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Audette Exel AO
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Audette Exel AO
Audette Exel AO

On thinking outside the box and the world as our home

Audette Exel AO is founder and chair of the Adara Group; an international development organisation and two corporate advisory businesses that share a common purpose - to bring quality health and education services to communities in need.
She Gives:

Q
What are your earliest reflections on giving?
A

I'm a Kiwi woman, and I cannot remember a time since I was a teenager when I was not acutely aware that if I’d grown up anywhere else in the world, my life would have been incredibly different. I always had a sense of gratitude about the family I was born into, and the fact that I lived in a country where I got great education, healthcare and I felt safe at night.

My father was a brilliant thinker who taught us to think outside of the box and my mother always gave of herself. It’s deeply imbued in her DNA. In a nutshell, my father taught me to think, and my mother taught me to give. My life has reflected those two key principles and it’s been a natural progression to end up in the place where I've ended up.

Q
What drives you to give?
A

The opportunity to make change in an unfair world. We are living through a very complex time; the rise of autocracy and the rule of law being challenged around the world. We are seeing 800 million people in extreme poverty and conflict; the pandemic hit hard and inequity is rising.

I feel so lucky to have an ability, even in a tiny way, to feel like my life is working to drive change in all that potential complexity and darkness. I'm enraged by inequity, and I'm enraged on behalf of women and girls and the extreme poor. That’s the external drive.

My internal drive is selfish, because giving has brought me so much joy. I love the life that giving provides for me and the people it connects me to. It lifts me and gives me purpose. It makes me want to spring out of bed every morning, even when it's hard. I see it as my stitch in the tapestry of social change, and I get to work with all these astonishing people. If I didn't have it, I think I would be beside myself.

Q
How do you give?
A

Adara is an expression of my fundamental beliefs and the fact that it’s still standing after 26 years and all the mistakes I’ve made, quite frankly, is a miracle. I deeply believe that you can embed philanthropy into your life, even when you're not a person of wealth. Philanthropy and giving should not be something that's ancillary, it should absolutely be embedded.

There are many ways to drive change, but my way of doing so is by bridging different worlds. We work with some of the most privileged people on the planet and we provide services to some of the most marginalised people on the planet.

I wanted to show that you can run a business, on Wall Street effectively, while delivering essential services to women and children who are living in extreme poverty in some of the world's most remote places.

It’s an expression of the values that I wanted to manifest within an organisation, which is now, a large international not-for-profit. Our area of expertise after 26 years is providing care to small and sick babies in places without electricity. We're neonatal specialists and operate on a global stage with work focused across East Africa and Uganda. It's in full scale and our teams are unbelievable.

The second limb of expertise is child-centred health and education, particularly in remote areas where kids are trafficked; Nepal and the Tibetan border. We’ve had 26 years of learning how to do that work, with really experienced local teams.

In terms of our funding model, we’ve built a corporate advice and investment banking business in Australia that is entirely for purpose. We provide advice to some of the largest companies in the country and have a rollcall of the greatest advisors who run engagements for us, entirely pro-bono, so that we can generate fees for our work. Hundreds of thousands of people have been touched through our service and the business is the engine that guarantees financial viability.

We’re now at $76 million in giving, with $27 million of those funds coming directly from the business. The remainder has come from amazing donor partners, some of whom have stood with us since the start. It's a very unusual model but it's the model for me. I'm not a person of wealth. Creating wealth has never been a driver, and the model enables me to use my skills to generate revenue and wealth for people in need.

Since I've been in this work, the impact and social enterprise movement has arrived. But when I started, nobody was crossing the boundaries of not-for-profit work and the private sector, particularly in investment banking. We were one of the earliest in the space of social entrepreneurship and it gives us a chance to show these wonderful youngsters that you don't have to be a person of great wealth to make a difference. You can just be a Kiwi woman with a lot of good luck, some skills and create something incredibly powerful that touches an enormous number of people's lives.

Q
What are some of your key learnings from doing this work for 26 years?
A

I doubt myself all the time but learned early on, to refuse to listen to that doubt because I knew it would hold me back from living a full life. Women have thousands of years of socialisation and the blood in our veins often tells us we should be second, and to be afraid. I have that and every woman I know has that too. Instead, I have turned my rage at injustice into passion and that passion into action.

