Resilience, Activism & the Entrepreneurial Mindset - Lily Dempster of The Neighbourhood Effect

Lily is a 30-year old climate change activist from Canberra. She is the CEO and founder of The Neighbourhood Effect. The Neighbourhood Effect is a mobile app and website that uses behavioural science to make it easy, social and rewarding for Australians to connect to eco-friendly products, services and community initiatives in their neighbourhood, and to adopt green habits that reduce their carbon footprints.

Local councils, green property managers and businesses white-label The Neighbourhood Effect's software to help their residents adopt sustainable behaviours, build community and reduce waste and energy costs. Through our app and website, users unlock recommended products and activities (across energy, transport, food, waste, neighbourhood initiatives and low-carbon consumer products) tailored to suit their lifestyle, household and location.

The Neighbourhood Effect has been running for 18 months and in that time, it has launched a free website and mobile app for ACT residents with the support of the government there, launched a national pilot with Sydney City Council and CitySwitch called the Better Buildings Cup, a sustainable behaviour change program for commercial office buildings and, raised $30,000 through a 4-week crowd-funding campaign with ING's Dreamstarter program.

Lily was formerly GetUp’s Market Impact Director, where she ran green consumer campaigns, helping 4000 Australians purchase GreenPower and 13,000 people switch to a carbon neutral electricity retailer. These campaigns had an impact equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year and adding 2MW of additional renewable power to the grid.

She has also worked as a consultant to the Australian environmental movement and was previously an analyst in an in-house management consulting unit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Lily has a background in law and social science and is completing a Masters in Energy Change (climate change mitigation, environmental sustainability and renewable energy technology engineering) at the Australian National University.

Lily is a Foundation for Young Australians 2017 Young Social Pioneer, a SheStarts alumnus (an accelerator program for female founders of tech startups with venture technology firm BlueChilli), the winner of the 2017 Allens Social Innovation Competition, and a national finalist in the Climate Launchpad competition for innovative green businesses.

www.theneighbourhoodeffect.com.au

[email protected]

To find out about upcoming events organised by Melbourne Silicon Beach - Australia's fastest growing startup community - go to:

https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Melbourne-Silicon-Beach/

Melbourne Silicon Beach is proudly sponsored by:

Victory Offices

http://bitly.com/VictoryOffices_SD   MYOB   http://bitly.com/MYOB_SD   Allied Legal   http://bitly.com/AlliedLegal_SD   Your host, Dan O'Grady can be found on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danogradysimpateco   and at simpateco.com.au   Intro & outro music by Dan O'Grady