Letter from Mel | By the time you read this, the numbers would have changed

A note before you read on. This email discusses domestic and family violence, and femicide (the killing of women and girls). Please read it when you have the space to. If anything here sits heavily with you, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) offers 24-hour free and confidential support.

A timely entry

At the time of writing this, four women and girls had been killed in the last four days in Australia. Two women, two teenagers. Three men and a boy charged with murder. By the time you read this, the number has most likely changed.

The timing lines up with the release of our conversation with Sherele Moody – journalist, founder of Australian Femicide Watch and the Red Heart Movement. This is the woman who has spent the last decade doing something most of us cannot bring ourselves to do. Counting, naming, and staying with the lives lost by femicide. Instead of just telling their stories as tragedies, she brings to life who they were as women, mothers, friends and carers. She humanises what can sometimes feel like just another news story. 

In the past six months alone, thirty-seven women and seventeen children have been killed by violence in Australia. Sherele knows each of their names. She has built a living memorial – not a statistic, not a database in the cold sense – a place where every person lost is documented, remembered, searched for by the people who loved them.

I want share with you why this conversations matters to us as a business. Not just as humans, but as a business.

Humans of Purpose exists because we believe that stories are not decoration. They are infrastructure. The stories a culture tells about itself determine what it can and cannot see – and therefore what it will and will not change. We work with organisations every day who are trying to shift something: a policy, a practice, a habit of mind. And what we know, what we have learned over hundreds of conversations on this podcast, is that data moves minds but story moves people. You cannot legislate your way to a culture that values women’s lives. You have to narrate your way there.

Sherele understands this at a cellular level. She began this work not as an academic or an advocate but as a nineteen-year-old woman who discovered that her stepfather had murdered a child in the family home. He had killed before – a five-year-old girl named Sandra Dorothy Bacon, in 1963. And then a nine-year-old girl named Stacey-Ann Tracy, in 1990. He maintained his innocence until he died in prison in 2007.

Sherele launched her memorial with those two names. That is not activism as we usually imagine it, rather, it is something older and stranger and more necessary – it is witness. The deliberate, costly choice to see what happened and say: this person was here. She had a name. She is not a footnote. In our conversation, I asked Sherele what she wants people to understand that the statistics don’t tell them. I asked her what it costs to do this work every day. I asked her what a different Australia would actually feel like – not in policy, but in ordinary life. Her answers stayed with me long after the recording ended.

We are a social impact business. That means we believe that commerce and conscience are not opposites – that the way we show up in the market reflects and shapes the culture we are building together. It also means we have a responsibility, when something is happening in our country right now, this week, to say so. Not to only sit in outrage, but to say, we see this and we are not moving on. Four women in four days. Sherele Moody has not moved on from a single one of them and neither should we.

Where this story leads | the Academy

Sherele counts the women who don’t survive. Our Academy walks alongside the women who do. Every woman who comes through Humans of Purpose Academy has lived experience of domestic or family violence and abuse. Surviving is not the end of the story. 

What comes after – rebuilding an income, a skill set, a sense of your own future, is the longer work, and it is the work we exist to do. Digital skills training that leads somewhere real, to a life that is hers to build. Sherele’s work and our work are not two different causes. They are the same fight, on either side of survival.

Where this story leads | the Agency

Our content marketing agency is not separate from any of this. It is how we drive our impact and bring to life our purpose as a business. We believe that business should be doubling down now to address the poly crises we’re all grappling with – so even when it costs our bottom line, we continue, because we care deeply. 

We work with brands who live and breathe their values. Purpose-led, impact-led, the kind of clients who are not just saying the words. And inside that work, something else is happening that most people never see.

Women from our Academy complete their internship inside the agency itself. They sit alongside senior leaders, experienced professionals who know how to do the work and know how to teach it. And they learn digital skills the way anyone should get to learn them, with real support from people who actually know the way.

So when you work with us, your budget doesn’t just go into our pockets. It goes straight into our purpose. It goes toward helping women with lived experience of abuse and violence get back on their feet, properly, with a skill set and an income.

Where this story leads | You

Humans of Purpose only exists thanks to the humans who have already put their trust in our purpose. We invite you to be a part of our story. Whether that’s getting involved with our Academy, partnering with our Agency to receive content marketing services or simply being a part of our community. Get in touch.