and sat on the couch where I do my best, thinking and sitting, and I thought I need to work out what this actually looks like. How is it something that I talk about? How is it something that is going to be sustainable for me? So I'm not over committing to not-for-profits and meaning I can't actually help my family pay the bills. What am I doing here? And so out of that came my pricing structure, which I've called the good mahi model. Essentially, what it means is for every hour up to 10 hours a month that I am doing for profit, work at my full consultancy rate, I subsidize and at the moment it's a 55% subsidy and give equivalent hours so up to 10 hours a month to not-for-profits.
Speaker 2:So what that means is the for-profits. They might have a not-for-profit that they like working with. They might say to me Hamia, we've got this partner, we'd love to introduce you if they've got any work for you. That way we can say we have helped our community partner gain equivalent value of X number of dollars, x number of hours, because we have chosen to work with Impact Inc. So this model it's basically my way of ensuring I'm still accessible to both parties.
Speaker 2:It's also this really cool ripple effect of goodness. You know that for-profit businesses can say that because I chose to work with Hamia at Impact Inc, we've also enabled not-for-profits to access Hamia at way cheaper rates for the exact same, you know, those same services, and it's a model that I think can be really applicable across businesses, so not just mine, and I'm working with a friend of mine. She's got her own business about um so we can plop it into her business, make it fit her and what she does, so that she can then pass on this kind of benefit to um, either not-for-profits or I think in her case she was thinking of um solo women founders. You know, yeah, like how cool and and then I get to say cool impact inc and all of these other organizations employ the good mahi model, which means x number of dollars value has been um given to not-for-profits. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a cool way to deliver your services to people who otherwise and organisations who otherwise might not be able to access you or they might not even consider accessing you because they see consulting and think but $600 an hour maybe that should be my rate.
Speaker 1:Not there yet yeah, I love that right.
Speaker 2:How have you gotten any feedback, I guess, from corporates or not-for-profits about, yeah, about how that model works for them yeah, so I I'm still trying to get more as I build my profile. You know my business is relatively fresh, still trying to get some more for profits engaged, but I have been able to deliver some of my subsidized work to not for profits and my first Google review that was one of the things that the organization said was pivotal for them being able to work with me was that I had this model in place. So awesome, yeah, feel goods all around. Feel good around, I like it.
Speaker 1:What kind of what kind of um, what kind of work are you looking for? Like what's your ideal project with, say, a corporate who's who's doing ESG work? Maybe they're not measuring their impact, like what is, what does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:I'd be really open to. Well, no, I, not, I would be. I am open to working with any businesses that are already doing some of this good mahi. They're already doing good work, but they're thinking it's time for us to review it. It's time for us to think are we going to keep doing it? Should we? Are we changing? Does it make sense to who we are? Um, and corporates often have people within their teams who can do this kind of work for them. Um, so being able to work alongside those team members would be awesome. To move to that next level of the actual impact measurement, the. Okay, we're delivering a hundred thousand dollars worth of investment in communities, but what do we know about that kind of return on investment? We know how many people might be impacted by it, but so what? That's usually the missing piece. So what?
Speaker 2:yeah, so helping corporates determine the so what and understand the so what doing that, but then helping perhaps medium and smaller sized businesses who are looking at getting started in that or rejigging what they're doing yeah, I love that and even like solo practitioners who have heard about this good mahi model, who want to see how that might apply in their business, I'd love to um have just this network and that's the intent having a network of businesses who have this little badge on their website that says we apply the good mahi pricing structure or the good mahi model. Rather um, and it means this yeah, cool.
Speaker 1:How do people get in contact with you if they want to work with you, if they want to learn?
Speaker 2:more. Um, I am semi-regular posting on LinkedIn if you just want to see, see what I'm up to. Um, but otherwise just impactincconz.
Speaker 1:We've got a form online and yeah cool yeah what is one thing that we haven't talked about that you'd really like to share?
Speaker 2:oh, I am not prepared for this question, um, hmm, um, I would challenge businesses to consider what they're doing beyond profit and, when things are extra hard, how and why you should you do things beyond profit. Just consider the question, yeah, um, and consider, for business owners, what are your personal values linked to who you are as, uh, you know, as an operational, as a business? Are they in sync with one another? And if they're not, how can you align them? Because this social, um, social good that you could be doing, environmental good that you could be doing, could be a way to just bring in some alignment, and I think people can over complicate things. Um, it doesn't need to be complicated, but it should make sense to who you are as a business and who you are as individuals leading business.
Speaker 1:I love that so so much. Yeah, yeah. I love that I the. It's so. So I saw a news report a couple of weeks ago about Country Road. So a women's apparel retailer and an Australian icon, I guess which is why I was.
Speaker 1:I was watching it and they the whole report was about they were going to shut stores, right, um, in Australia, and they're going to shut stores because revenues were whatever percentage down and profit was you know whatever percentage down, um, and they were only going to make 14 point something million in profit. And I was like like what so often in business? Okay, well, we're going backwards, you're not losing money, you're still making a lot of profit. But yeah, there was no thought beyond profit. It was okay, we'll just shut stores and from a social and a community point of view, that's really challenging.
Speaker 1:You're putting people out of jobs. Usually you don't have jobs for them in other stores. Um, there's a whole lot of knock-on effects to that. So I think that advice was really great, really and topical. And I was thinking about in my business you know it's been a tough business year and so, instead of me going, okay, well, what the hell am I going to do? Like what, what can I do to make something better for other people, people working in social diversity and inclusion, work like, oh, could I create a community, could I create something that's really low cost, because budgets have been, and that personal value that you talked about around with solo business owners.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, well, I saw a post on LinkedIn from Christopher Miller. He's a he's a business coach that I've met these last few months and he's terrible. I can't remember the details of it, but essentially it made me think how absurd it is really that it is a privilege to love what you do and it shouldn't be to love what you do and it shouldn't be um. But I think what is missing for lots of people is they. They haven't necessarily had the time or might not have the, the skills or the knowledge and how to actually articulate what their personal values are, and what that means is they haven't necessarily which I completely understand linked it to what they do for work. But if you consider, you give 40 hours of your life for what? 35, 40 years of your life to work? So it shouldn't be a privilege to love what you do. It should be an essential. It should be an essential.
Speaker 2:It's just like it's bananas to me. That and really unfortunate really that people don't have the time or the knowledge or the experience to investigate that for themselves, to then go and find what they want to do and explore what they want to do because they've first got to make a crust to pay the bills but that takes all their time, but they don't know what they want to do, so they'll just work at the local shop, which is good enough. They enjoy it well enough. Um, or you've got people who hate their jobs but do it because it pays well yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's been delightful speaking with you, hamia. Um, I love the work you do. I love your business model. I can't wait to see the impact you have with both corporates and both not-for-profits and same um, and I hope we get to work together at some point because we have overlap and I think we bring different strengths. So, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the opportunity. It's been awesome to chat.