History
In July 2008, friends and ‘accidental social entrepreneurs’, Melbourne-based Karina Butera and Sydney-based Noel Posus, were enjoying a rare face to face catch up due to the coincidence that they were both on holiday on the Gold Coast. Karina was feeling rather gloomy and down-trodden that morning. She had been running her small business for several years, and she had become incredibly disheartened by the uncaring and unethical behaviours she was experiencing from others in business. In fact, she was even starting to consider quitting the world of business and focussing on her academic career.
After allowing Karina her ‘recreational whinge’, Noel challenged her on her claim that ‘the business world was not a place for nice people’, reminding her that they were both nice people and asking her if she knew any other nice people. She was able to name a few, and soon had listed a dozen.
“What if,” Noel said with just a touch of challenge in his eyes “you could make it your mission to find all the nice people in business, and create a caring community of people from all professions, occupations and industries, who can rely on each other to have consistent integrity and a commitment to creating positive business experiences? All these people can be listed on a website where anyone can go to find ‘good’ people in business.”
A natural born ‘possibilities enthusiast’, Karina’s posture changed and she started exploring the idea with the help of some astute coaching questions from Noel. As it turned out, this was something that she had started to do already in her business, Project Balance, having three years earlier created a ‘positive business register’ on the website that listed people who shared Karina’s values of positivity and integrity in business.
Somewhat reluctant to fully embrace the idea, even though it seemed like such a worthy venture, Karina grasped at the first obstacle she could think of. “I don’t know...” she murmered, as she scribbled possible names for the group on her napkin – “Positive Business Community – nope, can’t have PBC, that’ll get mixed up with the broadcasters ... Ethical & Kind Business People – too much of a mouthful ...” She dropped her head into her open palms and moaned, “See Noel, I can’t even think of an appropriate name. Nothing really captures the high ideals that needs to be infused in the name!”
Noel looked at Karina and a big grin lit up his face. “I think you just came up with the right name.”
And after a quick check confirmed that the name was indeed available: High Ideals went from an idea to a mission!
After further discussion, Noel convinced Karina to add the third value of ‘impact’ to the two core values of ‘integrity’ and ‘positivity’. The rational made sense: ‘what’s the point of having integrity and positivity, if you’re hiding away and not making any impact with those values?’
The year that followed was an exciting time of bringing together an energetic and enthusiastic team of helpers and by the official launch of High Ideals on 13 June 2009, High Ideals had a management and consulting team of 15, a membership base of 60 and a fabulous website. Although the original geographical scope of the mission was Australian, we soon had members from the USA, Canada, China, Singapore and New Zealand join our community – each one wanting to be known as an accredited member of High Ideals and a supporter of our venture.
Since then the vision of high idealism in business practice grew to high idealism in five key areas:
- Youth
Our mission expanded to working towards raising awareness of the importance of high idealism in all areas of life and publicly recognising those who truly put their values into action. Our impact was becoming greater through adding more and more resources to our websites, providing inspiring and informative content in our newsletters, creating relationships with other caring organisations, appointing role models ambassadorship so they can continue to help us create even more positive ripple effects throughout the world.
Along with the broadened scope of the business, was the move in 2010 to not-for-profit status, giving High Ideals greater opportunity to create a positive impact with the help of additional sponsorship and government assistance (which we would much appreciate please Messrs Rudd, Obama, Harper, Cameron, Wen, Kelly & Lee).
At that time, Noel, who had been High Ideals’ most dedicated advocate (although the incredible Julie Saunders, wearer of way too many hats and known for her enthusiastic catch-cry “yep, leave it to me, easy peezy” comes screaming in a close second to that claim), a director and contributor to the business since that first ‘napkin conversation’, took over the leadership of the organisation as our Chairperson with the founder supporting him as Vice-Chairperson.
It’s not a long history, but it’s a dynamic and exciting one. It’s one that has had some challenges, but has been full of honest heart-driven work, lots of laughter and at least 17,394,256 hugs along the way. It’s a history that we are all very proud of...
Stay tuned for instalments as our journey and impact continue!
