Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, one of the 50 Best Workplaces For Women in Australia, shows how serious organisational growth starts with sharper role design, stronger employer branding and clear-eyed leadership on AI.
There’s a particular kind of career malaise that hits high-performing people in their thirties and forties, the kind that’s hard to articulate at barbecues because, objectively, everything is fine. Good salary, interesting enough work, a LinkedIn profile your university self would be stoked about. And yet.
“Before I joined this organisation, I was having a career crisis where I was asking myself, what the hell am I doing for the world?” says Mariam Hares is the Chief People and Culture Officer at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation (SCHF). “I just wasn’t getting that sense of engagement and job satisfaction that I saw in other people around me. Then I saw an ad for this role and I was like, oh my God. Of course.”
“I wanted to have a sense of job satisfaction and impact, number one. But the second thing is what attracted me in the job ad and in the interviews was actually it’s a really complex organisation. There is a lot of ambition, and there’s so much opportunity.”
Mariam describes the organisation as one with a large data team, precision campaign strategies, and financial modelling that would not embarrass a mid-size investment firm, all pointed at the singular goal of funding healthcare for sick kids. High stakes, by every metric.
The people strategy behind purpose, performance and growth
Not-for-profits employ more than 10 per cent of Australia’s workforce, yet the sector is still too often framed as a career detour rather than a destination for ambitious talent. “Typically you’ll see people working for charities after they’ve had a long career in for-profit and they want to give back,” explains Hares, “Which is great, we need those people. Or you have talent that has only ever worked for a not-for-profit, which is also great because you need that too. But there is a huge gap in the middle of talent coming right out of uni but just not seeing working for a charity as an option.”
The answer, rather than waiting for people to find their moral compass in middle age, has been to proactively invest in employer brand and employee value proposition, to make the commercial case for not-for-profit work.
“We’ve done so much work to break up that stigma around not-for-profit work not being commercially viable,” she says. “Our purpose is to provide world-class healthcare, world-class research and innovation. The outcomes are so profoundly human, right? It is a high performing environment and that is absolutely necessary for what we’re doing.”
“We’re here to raise as much money as possible to change the future for sick kids. That is serious business and it needs a seriously strategic approach.”
Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, however, is challenging that story. Since the EVP launch in July 2023, public case-study pages for the SCHF employer brand/EVP project state a 774% increase in average job views per ad, a 298% increase in new careers-page views, and a 20-day average time-to-hire against a 44-day industry standard.
Over roughly the same period, annual fundraising rose sharply, from $76 million in FY22 to more than $100 million in FY24, according to Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation and external reporting. SCHF’s FY25 impact report then recorded $82.2 million in cash fundraising revenue, plus a further $14.7 million in pledges and direct-to-hospital contributions.
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What she’s selling, and what the organisation can credibly deliver, is a specific combination that’s genuinely hard to find: work that helps you grow intellectually and pays you properly, in an environment where the outcomes, sick children getting better care, are visible and real. “We’re able to attract great people because we have that balance of highly talented people who want to stretch, but they also want to know that their work matters,” she says.
Better work design reduces burnout before it starts
In sectors where the work carries emotional weight, psychological safety is a structural essential, shaped by role design, workload and clarity around what the job demands. The things that sound administrative until you understand that getting them wrong is what burns people out.
“As an HR person, there’s the 101 stuff you need to do for psychological safety. Being a charity can be emotionally demanding,” she says. “I think the key is a solid workforce planning strategy. How you structure the roles across the business, what the position descriptions look like, what the workload is that the role will be managing. Role design sustainably.”
There is a radical practicality to this approach. Every job description gets reviewed annually to keep a keen eye on role creep, one of the main causes of burnout. “We don’t always get it 100% right. Sometimes something will be missed, that’s human, but we have a strategic approach to make sure people know what their job is.”
The organisation, which was just named as one of the 50 Best Workplaces For Women in Australia, designed their leave policies around the life stages where female talent typically churns out of the workforce. “When it comes to women specifically, we’ve recognised the life stages where we need a diverse offering for flexibility and leave. We have a generous paid parental leave policy, grandparent leave etc”
They’ve also reconfigured the conventional career ladder which, particularly in large organisations, is so often vertical by design. “We encourage people to see development as a horizontal view,” she says. “If you want to become a leader, you need to go and understand how fundraising works, you need to understand how to steward a donor.”
What good AI leadership looks like
“Our CEO is a self described AI evangelist so we are very positive about adopting it where it makes sense,” says Hares. Over two years ago, which in AI years is essentially the Jurassic period, SCHF wrote its first AI use policy. “Our lawyer said it was the first one they ever reviewed,” she says.
The approach since then has been notably un-panicked for a sector that could reasonably panic about AI’s implications for fundraising, donor management, and data use. Copilot has been rolled out with ongoing training. An AI subcommittee meets to work through how the organisation can improve and the framing has been deliberately non-threatening.
“First of all, I think it’s important to remove that sense of guilt, or threat, about how it could affect someone’s job,” she says. “We need to make sure that our whole business knows it’s OK to use it, to have clear policies around it, and a clear position on it as a leadership team.” They’re currently running a workforce planning assessment across the whole organisation to map which functions have genuine AI integration potential.
“We make sure people have access and are trained, and we have clear governance around how to use it. We understand that it will impact roles, and it should impact roles. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need you, it just means you can work on better things.”
The through-line across all of it, the AI governance, the role design, the lateral career development, the employer brand focus is that this is an organisation that has decided to take its people operation as seriously as it takes its fundraising operation. Which is very seriously indeed.
Why do talented professionals choose not-for-profit work over corporate roles?
The strongest draw is the combination of genuine complexity and meaningful outcomes. Purpose-driven organisations like Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation run sophisticated data teams, campaign strategy, and financial modelling, the work is commercially demanding and the results are profoundly human. Increasingly, high performers are choosing environments where both are true.
How can not-for-profit organisations compete with corporate salaries to attract top talent?
Salary competitiveness matters, but the bigger lever is employer brand. Organisations that articulate the commercial rigour, scale, and complexity of the work, rather than defaulting to mission-first messaging, attract candidates who want to be stretched. Strong employee value propositions in the sector emphasise development, cross-functional exposure, flexibility, and impact.
What does workforce planning look like in not-for-profit environments?
Sustainable workforce planning in high-stakes, emotionally demanding roles starts with deliberate role design: clear position descriptions, realistic workload expectations, and annual reviews of both. Psychological safety requires structural foundations, not just cultural intention. Organisations that treat role clarity as a living document, not a hire-and-forget exercise, retain people at significantly higher rates.
Is the not-for-profit sector a viable career path for early-career professionals?
Absolutely, and the sector’s talent challenge is partly a perception problem, not a reality problem. Organisations raising over $100 million annually, running national data operations, and leading AI policy development are offering careers of genuine commercial complexity. The gap is in employer brand investment: sectors that actively recruit early-career talent and communicate the full scope of the work are closing it fast.
