INTERVIEW |Sonja Bar-Am graduated from the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF) program in 2013. She works as Family & Relationship Counsellor at Uniting Communities, while also running a web shop in eco, sustainable and organic cotton clothes and home linen. Sonja is one of those people that never sits still and is always on the lookout for great ideas and new opportunities. She will fly to New York in October to meet with the CEO of Living Cities, an initiative she would like to pilot here in Adelaide and she might need your help… Read on to find out more about this inspiring woman and to see how you can support her in making a positive change in our community.
Sonja, could you tell us something about your work as a counsellor?
“Uniting Communities holds three core principles: Care, Compassion, and Commitment. As a counsellor and family therapist with the Adult and Family Counselling Team, I endeavour to make these principles active in all help and support to people who come to consult with me about their lives and relationships. We are federally funded to provide counselling services, and I have a very large client base of men, women and their children of all ages who choose to come to a Community Service agency for Counselling help. I cover the city office and I do outreach to Murray Bridge. It is a daily privilege to sit with clients who are inviting me into the most intimate and difficult parts of their lives and relationships to collaborate with them on finding hope and personal agency.
“Adjunct to the client work I also extend counselling theory and practice possibilities of helping people, through writing and introducing new innovative practices into Adelaide such as the Open Dialogue practice to helping families where a person has had an experience of psychosis and other mental illness presentations. I am currently extending thinking and practices of our team in working with a strong awareness of gender in relationships and working with addressing violence in our community. I am extending this thinking into promoting equitable and equity in gender relations organisation and business workplaces.
“While the counselling and thinking around this takes up much of my working time, the GLF reframed my vision into seeing multiple possibilities to extend into areas I am interested in.”
And that helped you to explore new ventures?
“Yes, that’s right. During my GLF year in 2013 I collaborated with a good friend Silke Liebscher in an online retail project. We found that European luxury organic cotton bed linen was not available in Australia and launched www.shifttonature.com.au to import the highest quality certified organic cotton bed linen from Germany and we expanded into Yoga wear. This little side business has grown and expanded during the last year in its niche of eco, sustainable and organic clothes and home linen. This has been a super fun and valuable project to create from the ground up, and even though it’s still new, it is aligned with my aim to create opportunities for fairness and to thrive in the world, and giving people greater ethical choices.”
It sounds like you are incredibly passionate and driven about you work. How do you combine all this with family?
“I think what drives me is the energy that I have and a thirst for thinking on the edge, thinking with daring, creativity and collaboration with other creative minds. I balance all of this activity with my family’s needs. I am indebted to my husband Miron for embracing our joint decision to become a stay-at-home dad. While this has had its challenges of course, it has been a great commitment to supporting the wellbeing of our three children, while still pursuing work and activities that we feel are important. It is neither smooth nor easy – no parenting is smooth and easy – but it is possible!
Sonja, you participated in the GLF program in 2013. What impact has the program had on your professional and personal development?
“The GLF program changes and develops you in so many ways, that I find it hard to pin down how it does this exactly. It challenges and extends us… GLF has helped me to be curious and creative about leadership where this was an uncomfortable concept for me. In community work and in my life I realised that my leadership is quiet and supportive of people’s own agency for their lives. The GLF, however, provided a public context with my fellows to test out leadership and others response to my public position on various things and how that challenged and shook up the GLF space. This was a difficult space, because it challenged me to realise that if I was too contentious in the GLF space, which I often was, it was the way I communicated that drew attention, rather than the message that I wished to convey. In this the GLF process taught me to really value kindness in my communication – to really hold an ethic of kindness in all communication. The GLF helped me step into that ethic.
“Regarding the Leaders Institutes mandate of raising the awareness and consciousness to creating wiser leaders for South Australia, I found that the program created an opportunity for intense personal integration that followed a willingness to be courageous about self-change. This has not only raised my level of consciousness, beyond this altitude of vision I have gained, it has given me a clear personal mission to give words, meaning and action to make visible our human experience, with all its complexity, beyond the structures and systems that have power in our lives. When more of what the human experience is about, becomes visible to us, the more able we are to return to assist people around us with clarity and kindness.”
Thank you for sharing these insights. I can see a clear connection between your vision of clarity and kindness and your project idea to set up Living Cities South Australia. Can you tell a bit more about Living Cities and your aims for this project?
