Empowered Business Model
How to change the world one hour at a time: Social and environmental activism as the essential foundation for corporate organisation
ARTICLE BY MANAGING DIRECTOR, DR SANDRA WALLACE
Corporate entities large and small shape our lives. In general, the primary goal and motivation of the corporate structure is to generate profit for owners and shareholders. Because of this they have often been seen as the antithesis of progressive movements and activism. Ironically the corporate structure itself is a perfect vehicle for positive social change. It just needs to be untangled from the pure profit motive and the assumption that untethered capital growth is essential for corporate survival.
Artefact Heritage and Environment’s Empowered Business Model is a response to this critique. The model’s structure integrates our consultancy engagements with purposeful social, cultural, and environmental impact, treating them as mutually reinforcing rather than separate goals.
Our Empowered Business Model uses the company's resources of time, people and money to enable positive social and environment change thorough the existing corporate structure. The 'plug-and-play' nature of this model removes complexity, proving that any company with employees, hours, and a bank account has the immediate capacity to undertake activism at scale.
“I believe that every company has a responsibility to call out injustice and give back to the world that it operates in. Artefact won’t shy away from stances and actions that are required to facilitate real change, whether that’s taking political stands, getting out on the street to protest, or advocating for empowerment. I challenge other business leaders to consider this in their companies, because if we all actioned a progressive corporate Purpose, we could change the world for the better.”
Who we are
Artefact is a professional services firm of almost 60 team members, technical, administrative and management. In 2026 we turn 16 years old. Artefact provides heritage and environmental assessment and management services to a range of clients from residential to large government infrastructure projects. Our services include archaeology, Indigenous cultural heritage and consultation, built heritage, environmental assessments, heritage interpretation and public art. Artefact’s revenue is solely based on charging the billable hours of our consultants to clients. As such, time is literally money in the organisation.
Our purpose
Over the last two years, Artefact has done some soul searching and refocussed our attention as a purpose-led organisation. As a heritage and environmental consultancy, we had always championed equality, sustainability and ethical operation. We also explored existing values-based models and accreditations, but nothing seemed to fit perfectly.
So, we took a journey, in consultation with the team, to look at how we would approach Purpose in the organisation. We landed on this statement as a foundation for our approach.
Flowing from this statement, we have identified four Commitments and four Actions.
“Our purpose is to make the world a better place by using Artefact as an agent for change. Whilst our passion is heritage and the environment, our purpose is social and environmental change which adds a deeper level of meaning to what we do.”
Our Commitments
FIRST NATIONS FIRST - Be guided by our First Nations Communities.
BE ACTIVISTS - Stand against inequality and injustice in the world around us.
SUPPORT CLIMATE JUSTICE - Be real about climate impact and strive to reduce it.
DO THE RIGHT THING - Make ethical decisions at every level of business.
Our Actions
PURPOSE TEAMS empowered to action our commitments.
CREATE employment and leadership opportunities for First Nations people.
CONNECT with like-minded organisations to push for positive change.
BUILD a successful business that will support our purpose.
The Empowered Business Model
At the foundation of our Purpose and Commitments is the Empowered Business Model. This model is structural and deliberately weaves consultancy success, support for its people, and positive social, cultural and environmental impact together. Consultancy outcomes and purposeful action are seen as mutually reinforcing, with our company enabling meaningful initiatives that contribute to the wider community and planet. This integrated approach positions impact as a core function of the business rather than an add-on or compliance exercise.
Central to the model is an empowering social activism loop, where a portion of the company’s financial opportunity is intentionally redirected into Commitments and Actions led by consultants. The Empowered Business Model allows an allocation of hours per month for each team member to work on social and environmental activism as part of the Purpose Program.
This participation is not mandatory but is an expectation and is viewed as a KPI. A KPI shouldn't just measure how much value we extract for a company, but how much we return to the community.
Redefining success to include community action proves that a company values its people’s humanity, not just their output.
