Launch your brainchild: Raise Our Voice Australia's Ashleigh Streeter-Jones

This transcript, generated from speech recognition technology, has been edited for web readers, condensed for clarity, and may differ slightly from the audio.

Linda Lacina: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they are tackling the world's toughest challenges. Today's leader: Ashley Streeter-Jones. She's the Founder and CEO of social enterprise Raise Our Voice Australia and she'll talk about getting more women and gender diverse people in politics and policy.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favourite podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum and this is Meet the Leader.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I'm invested in shifting power because I want these incredible, courageous changemakers to be in these spaces. But when they're there, I want them to be safe. I want them to be valued. I want their voices to not just be heard, but to be amplified, to be appreciated, for their ideas to be implemented.

Linda Lacina: Have you ever seen a wrong that needed to be righted and thought somebody ought to do something? And have you ever thought that somebody might be you?

Giving that realisation some momentum is at the heart of Raise Our Voice Australia. Too many groups, including women and gender diverse people, do not see themselves as policymakers or politicians, and as a result they are not properly represented in politics. In fact, and here's a piece of trivia for you, there's only four parliaments across the entire globe that have more women than men. What?

Raise Our Voice provides special training for those who want to better understand how the political system works, as well as tactical skills like community building and how to have a conversation with someone you disagree with. Those who have gone through this training have left seriously considering careers in policy and politics. And Ashley hopes that with more empowered voices in the mix, we will eventually see a changed and more inclusive political culture — one that focuses on safety for all people. She told me about the experiences that shaped her, the turning point that made it possible and, critically, the step-by-step routine she and her mentor put in place to make her big idea a reality. In fact, she has a circle of mentors that she consults. And she also shared with me why the compassion and commiseration from a circle of trusted voices is critical in building anything new. She'll talk about all of that, but first, she'll tell us more about Raise Our Voice Australia.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: So, Raise Our Voice Australia is a social enterprise working to increase the presence of young women and gender diverse people in politics and policy. How it came to start is a bit of a long story, but essentially, it's a culmination of my background working with young people in political engagement and political campaigning, which I've now been doing for the lofty time period of ten years, and my own experience working in the federal public service in a foreign affairs role and in a domestic policy role as well.

In doing this work, I looked around and saw who was in the room, and to be honest, I didn't see many people looking like me. We still don't have many public decision makers, be it politicians or high-ranking public officials, that reflect young people. And particularly they don't reflect young women, young gender diverse people and young people are generally speaking, politically marginalised. So, Raise Our Voice Australia is the combination of my background experience in these spaces and my passion for gender equality to help support young women and gender diverse people to be involved in active conversations around their futures and their livelihoods.

Linda Lacina: Was there a turning point for you? It was building, building, building and then one day you said, no, not only does this not stand any longer, but I'm the one who's going to make this make a change.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: Again, another excellent question. So, a number of years ago, I started an initiative, I co-founded an initiative, called Girls Take Over Parliament. So pretty simple premise: we use the takeover concept that's been applied in other community change models. I was living in Canberra at the time, which is where Australia's Federal Parliament is located, and with a friend we said, why don't we try applying this model of change to this particular problem? So, being young and audacious, we sent a bunch of emails out to politicians and introduced ourselves, introduced the concept and said, would you be open to letting a young woman or gender diverse person take over your office for the day?

Our intent with this action was twofold. The first was to help the young people themselves see that they could be there, see that they could do the job, remind them that being a politician doesn't actually have a job description. The essence of being a good politician is community representation. So why not them? And the second purpose was to start conversations. And nothing started a conversation quite like a staffer or a leader walking into a political office, not seeing their male politician and going, hang on, what are you doing here? Which, of course, is the million-dollar question. So, we co-ran that in 2017 over 2018, and at the end of 2018, I took the opportunity to take a step back, take some time to reflect on the problem I was really passionate about solving and also the way that I'm best placed to solve this problem. So, I took a year to reflect on my own background experience, understanding of the problem and consider how I was uniquely placed to make the change that I wanted to make. After a fair amount of time doing that reflection, I decided that I was uniquely best placed to solve this problem by actually sharing some of my knowledge, sharing my network, sharing my contacts. And we all know the importance of networks and helping people get what they want to go.

