By GARRY HOWE
IT takes a certain confidence, coupled with a keen social conscience, to influence world leaders like Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin as the first youth representative at a G20 Summit.
Holly Ransom did just that and told a packed room of Casey Cardinia Region businesspeople at the year’s first business breakfast that her resolve to make a difference was developed at age five after a supermarket standoff involving her “most favourite person in the world” – her grandmother.
Holly told the Cranbourne Racing Complex crowd on 9 March that her grandmother, who stands barely five feet (152cm) tall, confronted a “six feet something” giant who was dressing down a heavily-acned youth on the other side of the checkout.
She said the sight of her grandmother inserting herself between the aggressor and the poor supermarket employee sticks with her to this day.
“How dare you speak like that – go over and apologise,” her grandmother demanded.
The man muffled a barely audible apology and scuttled away, highly embarrassed.
When young Holly turned to her grandmother for an explanation of the events, she replied that: “If you walk past something like that you tell the world that you think it’s okay”.
“Everything I did from that moment forward changed,” Holly said.
Only a few years later, when walking down a city street with her parents, her social conscience kicked in and she stopped to have a conversation with a homeless man.
Holly remarked that the $4 in his collection wasn’t much and the man replied that it represented a good day.
From that moment on, she says, she wanted to help make the world a better place. The next day she enlisted the help of her school principal and class teacher to organise a food drive, collecting cans for charity.
Now in her mid-20s, Holly has travelled the world and sat down for what she calls ‘coffee chats’ with strangers she now calls mentors, and business minds she rubs shoulders with on a global scale.
Holly, a lawyer and CEO of her company Emergent Solutions, can be described as a social entrepreneur. She was the world’s youngest Rotary Club president and the youngest person to be named in Australia’s ‘100 Most Influential Women’.
At just 21, the West Australian was approached by Rio Tinto Iron Ore boss Sam Walsh to help transform his business.
Holly was a youth representative at last year’s G20 Summit and she raised a laugh at the breakfast when explaining what she learned a lot about seating arrangements.
“You don’t sit Russian President Vladimir Putin next to Barack Obama.”
Holly turned the audience’s attention to how they could better implement changes to drive youth employment and engagement in their business as well as the not-for-profit sector.
She said she wanted to see more intergenerational leadership occur through both generations working together.
Holly used her age and experience to speak for youth all over the world.
She told the G20 of the scary figures we faced in youth employment.
“By 2025 three-quarters of the workforce is going to be under 30, and currently one in three young people finish the certificate or course they start,” she said.
Holly said some countries had youth unemployment rates of 55-60 per cent and suggested that 60 per cent of the jobs today would disappear through initiatives like robotics and digitalisation.
She encouraged those business people present to work with educational institutions, lamenting the fact that Australia had the “wooden spoon” when it came to that relationship.
“We rank 33 out of the 33 OEDC countries.”
Holly defended the Gen Ys from critics who said they had a short attention span. “No, we have a short interesting span,” she countered.
She said her generation was exposed to nine hours of media per day and were skeptical of advertising.
The likes of oil spills and the recent VW environmental scandal had led to “enormous leaking from the bucket of trust”.
The Gen Ys wanted companies to show they genuinely cared about social issues.
Holly shared the story of Annie, a 10-year-old West Australian student who, along with her classmates, was given $10 to spend over two weeks to help make a difference in the world.
Some of Annie’s classmates put their $10 into a donation bin, others used it to buy food for a shelter.
Annie went out and hired two DVDs and, charging an entry fee, her two movie nights filled school halls. She turned her $10 into $356 and was able to have a bigger impact with that money.
Holly, who will be back in the region in April to talk to service clubs about volunteerism, challenged those present to: “Give yourself 10 bucks in two weeks to have a go”.
She also revealed another talent. Having attended circus school from aged 10, she mastered the unicycle – a skill she says mirrors life in a way.
“If you want to stay up on a unicycle you have to have your eyes up and looking ahead,” she explained. “In a business sense, that is looking at where your customers and markets are going.
“If you are looking at your feet, that’s where you will go. The only way you can stay on top is to keep moving. The moment you stop, you fall off.”
Breakfast MC Russell Robinson, from the Melbourne Football Club, summed up the sentiment of the room after Holly’s address.
“We have to promote people like Holly to our kids, rather than the fallen heroes who tend to make the front page of the paper for making a mistake.”
