Education delivering lasting change

Education Campaigns Australia (ECA) is an educational consultancy that develops school curriculum resources and programs for clients wanting to engage with youth and secondary schools. It offers online and blended learning design and multimedia content development, project management, and specialist educational writing, editing and publishing.

David Williams from ECA moved into MIC Greensborough in June –  right on the cusp of launching a new phase of the business. This will combine its capability and experience in public relations and education to help clients achieve their awareness, learning, and behaviour change goals.

“ECA has developed a trusted network of companies and talented individuals including award-winning writers and editors,” David explains. “We are always on the lookout for creative freelancers and engage them often.”

David is currently teaching at Melbourne Polytechnic, and has been a secondary teacher for 12 years. He has also worked in corporate elearning and was general manager of a national training company and CEO of a Registered Training Organisation.

A current ECA project is Disaster Resilience Education, which is being rolled out across Victoria in both private and public schools. This explains disaster resilience to students, particularly those in areas at high risk of natural hazards such as fire and flood. ECA is also redeveloping Country Fire Authority’s School Education Partnerships Program and Junior Brigades Program.

Melbourne Innovation Centre appealed to ECA with its networking opportunities and productive working space. “I like having the right space to meet clients and work alongside freelancers and collaborators on creative projects,” says David. The plan for growth in the next 2-3 years is to double revenue each year.

As for David’s passion for the industry: “I love helping clients to create highly engaging and effective learning experiences.”

The Flavour of Alphington

Every bottle of La Sirène's farmhouse ale is an embodiment of its locale. This microbrewery specialises in the enigmatic flavour profiles of yeast unique to the Darebin Parklands, situated behind the brewery at Melbourne Innovation Centre.

La Sirène is an urban farmhouse brewery with a strong sustainability focus. It produces beer like that made in farmhouses in the early 14th century—yet it is six kilometers from Melbourne’s CBD. This anachronism sees the contemporary warehouse emanating the mystery and charm of a beer sleeping room, custom-built cool ship fermentation vessel, and 130 stunning traditional French oak barrels.

La Sirène founder, Costa Nikias, explains, “We wanted to make beer with a sense of place. Over the years, it has become so industrialised and process-driven. We want to have a more authentic approach and pay homage to where our beer is made.”

La Sirène's business owners: Costa and Eva Nikias

The Darebin Parklands and creek contains a huge amount of flora which La Sirène coerces into their brewery. “We typically do wild brewing on a windy day with the roller doors open. It’s all about expressing natural yeast.”

In doing so, La Sirène has captured the flavour of Alphington. It uses the yeast to ferment the beer and then takes those yeast strains to a lab. La Sirene now has a full culture in a lab, so it can recall all the natural yeasts that originate from that location. “We’re a brand of Alphington,” says Eva Nikias, Costa’s partner in business and life. “I don’t think you’ll find any stronger than us.”

The Darebin Parklands are pivotal to this brewing method. La Sirène is a corporate member, supporting the land that enables it to incorporate wild fermentation into the brewing process. One beer was forklifted down to the creek in the tank and left there for three days so it could inoculate naturally. “Other beers have a bit of house yeast and a bit of parkland yeast,” Costa says. “But that one is a true representation of the parkland in beer form.”

Positioned in a large warehouse at Melbourne Innovation Centre, the brewery has received mentoring and support from the business incubator to assist with its business growth. Initially brewing Saisons and farmhouse ales, La Sirène has transcended that process since moving in, now focusing on making beer in barrels. “Wild fermented,” Costa explains, “Spontaneously fermented in the cool ship. You can’t get any higher than that in terms of brewing.”

Cool ship wild fermentation resulting from a very cold Melbourne night. Now ready to be put in oak barrels for three years

A cool ship is a large open vessel that catches the yeast and bacteria in the atmosphere as it cools. It demands very cold conditions and can only be used within a period of around two weeks each year. La Sirène is one of very few breweries globally to use this old school method that originates from Belgium. Costa calls it, “the Champagne of beer making.”

La Sirène is a certified green business from the Darebin City Council. Making beer with a sense of place feeds into the brewery’s emphasis on sustainability. The spirit of farmhouse beer-making involves using local ingredients as much as possible—and La Sirène uses Melbourne Water, hops grown in Myrtleford, and yeast from Alphington. All of La Sirène's beers use 100% grain (larger breweries tend to use around 30%), which then goes to a piggery in Macedon to be used as feed. It doesn’t use chemicals to clean the floors and recycles a lot of its cooling water.