I have also learned, as I have cried tears and made mistakes, that intervening in the lives of vulnerable people is a very serious responsibility. Giving is not a hobby. You can do damage, particularly when working in social services delivery and with vulnerable clients.

Another thing I’ve learned is to surround myself with people who are truly experts in this work. For us, that means expertise in international development work and behavioural change but most importantly, and I cannot underline this enough, local experts and local communities. They always know best. If I wanted to snapshot the root cause of the worst mistakes I’ve made, it’s been anytime I haven’t engaged that local knowledge.

However, on the positive side, I’ve learned what's possible when you break out of conventional thinking. A world of possibility opens when you cast off orthodoxy and step outside the silo. I've learned that business for purpose works. A lot of people warned me that I was going to fail, and now when someone tells me that I’m going to fail, it spurs me on.

I've learned that our world is full of heroes. I just can't begin to tell you how in awe I am of the people I work with; our colleagues on the ground and the communities we’re involved in. At a time when a lot of the zeitgeist focuses on the darker paths, I'm filled up by these people who are showing greatness to others every single day.

Q
What are your ambitions for giving into the future, either yourself or Australia more broadly?
A

For Adara, it's simple; we need to be even more impactful. We need to do deeper, better work and share knowledge more widely. It's a clear ambition for the entire organisation to touch more lives, in the wider global context. The reality is there’s a huge retreat from international giving, both in Australia and overseas. And that's despite operating as global citizens; we invest our money globally, and many of us run global businesses.

The problem is that cause areas are increasing while international giving is decreasing. And this is happening at a time when 783 million people regularly experience hunger, 300,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth each year and 250 million kids are out of school. This is the world we are living in and unfortunately, I believe it's going to get even tougher.

The impact that we can have with our dollar as global citizens is huge. So, in terms of my ambition and global vision, I want to see Australia’s culture of giving expand. Australians are good givers. They care for people. I want that to continue to grow and for us to never forget our neighbours in faraway places.

So many people ask me if I believe that giving begins at home? And I do, but the world is my home, and I believe that's so true for all of us. I want to see that message out there; that the world is our home and our neighbours in faraway places matter. We can have huge impact when even a small portion of our giving goes internationally. You don’t need wealth to turn the dial and change the world.

Q
What needs to change for us to grow women's giving, and how we can we encourage that change?
A

It’s a really good question. I think we need to connect and support each other more in our giving. Women need to network and find other women philanthropists and women who've set up NGOs and stand with them.

I would encourage more women to think about how they can use their skills to generate revenue for great development work. There’s this belief that you have to wait until a certain age or a point in your career, but I would say, don’t wait. I started Adara at 35 years old and here I am at 62, with much achieved, and still wishing it was bigger, deeper and touched more lives.

We need more awareness, and we need more courage; to talk about our giving and to give against the currents of what is trendy. It’s about taking the time to find your thread in the beautiful tapestry of social change.

Audette Exel AO

Is the Founder of the Adara Group, which is an acknowledged leader in bridging the worlds of financial services at the highest levels with the world of international development.

Audette is the Chief Executive Officer of Adara’s two corporate advice businesses, Adara Advisors and Adara Partners. The Adara businesses were established to help fund Adara’s health and education work with women and children in extreme poverty in some of the world’s remotest places. To date, the Adara Group has had a profound impact on hundreds of thousands of people in poverty.

Audette is a lawyer by profession specialising in international finance. She was formerly Managing Director of one of Bermuda’s three banks, and Chair of the Bermuda Stock Exchange. She is one of the youngest women in the world to have run a publicly-traded bank. Audette was previously a Non-Executive Director of Westpac and Suncorp. She was also Vice Chair of the Board of Steamship Mutual, one of the world’s largest protection and indemnity clubs for the shipping industry.

Audette is the recipient of numerous awards. In 1995 she was elected a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. In 2012, she was NSW Telstra Businesswoman of the Year and was one of the AFR 100 Women of Influence. In 2013, Audette was awarded an honorary Order of Australia for service to humanity and in 2014 was recognised by Forbes as a Hero of Philanthropy. In 2015, Audette was inducted into the Australian Businesswomen’s Hall of Fame and was a recipient of a World Class New Zealander Award. In 2016, Audette was named Australia’s Leading Philanthropist by Philanthropy Australia. She received the YPO Global Impact Legacy Award in 2019.

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She Gives acknowledges the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.