Pitch for Good: Meet the finalists
Five local women will pitch their innovative ideas on creating positive social change this week in the hope of gaining the community’s support.
Parramatta
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Five local women will pitch their innovative ideas on creating positive social change this week in the hope of gaining the community’s support.
The third annual Pitch For Good gives the community the opportunity to support locals’ ideas through live crowd-funding.
Guests pay $30 for a ticket to Wednesday night’s event and receive three $10 tokens they can give to the pitches they have chosen from five finalists.
Parramatta Council will match the amount given in tokens on the night.
Following the event, each of the finalists will start a month-long crowd-funding campaign on platform StartSomeGood.
The organisation approached the council a few years ago with the idea.
Lucy Brotherton from the council’s community capacity building team works in social enterprise.
She said it was “a really innovative way to stimulate the economy and create social good at the same time”.
“Council have been really interested in the concept of social enterprise for many years now,” she said.
The finalists set a target and if they reach it, they keep the money pledged on StartSomeGood. If they fail to reach their target the money is returned.
Ms Brotherton said previous Pitch For Good finalists had a “very high success rate for crowd-funding”.
“In the first year three out of five made their target, and last year we had four out of the five reach their target,” she said.
The 2018 finalists have ideas ranging from helping families look after aging loved ones, to soap that will help women experiencing homelessness.
This year’s focus for Pitch for Good was on “female founders”.
“Statistics say that 72 per cent of first enterprises are started by women in Australia, globally only 2 per cent of funding goes to women enterprises,” Ms Brotherton said.
