White Ribbon: Failed charity tied in knots

The charity’s collapse has highlighted how excessive staff and office expenses doomed one of the nation’s highest-profile organisations.

TV personality and former White Ribbon day ambassador Andrew O'Keefe at Bondi Beach. Picture: John Appleyard

When Tracy McLeod Howe, White Ribbon’s short-lived chief executive, sat down with her highlighter to rake through the charity’s expenses during her brief tenure last year, one particular item on the spreadsheet caught her eye.

It was a charge for “plant hire”. The phrase is typically used to describe mobile equipment such as generators and light towers. What sort of equipment, she asked, had White Ribbon been hiring? The answer stunned her.

“Plant hire” was exactly that — the cost of renting the ferns and pot plants that dotted White Ribbon’s spacious, and expensive, off­ices in North Sydney.

The hired plants were swiftly removed, but so, too, was McLeod Howe. She lasted only 11 weeks in the job before she was tipped out by the charity’s board.

White Ribbon’s collapse last month has highlighted how excessive the group’s spending became as it evolved into one of the nation’s highest profile charity organ­isations.

As the public focus on the scourge of domestic violence intensified, White Ribbon experienced extraordinary growth in income. Between 2014 and last year it brought in more than $20m in revenue, including a record high $6.07m last year.

But a growth in spending that matched and ultimately exceeded its growth in income, coupled with a split within the anti-violence movement and some bad press eventually overwhelmed the group.

The charity’s demise has startled outsiders who saw the group as one of the country’s most prominent charities, but, as one former employee who did not want to be named said, the reality of White Ribbon was more like the Wizard of Oz — a visage of glamour and strength from the outside but a different reality behind the curtain.

Passionately embraced by the Australian community, White Ribbon was championed by all sectors of our society.

Grassroots organisations held picnics and barbecues. There was a convoy of emergency services vehicles sporting oversized white ribbons that drove through the streets of NSW to raise awareness of the cause.

 

In November last year, women wearing headscarfs in the western Sydney Muslim heartland of Lakemba participated in the biggest march against violence towards women for White Ribbon Day. School assembly halls plastered their walls in pledges from children against violence.

A Queensland primary school tied white ribbons to its fence. Indigenous communities marched alongside soldiers and multi-faith groups.

Just weeks before the charity announced its collapse, Hobart held its Walk a Mile in Their Shoes White Ribbon Day fundraiser.

In accordance with the fashion, the charity’s ubiquitous symbol adorned the lapels of our most senior politicians, sports stars and celebrities. Scott Morrison and his predecessor as prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, sported the white ribbon. Television personalities Andrew O’Keefe, David Koch and Wil Anderson were among the high-profile supporters. White Ribbon provided accreditation services to some of the nation’s biggest companies, including Telstra, Rio Tinto and Wesfarmers, which held morning teas and breakfasts.

High-spending charity

The next White Ribbon Day is just weeks away. White Ribbon’s own website continues to list dozens of events involving schools, workplaces and communities, scheduled across the nation in the next few weeks. Workers on the Wheatstone gas platform in the Indian Ocean are planning a morning tea; one man has promised to run 40 marathons in a single year while raising $40,000 for the charity; the RAAF is proposing a fundraiser where teams will compete to pull a Hercules aircraft. The organisation has urged people to push on with their plans.

In the meantime, White Ribbon’s liquidators will work away in the background to see what they can salvage out of the one-time philanthropic juggernaut.

Documents from liquidators Worrells Solvency and Forensic Accountants detail the inventory of items up for sale. Among them are 157,759 bags of white ribbons, 54,260 bags of wristbands, 20,045 balloons and four oversized foam hands.

But the most valuable items are likely to be White Ribbon’s intellectual property and trademarks. Numerous groups have lodged offers with Worrells, and the group is on the brink of a deal that would resurrect White Ribbon under new ownership.

There is a widespread belief that, under the right operating model, the White Ribbon message can thrive once again.

But that future success relies on a clear-eyed understanding of the complex reasons for the charity’s collapse.

Libby Lloyd was a central figure in White Ribbon’s early years, working alongside O’Keefe and spending a decade on the group’s board before stepping down in 2013. She says she has been grieving for the group in the weeks since its collapse.

“We are our own worst enemies if we dance on the grave of those who fail. If a refuge crashed because funding ceased, we should weep. And I weep for this moment in our White Ribbon movement,” she said.

“There’s a million steps in this space that we need to make it work. We need an organisation like this. Yes it wasn’t perfect, but we were learning.”

Buying redemption

Accused of a shallow approach to preventing the crime of domestic violence, White Ribbon became a high-profile target. The charity was portrayed as a fig leaf for those looking to move on quickly from a controversy — a way for men and organisations to feel good about themselves. When media personality Eddie McGuire made an on-air “joke” about drowning Caroline Wilson, for example, his broadcaster Triple M responded to the fallout by signing up for White Ribbon’s training program.

Nina Funnell, a journalist and sexual assault survivor advocate, says the group all too often slipped into the “redemption-buying industry”. “I saw it as a fairly facile, tokenistic organisation ripe for exploitation by those who needed a quick-fix solution to redeem their own brand as an individual or an organisation,” she says.