So I'd been talking about it and talking about it, and the actual turning point was my fabulous mentor, Reto Clemente, sitting me down and saying, look, you've been talking about this for a couple of months now. I get the sense that you've got this great idea and you're not actually sure how to translate it into practice. So, if you do want to do this, I will sit down with you every week, every fortnight, whatever it takes, and help you break this huge idea into bite sized chunks and put together this training program. And she did. And I really owe it to her for helping me to bring the concept to life. She was so patient and so kind, and it was a real exercise in inter-generational allyship. So that brought the training programme to life.

It's always terrifying to launch your brainchild and put yourself out there and your idea out there. I had a sense we were responding to a need, but I still wasn't entirely sure how it was going to land. And we had over- it was nearly 100 applications for our pilot programme in 2020. So, I had the luxury of going, well, hang on, how many people do we actually want to take? It was a big process of trial and error. There was a lot of learning, a lot of things that we did differently and that we will continue to do differently. I think we will learn each time we do this. Obviously, we found a bit of a niche and some of that niche was people who were passionate about making a particular change but don't feel confident in engaging with the political system or they don't have a good enough understanding of policy. So, the training focuses on civic engagement, civic participation and introducing the different levers of change in these systems. So, we don't just want to tell young women, hey, look, you need to run for office. There are plenty of people that I want to run for office for a whole range of reasons. We want to introduce the diversity of mechanisms for making change in political and policy spaces, and also partner the participants with mentors who can help expand their networks while building that community as well.

Linda Lacina: Through your experience, is there a certain way that you position these things? How do you make sure that you're engaging and connecting with what's going to be motivating these particular people who are going through your programme?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: Well, it is a self-selection process. I think the short answer is that they find and fit us and decide whether our positioning is the right positioning for them. And but it's an exceptional question because to be honest, it's not something I've really thought about. We seek to connect with people through their passion. And again, usually they're people who are already making change or they're passionate about the issue and they're not really sure where to start. So, we really want to have these entry level conversations with people and demystify some of these concepts, which can be quite exclusionary.

Linda Lacina: What sort of practical things would they take away from the training?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: Oh, I need to go back and ask them. That is an exceptional question. Some of it is around understanding how the political system works. So, one very tangible example: Australia has compulsory voting, but we don't really teach people how voting works, not even at school. So sometimes it's as simple as sitting people down and saying, we've got an upper house, and a lower house, and let's talk about how you vote works once it's cast, and then those teach you the power of your vote. Sometimes it is understanding how to best get in contact with your local politician and reminding participants that your politician, they do actually work for you. So, these are the ways you can best get in touch to have that impact. Or here's how you can have a conversation with somebody who holds a different perspective because that is such a critical skill for influence, changing minds, bringing people with you. And it's something that we find ourselves doing less and less through our conversations in person, but particularly our conversations online. So, we want to demystify, but most of all make political and policy change accessible.

Linda Lacina: What kind of impact have you seen so far?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: So, from our training programme, and from our 2021 programme in particular, we saw a 105% increase in the participants considering careers in politics and policy and a 107% increase in participants seriously considering a career in policy. So, more interest in policy than politics, which I think is fair enough because the context is quite different.

We also run a campaign called Raise Our Voice in Parliament. And what we do in this campaign is we go out to a bunch of politicians and ask them if they’d be open to reading a speech written by a young person from their electorate. So we found this for the first time in 2021. Again, a pilot. We didn't know how it was going to go, and we ended up partnering with nearly 70 federal politicians and received over 600 speech submissions from passionate young people on the prompt where do you want to see Australia in 20 years’ time? Again, trial, error, audacity. Threw it out there, got a phenomenal response. But from that campaign, in particular, which works with people aged 21 and below, 60% of respondents reported it was their first time engaging with Australian politics and 96% submitted their speech because they wanted their voices to be heard. But I think most importantly after the campaign, 62% of respondents to the post-campaign survey report an increased likelihood to engage with politics in the future. And we had over 120 speeches read in Parliament as well. So even the politicians who put their hand up to read speeches, more often than not, they read the quality of speeches from these young people and said, this is amazing. I'm going to read more than one.