The business hires locally and organises all deliveries in-house, which further minimises its carbon footprint. “It’s our responsibility to minimise our footprint,” Costa says. “For us it’s about building up a local market. It would be ideal to sell all of our beer in metro Melbourne.”

“La Sirène is a gem in the middle of Alphington,” says Eva. “People are very proud of us.”

Farmwall Startup to Sustain Cities

Picture a small-scale, vertical, edible garden that grows herbs and microgreens in urban cafés. It’s environmentally-conscious, sustainable, visually appealing—and it’s being turned into a reality right now by Farmwall at the Melbourne Innovation Centre in Alphington.

Farmwall is a community-oriented social enterprise that aims to grow fresh, local and natural produce in close proximity to food venues. This groundbreaking concept will provide custom design, installation, and maintenance of vertical farms and fresh produce maintenance systems inside restaurants to provide high-value crops at chefs’ fingertips.

Farmwall cofounder, Geert Hendrix, explains the motivation behind the Melbourne-based startup. “It’s possible to combine food production, design, and nature through innovative science and technologies. If we grow our food in coherence with natural ecosystems and implement this mindset in designing our living spaces, we create a beautiful, healthier environment for ourselves, as well as solving major issues that cause climate change and pollution.”

Environmentally, the Farmwall reduces food miles, food waste, pesticide and herbicide usage, water and energy costs, and deforestation.

In addition to vertical farms, Farmwall will also build urban aquaponics farms on under-performing land such as parking lots and rooftops. “Transforming them into food-producing spaces,” Hendrix describes. Farmwall intends to inspire the city-based food industry to pursue a more sustainable approach to acquiring fresh produce.

Melbourne Innovation Centre’s CEO, David Williamson, says, “We are really excited to have Farmwall joining MIC’s business incubator program. Farmwall is addressing some key market and societal issues around food security and urban farming, combined with a unique and clever business and distribution model.”

Farmwall will build its prototype and establish its first aquaponics system while at MIC. Few locations in Metropolitan Melbourne could provide the necessary resources to nurture such a project, including onsite workshop space and land, business mentoring and support, and a diverse business community for collaboration. Hendrix applied after hearing about MIC’s strong track record as a business incubator.

The prototype will be built in workshop space and the aquaponics system will be set up on outdoor MIC land. This system will grow vegetables sustainably using fish, water, and sun, with the aim of supplying restaurants without a Farmwall with local produce and providing those that do with larger produce that won’t fit within the structure.

MIC’s Business Incubator has a strong relationship with the City of Darebin, utilising a council asset to grow local businesses and create jobs. Williamson says, “The energy of Farmwall’s highly credentialed team is abundant and we feel they are a great cultural fit within the existing MIC incubator community, as well as the broader local community and the City of Darebin.”

The first sketch of Farmwall was made in October 2016 and the team has rocketed through Melbourne’s startup ecosystem in the short time since. They joined the Nest Coworking community in December 2016, taking part in the boost program and receiving valuable support and assistance from owner Jay Chubb. In May 2017, Farmwall started the Two Feet acceleration program at The Difference Incubator (TDI), which will run until October this year. Through this, the team has already learned how to design a solid model and dig deep into their value proposition, intent, and customer desirability.

TDI Two Feet Program Lead, Meagan Williams, believes, “That a sustainable, values-driven business that is financially and commercially sustainable is the greatest tool for change. Our Two Feet program aims to help entrepreneurs understand the critical elements needed to build a sustainable business, identify the gaps in their current business model, and what to do next on their journey to sustainability.”

Farmwall’s journey highlights that there is a definite shift in the right direction in the startup ecosystem in Melbourne.

“Initiatives such as LaunchVIC are seeking to build a more cohesive start-up ecosystem,” Williamson says. “This is case in point of how the ecosystem can work in tandem, with Farmwall utilising coworking space at Nest in Thornbury, receiving support and participating in The Difference Incubator’s program, and now launching into the validation and enterprise phase at Melbourne Innovation Centre.”

The multilayered startup network is firmly in place to support Melbourne-based businesses like Farmwall. And the more sustainable, globally-conscious entrepreneurs that grow out of it, the closer Melbourne will be to leading the world into a better future.

As Hendrix says, “The world looks like a very bright, positive, and happy space when we imagine our cities as green, natural and productive spaces: abundance, resilience, jobs and community without harming our environment.”

The Farmwall team. Image courtesy of Farmwall

Media enquiries – please contact Melbourne Innovation Centre on 03 9499 9100 or info@melbourneinnovation.com.au