Hacking a Social Venture in a Day
By Indigenous - Inmate-made Indigenous Art
In August this year we challenged the team: build a business in a day.
The brief was to sell inmate-created Indigenous art from the Girrawaa Creative Centre in Bathurst on a website called By Indigenous.
The centre empowers Indigenous inmates to learn and create art and other goods – working four days a week to produce goods for sale through the centre, and a fifth day of personal projects – painting, art or education through TAFE NSW and Indigenous elders.
We purchase all of the goods from the Centre, which funds the employment program and the art supplies (purchasing materials, equipment and hiring educators). So far we’ve sold nearly $1,000 in Indigenous art, collecting enough margin to fund four art supply packs that will be gifted to inmates in the Girrawaa program upon their release.
The goods are beautiful – handmade and painted boomerangs, coasters, and bullroarers. We’ll soon be stocking paintings from Girrawaa and additional Correctional Centres across NSW.
The Hack Day itself was a huge success – the team brainstormed what goes into an ecom, and broke out into groups to start working – marketing, development, customer service, product, logistics.
People built things, broke things, re-did them, ran workshops across teams, and snuck in a massive seafood lunch at midday.
By 4pm, we had a working site complete with a shipping solution, marketing and multiple marketplaces. Staff had pushed themselves to try new ideas, skills and channels, and earned a perspective on the day-to-day priorities and responsibilities of our ecommerce clients.
We’re now exploring new ideas and formats for another Hack Day in 2019, and continue to work on the By Indigenous project with a small group of Sparro staff.