Linda Lacina: What's been the most surprising change? A surprising factoid? Any sort of development over the time that you've been running Raise Our Voice?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I'm constantly surprised. I'm constantly surprised by how people respond to these ideas that we think up in the shower. I'm constantly surprised by the depth of people's passion and how much we are not connecting with passionate young people or surprised by the just incredible leadership of some of these people that we come into contact with, some of whom are just waiting for the right opportunity at the right time. I'm pleasantly surprised by the participants who've come through our training programme, who've got back in touch with me and shared where they’ve ended up. So, my Chief Operating Officer was one of our 2021 participants. She had never really engaged with politics before. Second generation migrant family, hadn't finished school, hadn't gone to university, went straight into the workforce, and after finishing the programme, she joined one of our major political parties and she got preselected to run as a candidate in the New South Wales state election. So that will take place in March and we're crossing fingers and toes for her. But it's just incredibly humbling that these ideas that once sitting in your head that you work way on on your kitchen table really translate into action.

Linda Lacina: What would you expect in ten years is if this programme continues? What would you expect the change to be with a before and after?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I would love to see a real change in our political culture. Like many countries, Australia does have quite a masculine political culture and this has really come to light in the last 12 to 18 months, I think 2022- 2021, actually more than 22, was a real year of reckoning for Australian politics, with a few commentators saying that it was like Me Too finally made it to parliament, which of course comes with some challenging conversations, but some national conversations that we really did need to have and we needed to shine some light into some shadowy areas. So, in ten years’ time, I would love to see a changed culture, a more inclusive political culture, a less masculine political culture, a culture that focuses on safety for all people in politics.

It is still a very pale, stale and male space. And although we did have more women elected at our last federal election in May, we are still lagging behind in a lot of areas. There's not a lot of diversity that needs to be much more cultural diversity. There needs to be more First Nations representation. Disability. We really do need a politics that reflects the population. So, I also hope that we continue to move in that direction and we are able to elect and safely elect more people who can truly represent our population and make better decisions on our behalf.

Linda Lacina: You mentioned before that you had talked to your mentor and she said, hey, we've put this plan together and we'll meet. And she created like a little schedule, a routine. What about that was effective about the little routine you guys had put together?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: What was effective? It was that I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what I was trying to do. I don't come from a training background. I don't come from an education background. Although I studied politics and international relations at university, it was the operationalising and localising of that that felt quite overwhelming. I was tied up in my own perfectionism and I needed somebody to help me untangle my thoughts and really break that down into bite sized steps. I wasn't trying to eat the whole cake in one sitting, I was doing it in little bites, and little bites that I could really work on and nail down before I was ready to do the next thing instead of trying to do the sixth step before the second step, then the thirteenth step, which is where I was at at the first place. So that consistency, that accountability and that compassion and patience, which of course were so central to the process as it allowed me to learn and make mistakes and try different things, but really breaking it down into something so tangible and implementable.

Linda Lacina: How have you evolved that idea of perfectionism, right? What do you do now when you look at a situation to make sure that that's not happening and to make sure that you're not letting the perfect get in the way of the great?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: It's funny that I made that remark, because I'm very far from being a perfectionist. If anything, I'm the person that sends the email and goes, oh my goodness, that was a typo. I forgot to attach this thing. I have another question. So, I do tend to err on the side of done is better than good and is better than perfect, which is a terrible habit to be in. But I think as a change maker, I can feel quite paralysed by the enormity of these issues that we're trying to solve and trying to solve those in the best way possible. So, I do get a bit nervous that I don't know enough that there's more I should be learning, that there's more people I should be talking to.

