‘Is the job satisfaction better? 100 per cent’: Why this boss doesn’t mind being broke

At age 11, Shaun Christie-David was at a crossroads. He had less than two years to go at primary school in south-western Sydney, and his local high school was a rough place where stabbings were commonplace.

“There was no way I was going to the local school because I know myself – I’m very easily influenced,” says Christie-David, with a machine-gun laugh.

“If someone’s gonna do shit, I’m gonna do shit, I like it. I knew that if I was going to a school that had huge loads of criminality and drug problems, that’s [the direction] I would go too.”

Shaun Christie-David, founder and chief executive of social enterprise Plate it Forward.Credit: Peter Rae

There was also no way that Christie-David’s parents – his father a mobile mechanic and his mother a homemaker who both emigrated from Sri Lanka before he was born – could afford private school.

“I said to myself, ‘I love my mum, my parents have done so much for me and I can’t put them through hell’ and I studied my arse off in year 5 and 6 to get into a selective school,” he says. “That was the only way I knew out.”

When I ask Christie-David if there’s anything left of that naughty streak, he laughs again and says he has “calmed down a lot”.

The former banker is too busy running his social enterprise, Plate it Forward, which has a collection of small restaurants and bakeries in the inner city. Most Saturday afternoons, he visits his mother, now an early childhood teacher in Camden.

Christie-David, 37, won the Innovator of the Year award at the Good Food awards last year. The Plate it Forward restaurants employ refugees and donate meals to communities in need in Australia and around the world.

The original is Sri Lankan restaurant Colombo Social in Enmore and the most recent is Kyiv Social serving Ukrainian fare cooked by Ukrainians in Chippendale. There’s also Anything but Humble bakery in Alexandria, Mexican joint Coyoacan Social in South Eveleigh, and Kabul Social where we meet for lunch.

It takes me a while to find Kabul Social, which is tucked away in the tunnels of Wynyard station. We claim a table covered in beautiful blue tiles at about 11.30am to beat the weekday rush and stay talking as the crowd of office workers flows and then ebbs around us.

Christie-David and I share a mixed plate with crinkle-cut fries, Kabuli salad, cabbage and pickled onions, Borani Bajan eggplant, Afghan charcoal chicken and lamb chapli kebabs, as well as a plate of the Aushak garlic chive dumplings with tomato and lentil sauce and Afghan mint yoghurt.

The mixed plate at Kabul Social.Credit: Peter Rae

Halfway through lunch, he pulls out his phone to show me a picture of one of his nieces getting ready for her dance recital. He is not sure if he will ever have children, but he loves being an uncle.

He scrolls forward, pointing out the next picture is Nehad Jerada, the 50-something Palestinian chef making traditional pastries for the Anything but Humble bakery in Alexandria.

I take it as a sign of how he sees the staff at his business as akin to family. Christie-David says it took a mate to explain that in creating a business with a purpose besides profit, he had founded a “social enterprise”.

“It just feels like it’s how businesses should operate. Profit is important, but people are more important,” Christie-David says.

The garlic chive dumplings at Kabul Social.Credit: Peter Rae

“A lot of migrant businesses are by default social enterprises. They employ people from communities, they do community outreach, they do things that are bigger than just a business, and that’s how I was brought up.”

These principles were put to the test in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he had founded Colombo Social in late 2019.

There were a few Sri Lankan restaurants at the time, but the authentic ones were all in the western suburbs, with good food but not nicely designed. As someone who straddles two cultures, Christie-David said that didn’t feel like him. He now lives in St Peters in the inner west and he wanted a restaurant that was “cool” – somewhere he wanted to go and could bring clients, friends, and girls he was dating.

He had no experience in hospitality, so banks would not lend to him. His parents dipped into their retirement savings to get him started, and within a few months he built a “pumping” business with lines out the door.

Shaun Christie-David behind the counter at Kabul Social.Credit: Peter Rae

It all threatened to come crashing down during the first national lockdown, especially since his staff of refugees and international students were not eligible for JobKeeper.

He asked his employees to name a dollar figure that they needed to pay rent and buy food, and committed to put the money in their bank accounts by the end of the day, dipping into savings to do so.

Within days, charities and corporate sponsors called, offering to pay the business to provide meal donations. He kept the people who were eligible for Medicare - so they could be treated if they fell seriously ill with the scary new virus – working on site, while paying for others to stay home.

When the restaurant reopened, he incorporated meal donations into the business model, so every meal sold funds one or two more. Between customer-funded meals and the continuing corporate and charity partnerships, Plate it Forward has provided 450,000 meal donations in Australia and another 110,000 in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Ukraine since 2020.

Christie-David was born in Canterbury and then moved further west to Fairfield and Edensor Park. He credits his mother with the fact that he and his two older brothers went to school already knowing how to read and write, and went on to university and professional careers.

Cramming for the selective school test paid off, and Christie-David won a place at Hurlstone Agricultural High School, one of the state’s four agricultural high schools – “like James Ruse but not as smart”, as he puts it.

On his first day, he arrived early and was waiting just inside the gates, when a boy on the street started yelling at him, calling him the N-word. He was worried it was a sign of what he could expect from his next six years at school, but it turned out the bully was from the juvenile detention school down the road.

Christie-David speaks highly of his school days, saying racism wasn’t bad for his cohort. He has stayed in touch with his mates who including day boys from all over the world via western Sydney and boarders from country towns like Wagga Wagga and Mudgee. Hurlstone Agricultural is one of three public boarding schools in NSW.

With his place at a selective school secured, Christie-David admits his naughty streak won out for a time, and he was frequently thrown out of classes for being disruptive.

In year 11, his legal studies teacher – a young guy in his first job – challenged him about why he was wasting his potential. Christie-David knuckled down and achieved a good result in year 12.

He went on to study business and finance at university and then to work for organisations including Royal Bank of Canada, Perpetual and Macquarie Bank.

Racism was far worse in the corporate world than school. Christie-David said the “north shore private school boys” were cliquey and made it clear he did not belong.

“I remember going to work, and they’d call me all these different names, and they started to call me Tamil Tiger,” he recalls.

“… And I was like ‘hey man, it’s a terrorist organisation creating havoc in my country, it’s not cool’. But that just made it funnier, so that was my nickname.”

When Barack Obama was elected US president, a wealthy client in Perth told him over the phone that he “couldn’t believe that Americans had elected a n—-r”. Christie-David was told to ignore it.

He had gone to Sri Lanka with his family when he was five, but the civil war meant he could not go again until he was 28. His mother had always told him he was lucky, but he didn’t understand until he saw the poverty in Sri Lanka as an adult.

He remembers getting a suit made for about $60 and being measured up by boys aged about 15 or 16.

“They were like ‘where from?’ and I said Sydney and they were treating me like some kind of hero because I could afford to buy a tailored suit, and I was from another country,” he says.

“It made me feel really uncomfortable because if my parents hadn’t left, that would have been me or worse, recruited into the army.”

Christie-David moved to London, where he worked on an IT project for the National Health Service. Back in Australia, he worked for Dr Norman Swan’s Tonic Health Media, which has a TV network for doctor’s surgeries, and was instrumental in getting funding approved for the Aboriginal Health Television Network.

Then he was ready for his own venture and Colombo Social was born. He misses his pay cheque but little else from his career in finance.

“I’m f—ing broke but is the job satisfaction better than Macquarie? Oh, 100 per cent.”

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