“During the GLF year we were investigating methods of measuring strengths in Community Practice for our Community Action Project (CAP). When my investigation took me to the Living Cities blog, I noticed that one of the contributors and the senior fund manager for Living Cities was an old friend of mine. She is a very experienced and astute Venture Capital fund manager. This increased my interest in what Living Cities is, what it does and how it raises money for investment into community. I was very much impressed by the commitment of their investors and by their focus and knowledge of where critical issues of homelessness, poverty, low health, low education, racism, and the myriad of pressures are bearing down on the most unsupported and marginalised members of our communities.
“Living Cities is a US based organisation that sources funds from the large philanthropic funds and financial institutions in the US, and using financial instruments such as market funds to raise money to address community issues such as Housing, Community Cohesiveness, Poverty, etc. This organisation became particularly influential in Detroit when the car industry crashed and also during the Global Financial Crisis in mitigating foreclosures and helping support and transform impoverished communities.
“It inspires me that such organisations can be formulated that draw upon existing expertise traditionally held by the capital markets and fund managers to actively address serious and pressing adaptive challenges that all of us, from all parts of life, are effected by and can take accountability for. To me this project is about understanding the real need on the ground – which I witness every day in the counselling room – and to bring creative and inspired solutions that could potentially turn problems on their heads, inside out and shaking them up with meaningful skills, vision and governance.
“After email communication with the Living Cities CEO Ben Hecht, based in New York, I found that they would be supportive of efforts to pilot similar programs in other cities. Thus I feel encouraged to continue my exploration and to bounce off possibilities for a pilot in Adelaide of an organisation that may follow in intentions and structure on the existing Living Cities template but with local tweaks and modifications where needed. I will meet with Ben to discuss ideas during a trip to New York at the end of October. “
And this is where the GLF Alumni come in… In what way would you like to find support for this project?
“My intention is to invite interested Alumni, specifically first from the financial and banking sector, to join a steering committee that can guide and inform the progression of this project. Living Cities as a concept was developed from the owners of the investing organisations and foundations. It may work a little differently in Adelaide; however it is important to understand how the private and corporate sectors would wish to be involved in such a project and how that involvement could be harnessed to shape the organisation as it develops here. This seems vitally important here.
“I would like to host a few meetings before I travel to NYC to be able to have an idea of what is possible and who might be interested. I would like to schedule one meeting in the first week of September and another mid-end September and then go from there with a core group of interested and relevant parties.
“I need to get really clear about the operations of Living Cities in order to present it during the meeting with Ben. Maybe there are some ways to translate what’s happening in the US to Australia or it would be possible to form our own ideas around using the Capital markets to address the big social issues. Ways that are uniquely formulated by a team of willing GLF Alumni.”
This year you have decided to invest in continuing your leadership development by participating in the Edge (peer-mentoring) program. How would you say GLF, the Edge and Living Cities are connected for you?
“The link between the GLF, Edge and my new focus on Living Cities for South Australia is like a pathway. The GLF has given me the vision to see a particular path that I might be able to develop to grow and influence to become really targeted to making a dent in some of our serious social issues. My participation in the Edge group feels like having walking companions along this path – at least for this beginning. My Edge mentors are extraordinary women leaders who can guide, encourage and also point out possible hazards before I’m about to trip over them. So undertaking both the GLF and the Edge has been critical to give me encouragement that this project is worth investigating, worth experimenting with and worth to be taken seriously as a possible avenue for creating community support in addition, and complementary, to the traditional ways community service agencies and NGOs operate in their sector.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years from now?
“To be involved in some way with an alive, relevant and ethical organisation that is harnessing the skills and knowhow of the financial and private capital sectors to make effective dents in our huge and pressing social problems. I would still wish to be connected on the ground, counselling, this is my great privilege to be connected and helpful to people.”
What are your biggest dreams for the future of South Australia?
“Adelaide was founded on bold egalitarian intentions for a just, free and self-sufficient community. It is a unique and beautiful place to live and raise a family. The ingenuity of South Australian has created this wonderful place, yet as in every place it is not without serious failings to take care of all of its citizens. I believe that we can encourage each other, particularly those in leadership positions, to step into boldness and creativity and start to return leadership to an ethic of accountability for all. I hope that ideas can form collaboration around meeting adaptive challenges head on.”
Thank you Sonja, and all the best with your beautiful initiative.
There are already GLF Alumni interested in forwarding this idea. If you are interested in joining the conversation and attending meetings about the development of Living Cities in South Australia please email Sonja on her personal email sbaram[at]adam.com.au with a brief sentence of introduction and what draws you to this project. Sonja would then be happy to contact you by phone or email to talk some more. For more information about Living Cities visit: www.livingcities.org
WISER LEADERS 