The Purpose Program is overseen by our Social Activism Manager, Amy Weidlich, and not through the corporate business structure. Placing the Purpose Program under a dedicated Social Activism Manager, separate from the standard corporate hierarchy — is a crucial structural guardrail. It protects actions from being diluted.
The Empowered Business Model enables team members to have agency, within the context of our Commitments, on what Purpose projects they support. These team-led initiatives strengthen professional capacity, support innovation, and generate insights that feed back into and enrich the consultancy’s professional practice.
Unlike traditional top-down ESG frameworks, it is shaped by the vision of collective decision-making and a willingness to forgo potential revenue in order to redistribute financial agency for the greater good.
How does it work?
The Empowered Business Model is operationalised through four employee-led Purpose Teams:
First Nations
Equality and Justice
Climate
Connecting with Like-Minded Organisations
These self-determined teams serve as the company's incubators for social and environmental action. See our Purpose Teamwork projects.
These teams focus broadly on the nominated issues and are designed to be changed or expanded as the company and program evolve. The Purpose Teams embed Purpose into our corporate structure and the intimate working of the business model. The Purpose Teams are where the ideas for action are discussed, supported and organised with the support of our Social Activism Manager.
“It’s needed now more than ever, to not just bury our heads in the sand, while bolder factions take up all the oxygen. If it’s radical to care about the world and do something positive and wise about it, then that’s what we are all about here at Artefact. ”
Every full-time and part-time employee is allocated 1 hour per week of time, out of their billable hours target, to dedicate to these initiatives. This structure currently unlocks approximately 3,000 hours annually of collective community action, not counting the Social Activism Manager's dedicated oversight.
Our Social Activism Manager sits between and around the existing management structure. Sometimes she leads actions we want to take, largely she supports and facilitates the flow of the Purpose Teams, encouraging collaborations, connections and areas of enquiry. She also empowers our individual consultants to consider activities they are authentically interested in putting their considerable efforts towards supporting.
Our team have engaged in a range of projects on a broad range of topics. From citizen science projects; to supporting First Nations native plant research; volunteering for charities that support women; and gathering food and clothing donations. They have also utilised their expertise when invited to speak as thought leaders at net zero conferences. We’ve attended protests, developed bespoke Aboriginal Site Officer Training programs and began working with communities.
Furthermore our inspiring Empowered Conversation series brings guest speakers in conversation with our staff on topics about the environment, heritage and First Nations’ perspectives.
Empowerment as the foundation for change
Although a Corporate Social Responsibility or charity-based corporate focus is a legitimate response, Artefact took the position that our approach would be multi-layered. As well as providing tangible benefits to stakeholders and community our Empowered Business Model is also focussed on empowering the participants the team members who undertake the Purpose work.
This model enables individuals to make choices about activist stances and actions in the context of the corporate purpose, as individual agency is critical for empowerment. We believe in our team and their wisdom to follow important issues and learn through experiences of their own choosing. Our job is to support them to do this and encourage an activist mindset.
Empowerment also comes from embedding the Purpose Program and individuals’ participation in the corporate structure, as this legitimises it as more than a decision of current management or a transient approach.
Where to from here?
The learnings so far have been many, but the success of the model is already evident. Embedding our social and environmental justice response into our everyday corporate working means that it’s already becoming part of who we are, not an add on or metric to be met. And everyone is involved in a way that lights their spark and empowers them to act.
We have achieved a remarkable amount so far and have big plans for the next phase. As well as continuing the work in our Purpose Teams and increasing our available Purpose hours allocation, we want to reach out to other companies to encourage this approach as an effective and valuable way forward to address the ever increasing social and environmental justice issues. These issues are set to only become more pressing and the more we can leverage existing corporate organisational structures to push for meaningful progressive change, the better off we will all be.
We invite other businesses to join us in embedding activism into their corporate structures. If your company is ready to take action, let’s start the conversation.