Building Better Systems for Students

Andrew Cameron is the CEO of State Schools Relief (SSR), the Victorian charity that has helped government school students who are facing hardship attend school with dignity for almost 100 years. With a couple of decades across the education, social enterprise and government sectors, Andrew has held senior roles in peak and member associations, work-integrated social enterprises, and government departments and agencies including Services Australia and the National Disability Insurance Agency, with much of his career focused on human services delivery and systems transformation.

Since taking the helm at SSR in 2025, he has guided the organisation through responding to record demand and led the launch of Equal Threads, a purpose-led uniform sales enterprise that reinvests every dollar generated into supporting students. Andrew also chairs the board of Outlook Australia and is a member of the Education Equity Alliance’s intergenerational Leadership Council. He lives in Melbourne, is a keen runner, and a proud dad.

Describe your career trajectory and how you got to your current position.

My career has been a genuinely engaging journey – anything but a straight line – but always centred on helping people access meaningful opportunities. After realising fairly early that I wasn’t cut out to work in allied health, I started out in outdoor recreation and employment services. From there I moved into operations management, and on into government which led to managing everything from change programs to service design, human resources and emergency recovery operations.

Much of that work came back to workforce and system transformation – improving how large, complex services actually reach the people who need them. I cycled through executive and consulting roles over the years, but always stayed close to purpose-led work, where outcomes are measured in someone’s life getting a little better. My 18 months at State Schools Relief have been overwhelmingly positive. The team here is incredible and we’re making real progress every month.

What drives you to do the work that you do?

I struggle to accept that it’s okay for children to grapple with the unacceptable situations we all encounter in the social services sector, and take a very pragmatic approach in response. With the support of the Victorian Government, in the last 12 months we fulfilled 99,141 applications from schools to provide items in children which will support them to keep connected to school, where so many protective factors are found.

I’m enormously proud of the SSR team. They work on the road delivering our Glasses For Kids or school engagement activities, turn up to a freezing warehouse in the depths of winter, and lean into every opportunity to get the job done. In doing so their work generates an extraordinary lead-indicator dataset on what’s happening for tens of thousands of families across Victoria. Working alongside our partners across government and the social sector, I’m keen to see systems we all work within operate in a more connected way, so students are supported as well as they possibly can be. We have to work together to make a difference at the scale that’s needed, and I’m completely committed to that.

If you could go back in time, what piece of advice would you give yourself as you first embarked on your career?

I was fortunate early on to be shaped by people who, I suspect, knew exactly the profound influence they had on me. My grandfather sharing stories that landed long after he’d told them. A fellow SES volunteer, who happened to also be a senior public servant, teaching me whilst servicing chainsaws to pace my decision-making and to adopt a mindset that would welcome the productive detours a leadership journey would offer.

That mindset has opened up a great many of what my daughters call ‘side quests’ – volunteering, governance, consulting and entrepreneurial adventures I’d never have planned. I’ve become a firm believer in the value that comes from a genuinely diverse range of experiences, and my hope is that each one adds something to what I bring to the organisations I’m part of. So my advice would be simple: stay open. I remain unrepentantly interested in meeting people, hearing their stories, and looking for ways I might offer some support to their journey.

What does strong social sector leadership look like to you?

For me it starts with seeing the whole system — getting clear on who we’re ultimately serving, and how we actually create impact. Social sector leaders tend to be big-hearted people, but we also have to be willing to make hard choices so that impact is made real. It means at once having deep empathy for the people we support, and applying genuine commercial and operational discipline.

I’ve seen the power of getting that balance right as Chair of the board at Outlook Australia, whose management leads a growing, impactful and ethical social enterprise largely staffed by members of our communities facing barriers to employment. It’s the same conviction behind Equal Threads at State Schools Relief: a commercial offering that makes available great products and funds the delivery of essential supports for students.

Leading well-intentioned change means asking people to trust us through real uncertainty, and holding that space for everyone can be tiring. Finding balance is important. Like the many social sector leaders I admire, I’m determined to run my leg of State Schools Relief’s race with everything I’ve got. The kids we serve deserve nothing less.

What are you currently watching, reading, or listening to?

I’m a big believer that what we take in outside work keeps us curious about the world. At the moment I’m re-reading The Alignment Problem to sharpen my thinking on the rise of AI, and I found World Politics Since 1989 a genuinely useful framework for making sense of recent global events.

I tend to run late in the day with a podcast humming along. If The Ezra Klein Show is feeling too dense then The Rock Drive’s Kiwi hilarity comes highly recommended as a tonic to the challenges of not-for-profit leadership. Choice.