why give industries

Making big dreams our business

Give Industries was founded by three close friends (and former housemates) in late 2018, after discovering our skills and interests worked well together to start a sustainable, impact-focused electrical social enterprise. Calvin is an electrician, Jeremy is an environmental scientist, and Kat is an arts and community worker. We’re all pretty driven by a desire to make the world a bit better than it would be if we weren’t around, and Give Industries is our answer to how to do this.

By 2018, Calvin had been running his own electrical contracting business for the better part of a decade, and was realising that the amount of money he needed to be happy, and the amount of money a standard tradie could make, were widely different numbers.

We got to talking, and decided to try something a bit new, and a bit different. What if we turned Calvin’s company into a social enterprise – gave staff and management strong and fair salaries; worked in the most environmentally sustainable ways possible; committed to a diverse and open hiring policy; and then gave away every single spare dollar to the most highly effective charities we could find?

Five years later, we still feel like we’re trying something a bit new, and a bit different. In many ways, the day to day at Give Industries is much like any other electrical contractor. Our qualified staff and apprentices work on fit outs and maintenance in retail, hospitality, office, and residential buildings. We tender and quote competitively, and offer our customers high quality and reasonably priced services.

But in other ways, ours is a very different company. Our toolbox talks involve chats about the places our donations are going, and our staff are some of our biggest advocates. We’ve hired someone after multiple years of unemployment, and someone else quit running their own business to join us on the tools, just because he liked the idea of us. We’re committed to at least 50% of our apprentices being women and girls, we work a four-day week, and we built a rock-climbing wall as soon as we got our first warehouse. We try every day to be open to new ways of running a business, listening to our staff, and implementing their ideas.

And at the heart of it all, behind every decision we make, is our driving goal: to give every single spare dollar away to some of the most highly effective charities in the world, working towards the future we all want to see for the world.

And for our whole team, we get to wake up and go to work somewhere where it’s so easy to see the bigger picture. Where a successful project can mean not only a happy client and a well-lit room, but malaria protection for a village, education for a young girl, employment for a community health worker, or advocacy for the voiceless.