Beacon Laundry is the social enterprise commercial laundry that “gives a sheet,” creating local jobs, career pathways and a workplace for people overlooked by mainstream employment.
Whether it be those living with a disability, former refugees, First Nations people, the homeless, those with a mental illness or who have spent time in the criminal justice system — Beacon Laundry exists to create jobs and career pathways for people from all background to thrive.
The premium commercial laundry service and jobs-focused social enterprise officially opened its doors in April 2024 in Bangalow in the Northern Rivers region of NSW — an area that experiences almost double the state’s average unemployment rate.
The positive Impact
Beacon started with 30 employees and has since become Bangalow’s largest employer, now with more than 130 locals employed.
“A lot of people just really needed a safe place to land and someone to believe in them — someone to give them a little bit of confidence to be able to move on,” Beacon Laundry CEO Morag Roseby said.
Beacon has created a “really beautiful community of people who all have barriers to employment — a mix of all different people that have come together and really support each other every single day.”
The laundry now has almost 70 customers in the Byron area, which has a high volume of hotels and resorts but previously had no large scale local commercial laundry.
In addition to the laundry itself, Beacon provides wraparound supports to make sure it is looking after everybody. It has a team of three that work on the floor alongside people, providing support to those having a hard day.
Then there are monthly check-ins with the Pathways Portfolio team, looking at their barriers to employment, how Beacon can help address those barriers and how to transition into mainstream employment.
“For someone coming in who’s sleeping rough, that might involve getting them a savings account, getting a tax file number,” Morag said.
“Getting all those steps in place so that they can start to look at some secure housing so they can move on to the next step.”
This support has already paid off, as Morag explained, “We didn’t really have any targets around transition for this initial period, wanting to first consolidate our framework and the support and start making some money from a production angle. Yet within these first eight months, 16 people have transitioned to new workplaces.”
Beacon Laundry is formed
Beacon Laundry is the fourth jobs-focused social enterprise successfully incubated by White Box Enterprises — a non-profit organisation that works with social enterprises, government, investors and philanthropists to build, support and advocate for large-scale jobs-focused social enterprises.
Founder and CEO Luke Terry established White Box in 2019 to address the constraints that he routinely confronted when launching enterprises: access to affordable space, access to capital, and to partnerships that would help bring social enterprise into the mainstream fabric of employment in Australia.
Inspired by the success of Vanguard Laundry — a social enterprise laundry set up by Luke in Toowoomba in 2016 — Richard Uechtritz, the former CEO of JB Hi-Fi, reached out to Luke in late-2019 with a proposal to bring the concept to the Northern Rivers.
The Richard and Lorena Uechtritz Foundation contributed $2 million to the creation of Beacon Laundry and committed to help secure contracts with local resorts.
Despite this contribution from Uechtritz, along with a $750,000 federal government grant, the next stage of the raise proved challenging.
Large scale commercial laundries aren’t cheap to set up, and many impact investors can be hesitant to back social enterprises, often due to the risk and lower immediate returns.
White Box approached more than 120 foundations and individuals who identify as impact investors. While all appeared interested initially, Luke hit a wall after trying to raise capital for Beacon for over two years and it seemed that the enterprise may not get off the ground.
“Raising capital in this market is incredibly challenging. Raising impact-first capital is even harder. Impact investors are still hesitant to invest in social enterprises despite the returns these businesses offer,” Terry said.
Fortunately, the Ian and Shirley Norman Foundation stepped in at the eleventh hour as a major backer, driven by a belief that social enterprises can fill critical market gaps and with a desire to demonstrate the power of impact investment.
Ian and Shirley Norman Foundation CEO Coralie Nichols said, “if we can back some proof of concepts, in real time, around real people’s lives and record the impact on those people’s lives — and then get some success stories out, it promotes to others this is a legitimate way to engage in the economy and is something worth supporting.
“Not all returns need to be economical returns. There are other reasons why you get involved. Our involvement with White Box does allow for some conservative returns. But our real investment is around social return.”
Investor returns were designed with a variety of options: senior notes with an average 3% return over 10 years, followed by mezzanine notes at 8%, and subordinated notes at 12%.
The final stages of fundraising included a family-and-friends offering of mezzanine and subordinated notes of $25,000, raising an additional $1 million and bringing 11 new investors on board, with some contributing up to $100,000.
After two years, a total of $12 million was raised — just $1 million shy of the original target — with 75% coming from 13 impact investors, including Richard Uechtritz and the Ian and Shirley Norman Foundation. Beacon Laundry also received philanthropic funding from corporate and family foundations.
Supporting Beacon Laundry
Beacon is currently having to turn away people in need. There’s nothing else like it within the vicinity and the laundry has had a 100-person waitlist for months, with people coming from all across the region and some travelling from an hour and half away each day.
One of the greatest challenges for social enterprises — particularly jobs-focused social enterprises — is access to capital.
Hoping to expand its positive impact, the social enterprise is continuing discussions with investors, working to raise capital with views to expand.
“If more investors were willing to consider impact-first investment, we could create more businesses like Beacon Laundry in every local community across Australia,” Terry said.
Interested investors can contact White Box Enterprises, or Luke Terry. And for more on Beacon Laundry see: https://www.beaconlaundry.com.au/
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