And I, if I'm really honest, I'm stuck in that place right now. We are in the process of doing or starting a research piece to learn more about the problem, really reconnect with our audience after the last election, retest our understanding of the barriers and the solutions. We're entirely volunteer run organization and we've been sitting here now for about six months, but I would like to base our strategic plan on that research and I've had multiple people remind me that most organizations do not do a huge research piece in order to start the work that they're doing. Sometimes you've just got to close your eyes, make a decision and start somewhere. And we learn through the process of doing.

I do find that still a bit challenging. I always want to hold myself to a higher standard and make sure that I really am lifting the floor, not just smashing the ceiling, that I'm bringing people with me in the right way and being quite conscious of my position as a middle class cis, white, non-obviously disabled person, that I am being intersectional and again really focusing on that, lifting the floor, not just smashing the ceiling. So, it remains a work in progress, but sometimes it's frustration and you think, gosh, I've just got to start somewhere and chatting to a friend or chatting to a mentor who essentially gives you that permission to start is something that I always find very helpful.

Linda Lacina: What have you learned from your mentor?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I'm very lucky that I have a lot of mentors. I have mentors for different areas of my life, so I've got wonderful Rachel, who’s my start-up mentor, I've got a governance mentor, I've got a mentor for my day job. But actually, most of what I learn comes from my peers, and I'm really lucky to be part of a community like the Global Shapers, where there are many young leaders doing similar work to this. It's very important to have people that we can celebrate with, and it's very important to have people that we commiserate with.

I'm constantly learning from people. I'm constantly being mentored and hopefully mentoring back. I turn to my mentors, both professional and collegiate, for so many things, whether it's how to keep volunteers on board or how to set a positive culture, or how I can best learn from something that has happened if I feel like I'm sitting in a place of conflict or failure and how I can be the best leader possible. So, I very much enjoy sitting in a place of self-reflection. I like talking through issues with people, but I often find myself deferring to the incredible community that I sit in, particularly for these more technical questions of how do you move forward and what does good change look like?

Linda Lacina: Is there something that one of these people in your own sort of board directors here that they've told you and that you've implemented that you're like, oh, gosh, that's a good idea, that's a good tip.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: You know, I was reflecting on this question. It is such a good one. The honest answer is I don't remember and I'm not sure because it's January and I'm out of the pace of being in a year when I think about this a lot, or whether it's because I've taken the advice and truly internalized, implemented it. So, I don't think of it as advice. I think of it as a practice and I'm struggling to separate those two concepts in terms of advice and practice.

But also, sometimes you receive advice and it's excellent advice, but you're not in the right place to receive or implement it. So, I was getting some advice the other day on human resource practices and how to best on-board volunteers and how to build a really positive and sustainable workforce around what we're doing. So, I'm constantly sitting in a place of getting advice and trying to implement it in the best way possible.

Linda Lacina: Is there a habit that you can't work without?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: Walking. I find it very difficult to work through problems if I'm sitting still. So anytime I need to work through something or I'm thinking through an issue. Or even just reflecting. I need to be on my feet. I find it quite difficult to sit down and have conversations from a place of reflection. So you often see me up and walking about whether it's with headphones in or on the phone or talking to somebody. A few people find that quite distracting or disconcerting, but there's something about movement that just helps you work through those blocks.

Linda Lacina: Is there a book you recommend?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I think everybody should read Invisible Women, and the reason for that being, coming from my background of gender equality, we so often assume that the world is gender neutral, and the reality is that it's not. Men, women, gender diverse people, and past our gender, in a cross-cultural perspective, we see the world in different ways. And overwhelmingly the world is designed for and built for men to succeed and to thrive. And if we don't recognize this and don’t recognise these patterns, we also can't identify solutions to create better outcomes for everyone. And what Invisible Women does so beautifully is it shines a light on this gendered design of the world across many different areas. So, it's a fantastic way to change the way that you see the world and to learn more about how we can create an equitable society.

