Jessica Macpherson spent twelve years building and leading Melbourne charity St Kilda Mums before deciding it was time to hand over the reins and launch technology training social enterprise Blaze Your Trail, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
St Kilda Mums and its associated charities Geelong Mums and Eureka Mums all use business software giant Salesforce to organise their fundraising and activities with a “steady stream” of volunteers using the platform to help the charities while also mastering the technology.
“I saw value for a guided program that gave people the opportunities to get hands-on experience but kept the project on course in the best interests of the charity,” she says. “They can probably do more harm than good if they are let loose in a charity organisation and they don’t know what they’re doing.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit Macpherson says it wasn’t the best time for St Kilda Mums to start a new business so she stepped down from the charity she had founded and grown to a network of 3000 volunteers to build the social enterprise herself.
Macpherson launched Blaze Your Trail in April to provide tech training, mentoring and employment placement for migrants enabling them to get a start in the workforce.
The social enterprise’s main focus is training and placements using Salesforce as the company provides its platform for free to charities and so is widely used across the not-for-profit sector as well as large corporates and consultancies.
“A lot of my students are working mums,” Macpherson says. “So they’ve been out of the workforce and they’ve decided to retrain in Salesforce. They’ve gone ahead and got certified but they can’t get their foot in the door, they can’t get their resume to the top of the pile because they’ve got no local work experience.”
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Charity founder blazes own trail with tech training (Sydney Morning Herald)
