Meet Our Founder, Allison Hendricks
Simply Stakeholders was born out of my own experiences as a young graduate engineer in an environmental consultancy.
One of the first projects I worked on was a controversial motorway project in Sydney. It was the third time the government department had tried to get an environmental impact assessment approved. Our first day on the project saw a full page advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald taken out by the who’s who of Australia, objecting to the proposal.
A community member had suggested a tunnel that would avoid the environmentally sensitive area. But as it would’ve been the longest tunnel at the time, the suggestion was not taken very seriously.
However, one of the few things I did know as a civil engineering graduate was that it was not unfeasible! So, I kept putting forward the suggestion.
At a final options selection meeting, the very senior executive of the government department asked the team if there were any other options to be considered. Reluctantly, the tunnel option was raised. But when the executive went around the room and asked us to point to the option we’d like to show our grandchildren we’d created, each person in the room chose the tunnel! So, he told us to go and make it happen. And the rest, as they say, is history… and we now have a lot of tunnels all around Sydney!
This experience stayed with me as I became more senior in my career and more distant from the voice of the community.
I knew that if we could get qualitative information and meaningful reports to the decision makers, we would get better decisions. But the tools of the day (excel/access databases) were not up to the job. So, I decided to create Darzin — and a little later, Simply Stakeholders.