Linda Lacina: One of the themes of this Davos is cooperation, because we have so many challenges. We have a polycrisis, we have an economic crisis, an energy crisis. There's the climate crisis. There's the looming threat of a global recession. Given all that, what in your mind is the role of public leadership to navigate and protect people from these from these challenges?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I strongly believe that the role of public leaders is to lift the floor, not just smash the ceiling. I think that we need to be creating better outcomes for everybody. And there's nothing wrong with being the first. Being the first is a great thing. But what I'm fundamentally invested in is the last. I want to see the last person living in poverty, the last girl who can't go to school because of the leadership in her country or because of period poverty. I strongly believe that we need to be bringing all people with us and we can't move forward if such a big portion of the world is held behind.

Many of our challenges, of course, are global and it does require us to work together and it requires public leaders to be brave, to be bold, to think really critically about the challenges that we are facing, and also challenge their understanding of these problems. We don't get it right all the time and we must be open to admitting mistakes. I think that's fundamental for trust between public leadership and civic society, but also look for spaces to go back to people, to check in with them, to see if we are making the difference that we want to make in lifting that floor as we make some of these courageous and sometimes very hard decisions.

Linda Lacina: We saw that with the training program. Why is training so effective in helping to create the space where people might feel like, yeah, I do want to go into maybe elected leadership, maybe that's something for me.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: With the young people we work with, there's often a lot of passion. They want to go out and do something. They have the issue they're passionate about. But similar to me, they're not sure how to translate that into something tangible. So, what we hope to do through the training programme is bridge that gap between passion and action by teaching people more about how some of the systems of power function and what the levers for change are. Through the training program, we also want to build people's confidence as change makers in their own leadership. We want to connect them with a like-minded community so they've got their people that they can celebrate and commiserate with. And building networks: again, that comes through the training programme. So how can we connect people with networks and opportunities, with people who can then bring them along as they are moving forward in their careers or in their public leadership? And of course, giving people the skills. So when they step into these spaces, they're confident in how they can be there.

All that being said, we are sitting at a juncture at the moment where we’re considering this empower versus shifting power. I do believe in giving people skills and confidence, networks, all the things I've just outlined. But I'm also really tired of women being told that we are the problem and that we can empower ourselves to this more gender equal world, because I just fundamentally believe that's not true. So, I'm invested in shifting power because I want these incredible, courageous changemakers to be in these spaces. But when they're there, I want them to be safe. I want them to be valued. I want their voices to not just be heard, but to be amplified, to be appreciated, for their ideas to be implemented. With working with this target group of young women, gender diverse people, people from politically marginalised background, they're not the people we typically think of when we think of leaders. They're the people who are not necessarily elevated when we look at some of these cultures in public spaces. So, I do think the training is very important. But what I'd love to move to is complementing that training with this power shifting work as well. They need to work together in order to make this change.

Linda Lacina: One last question. What do leaders need to prioritise this year?

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones: I would love to see leaders prioritising gender equality. There are so many critically important conversations here, but you can't talk about something like the climate crisis without facing the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. You can't talk about conflict and security without recognising the importance of women, in peace and security, and that women and gender diverse people do have a different experience of conflict and they do have an active role to play in peace processes. So, I would love leaders to be thinking about these issues. But again, recognise that these issues are not homogenous. Again, the world is not gender neutral, the world is not race neutral. We really do need to be thinking about how we can bring everybody along to create better and more sustainable solutions and outcomes.

Linda Lacina: That was Ashleigh Streeter-Jones. Thanks so much to Ashleigh and thanks so much to you for listening. If you liked that episode, check out episode 34 from February 2022. It's a big one. It's my interview with Vice President Al Gore. He has his own leadership training programme, one he founded, the Climate Reality Project, where he has educated tens of thousands of grassroots leaders and empowers them with practical skills to make change happen.

This Episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me, with Juan Toran as studio engineer, Jere Johansson as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.