Lyndall Spooner, Founder and CEO, 5D
Last week I took part in the Vinnies CEO Sleepout for the first time to raise money for homelessness.
I’d heard about the charity event more than 10 years ago and thought it was an amazing concept: CEOs from industry leading companies coming together to experience sleeping rough for just one night to better understand the complex problem of homelessness, raise money and hopefully use their power and influence to drive broader change.
It’s the true definition of societies most privileged looking after the most vulnerable.
Technically I have been a CEO for 20 years but for a long time I didn’t call myself a CEO because that seemed ridiculous when we were a company of less than five people. When you start to get over 30, and then 40 people, you think “Ok, I might change my title now”.
But even then, I never felt I could participate in an event like a CEO sleep out, I mean, what power and influence do I bring to the table? But this year when it popped up on LinkedIn I thought I’d see if they would take me – and they did.
The main objective of participating is to raise money. I was a bit late joining the program, but I managed to hit my fundraising target, so off to the sleepout I went.
I had two main expectations for the night.
The first was that I would walk away with a better understanding of homelessness. I’d describe the experience as a solid glimpse into an extremely complex, frustrating and daunting world. I’ve never been homeless, and I’ve never imagined I ever would be.
Most of us are in the same position. But guess what, that’s exactly what many homeless people also thought. And once you see and experience it (even for just one night), you will never want to be homeless.
As soon as I arrived and registered, I had to role play a situation where I was a single mum of two children leaving a domestic violence situation. I then joined a group of people to hear a young man talk about how Vinnies helped his family put food on the table when he was young.
Probably the story that most people in the room related to later was a man who was in a high-paid corporate job who ended up homeless.
And then I spent the night sleeping on a piece of cardboard on concrete at Sydney’s White Bay, just a few metres from the water. It got a bit windy, the concrete was hard and the cold was seeping into my sleeping bag by 4.30am, but it was only one night, the weather was kind and I have pretty good gear.
I can’t imagine doing that night after night and the impact of the mounting sleep deprivation on my mental state.
My second expectation for the night was to see the leaders of industry all coming together to not only raise money but to use their influence to drive change.
You know what I saw? I saw CEOs just like me. Lots of them. But I didn’t see the leaders of industry or government that I was expecting to see. (To be fair, I was at the Sydney sleepout, so hopefully CEOs from large companies might have been at the ones in the other capital cities.)
I didn’t hear the bigger conversations about how business and government can work together to try and solve homelessness. I felt we left something on the table.
We are in the middle of a growing crisis, with more than 120,000 people homeless across Australia according to the most recent Census, and I think we need to pivot in how we tackle this problem.
We are a country of small and medium-sized businesses with a lot of CEOs just like me. And one thing I learnt from listening to the Vinnies volunteers (who are amazing) is that every small impact has a ripple effect.
As a country we don’t need to constantly rely on big business to be solving the big problems; a lot of the innovation is being driving by the small and mid-market.
We are the ones building new companies, we are agile, we can move fast, we can come together in ways that big business cannot to work with the not-for-profit sector to help solve complex social issues.
So, I am putting out the call to all CEOs of small and medium-sized companies who have heard about the Vinnies CEO Sleepout and have thought that you aren’t worthy of participating.
This incredible and important program is reliant on people like you and the experience will change you for the better. When it comes around next year, sign up. Having more people understand homelessness and raising money to help address it will benefit our entire community.
And to the CEOs of our nation’s biggest companies, it would be great to see some of you there next year as well.