Funnell also echoes a common criticism of White Ribbon — that its focus on brand recognition meant it grew at the expense of charities that funded shelters and those working at the frontline of the domestic violence crisis. “Those groups are far too busy to be working out their next hashtag campaign,” she says.

However, former chairman Nicholas Cowdery QC says many of those “sinking the boot in” to White Ribbon in the wake of its collapse are doing so on the basis of “ignorance and misinformation”. “One piece of spectacular and stubborn ignorance is the complaint that White Ribbon didn’t do anything to help victims of domestic violence,” he says.

“That has never been part of its mandate, as a cursory glance at the website would disclose.”

October last year was a horror month for the organisation, argu­ably marking rock bottom for its reputation.

Cowdery stood down over comments he made on an ABC documentary referring to convicted baby killer Keli Lane’s sex life. Also that month, the charity drew fire as it wavered in its support for women’s reproductive rights. Women’s Safety NSW chief executive Hayley Foster says the abortion position — that it was “agnostic” over the decriminalisation of abortion — did lasting damage. “Those on the frontline really had to question our support for what the organisation was doing,” Foster says.

However, University of NSW associate professor of criminology Michael Salter, an adviser to the White Ribbon board during the past year, says few who attended community events were aware of the conceptual criticisms of the group. “Last year we saw massive community interest in White Ribbon Day. Nobody … on the ground had any idea of the elite media criticism of White Ribbon but they were real­ly passionate about the issue,” he says.

Outdated model

More telling, says Salter, is that the group was stuck under an outdated not-for-profit model, burdened with excessive staff and office expenses.

“These days not-for-profits tend to be more nimble, flexible and adaptable with a smaller burden of permanent staff and more engagement in a collaborative way that might involve pulling people in on contract,” he says.

“When White Ribbon was set up, it was very much under the older model where you’ve got quite a high salary burden, you’ve got a lot of people on staff, and you need to bring in money to keep people employed.”

Among its biggest financial missteps was the decision in May 2017 to break its office lease early and move 230m up Walker Street, North Sydney.

It more than tripled its annual lease obligations in the process, from less than $100,000 a year at its old headquarters to about $350,000 a year at the time of its collapse.

“They were signed up to a very expensive lease in North Sydney with a massive floor plate. That’s a huge set of overhead costs they just didn’t need,” Salter says. “They were decisions inherited by the last couple of chief executive officers and unfortunately there was very little they could do.”

As White Ribbon’s income grew, employee expenses ballooned. They reached almost $4m last year, up from less than $1.6m in 2014. The growing overheads left White Ribbon in a precarious position when it started to run into headwinds.

It recorded an $840,826 deficit last year, wiping out much of the accumulated surplus it had built up in previous years, and was on track to record another big loss this year before its directors made the decision to pull the pin.

According to former insiders, the rapid growth in spending was not accompanied by any sufficiently rigorous business plan or analysis.

The workplace accreditation program, according to one former insider, saw some of the biggest and richest companies in the country charged only $15,000 to $20,000 for a service that took about 18 months and multiple workers to deliver.

Major corporations keen to demonstrate their social credentials flocked to the service, but the amount charged in some instances barely covered travel costs, let alone the wages of the staff and contractors involved.

Merchandising slump

White Ribbon was also hit by a sharp slump in merchandise sales last year.

The revenue generated by all those white ribbons, wristbands and other paraphernalia tanked by almost 40 per cent that year, putting a strain on the group’s fin­ances that ultimately would prove fatal.

Some say the drop reflected a turn in public support away from the charity, but others closer to the organisation say the merchandise had grown stale and unappealing.

They point to the record $1.15m in income generated by White Ribbon’s community events last year as proof that grassroots support remained strong for the organisation even as criticism grew louder.

The liquidators at Worrells have been studying the charity’s groups during the past month.

They say they have found no evidence of a single key cause for White Ribbon’s demise.

“At the start of this process we said that third-party commentary seeking to lay blame was likely speculative, but can now confirm that such opinions are misinformed or biased. There is no ‘smoking gun’ when it comes to White Ribbon,” Worrells partner Aaron Lucan says.

“Like most charities, White Ribbon was reliant on the sustainability of disparate, discretionary sources of revenue, yet was bound by hard commercial realities like long-term leases and fixed staffing costs.”

White Ribbon found it hard to adapt to such quick growth in its revenue, while the high turnover at its upper levels also hurt its ability to make the right strategic decisions, he adds.

“With three CEOs and four chairs over approximately 12 months, there was little continuity of management and leadership during the most critical times,” Lucan says.

McLeod Howe, meanwhile, says she doesn’t feel any vindication over the events since her sudden departure last year.

Instead, she says the whole situation makes her feel ill.

“I’m incredibly sad to see people who I respect out of work just before Christmas,” she says.

She hopes White Ribbon returns in some form.

“In future, anyone who is going to be a backbone organiser should consider themselves a custodian, not a brand owner, and think about ways to give back to communities,” she says.

“It’s not just about creating more staff for more staff’s sake, there needs to be something much more grassroots, community-led.”