Seeding Investment with Purpose

 

Chuck Berger is the Executive Director – Investment at Impact Seed, a Perth-based social enterprise focused on building the impact investment and social enterprise ecosystem. He was previously CEO of the Kimberley Development Commission, a WA State Government agency, and has held a diverse range of leadership roles in the not-for-profit and advocacy sectors, including ten years with the Australian Conservation Foundation. 

Chuck is trained as a corporate lawyer, with a J.D. from Yale, an LLM from the University of Frankfurt (Germany), and several years in private practice in New York and Brussels. Born in the Appalachian Mountains in southern Ohio, he first came to Australia as a researcher with the Federal Court of Australia in 1999, and has lived here permanently since 2003. He lives in Perth with his partner Christy Hawker and their sons Tom and Leo. He has too many hobbies, and consequently is no good at any of them.

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

Out of university with not a clue what to do with my life, I moved to Germany and got a job as a graphic designer. I was entirely self-taught in this discipline, learning Photoshop 1.0 on a first generation Mac.

But I wasn’t great at it, so I went to law school, and continued putting off real decisions for a few years with fellowships and other jobs. Running low on money, I finally took a job as a corporate lawyer with a Wall Street firm. It was gruelling work, very long hours on byzantine transactions between investment banks – some of which made me ethically queasy. I lasted less than three years.

I took a big salary cut, moved to Australia and started a ten-year stint as the in-house lawyer (and later strategist) with the Australian Conservation Foundation. Many of my colleagues at the firm said they wished they were as brave as I was, to leave the law firm money! But it wasn’t bravery – I was actually losing my mind, working in a role where I knew I didn’t fit the skin.

The ACF gave me so much – a sense of pride and purpose, and a tight-knit team of fun and dedicated people. And I found one of the wonderful things about NGOs is that you can rapidly rise in responsibility if you have the chops. Within a few years, I was meeting corporate CEOs, Government Ministers, and helping shape national debates.

I led a small industry body called Outdoors Victoria for a few years after that, and then one day my partner Christy asked if I would maybe like to move to the Kimberley. Only a few weeks later, we had packed up our house and two boys and were on the road to Kununurra. I spent five years there leading Kimberley Community Legal Services, and another three as CEO of the Kimberley Development Commission. I loved living there, especially the sense that you were part of a community and a workplace with people from very different contexts and backgrounds, and you have to make it work because you don’t have a choice. The challenges of remote Australia are intensely local, pragmatic, and often very pressing.

With our boys entering high school, we made a wrenching decision to leave Kununurra. I took up the opportunity with Impact Seed here in Perth, because I saw in it the chance to continue working on the issues I care deeply about – how to craft a more sustainable and more human-centric economy.

What drives you to do the work that you do?

Impact Seed helps connect investors who are looking to achieve good social and environmental outcomes, with investment-ready enterprises in WA who are trying to deliver those outcomes. It’s very rewarding to help people make that kind of connection.

I love the sense that we can reinforce and bolster the work of the people and organisations that are already doing the hard practical work of building a better WA economy that works with our ecological and cultural systems.

I also get huge energy from the team at Impact Seed – we’re a small team with very different skill sets, personalities, and ways of looking at the world. It makes for a lively and fun workplace!

We’re all driven and focused on what we can achieve for our funders and clients. That strong alignment and implicit trust in our workplace is a source of great motivation for me individually. The close working interdependency in a small team can really keep your reservoirs topped up, in a way that I found more of a struggle in larger organisations.

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

We ask our kids “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, and then we grow up and ask each other at parties, “so, what do you do?”, which is really the same question. And it’s a question with such a narrow band of possible answers.

I wish somebody had asked me “who do you want to work with?” It’s so much more thought-provoking! And who you work with is far more important early in a career than the specifics of what you are working towards.

Also: “what do you want your days at work to look like? Are you working inside, or outside? Working with your hands, or mostly on a computer? Do you like solving problems, or telling stories?” And so forth.

Much as I love my current role, if I had a do-over, I might well have chosen to be an instrument builder, or an art restorer, or a musician. 

What does social sector leadership look like to you?

Same as good leadership in any other context – it’s about a mix of authenticity, demonstrated care for those around you, and drive.

In a world where bureaucratese and euphemisms and talking points and AI mush infects our language relentlessly, it is so important to be able to speak with directness, deep honesty and power. Honesty here is about more than just not lying, it’s the ability to discern and describe something meaningful about our lived reality.

The Australian leaders I admire most – people like Julian Disney, Jan Owen, and Stan Grant just to name an eclectic few – never come across as machined or contrived. They speak frankly about the personal and collective challenges of our day through a lens that is, for each of them in different way, grounded in their own experience and internal dialogue.

What are you currently watching / reading / listening to? (Hoping you can weave in the Impact Seed report into this answer)

I just finished “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s a dense but astonishing read. They paint a rich tapestry of pre-modern societies as endlessly inventive and diverse, with many having large cities and rich material cultures without much in the way of hierarchical structures. It’s a rejection of the story of humanity as a steady march of “progress” towards modern civilisation and economic inequality. I also love that the book arose out of a series of late-night conversations between two friends!

Hugh White’s most recent Quarterly Essay on Australia’s geopolitical challenges today is the best piece of writing I’ve come across this year – and a bucket of ice water over Australia’s foreign policy choices.

And in the guilty pleasures department: “The Diplomat” and “Slow Horses” are whip-smart, binge-worthy dramas just right for the narrow window between dinner and haggard adult bedtime.