Gem Spotlight - Simonne Michelle at Beyond Blue
This month, we celebrate Simonne’s role and learn what the best thing about it is, her proudest accomplishment, favourite holiday destination and more.
Gembridge partnered with Beyond Blue to appoint Simonne as their Philanthropy Lead. This role focused on philanthropic income generation and engagement with donor and partners, and was responsible for strategic development, management and implementation of cultivation programs for significant individual and corporate donors and partners.
What’s the best thing about your current role?
The people and the variety are the best things. I oversee major gifts, corporate partnerships, gifts in Wills, and Trusts and Foundations and I really enjoy the variety of donors and supporters we interact with.
I also really enjoy the variety within the supports and services of Beyond Blue itself. We have such an incredible array of smart, passionate people here, from clinical to policy to education to prevention. I’m always learning something new and always so impressed with the depth of service that Beyond Blue provides to the Australian community.
And then there’s the people I work with in the Fundraising and Philanthropy team - they’re just such great, passionate, committed fundraising professionals, all pulling together as a team. And of course there’s the requisite silliness and fun that fundraisers know how to bring - it’s a great team to be in!
What is your proudest accomplishment or career highlight?
Becoming a mother after some pretty hefty odds against me, is, and will likely always be, the highlight of my life. My IVF journey is wrapped up in a personal journey about trauma and shame – one I’ve written a book about and hope to publish one day.
What is the best career advice you've received?
Learn how to work in the grey and then when you think you’ve got it, assume you don’t and keep learning it!
Fundraising and Philanthropy can be hard. How do you stay focused, motivated, and driven?
That’s such an important question because it is a challenging and fast-paced industry, often with high staff turnover. I think sometimes, as fundraisers, we forget we are inside organisations that deal with deep need that we’re often directly exposed to or holding the space around that need, and we can take that on just as much as the programs people on the ground do, but oftentimes without the immediacy of seeing some of the great impact as it occurs.
On top of that, we feel this responsibility to ensure the funds are coming through to guarantee our organisations can continue to keep doing the incredibly important work they’re doing. For me, ensuring I make time for self-care is the only way I avoid burnout and/or overwhelm. I have an early morning self-care routine that I stick to. It’s a 5am wake up, exercise and some yoga, some creative writing, and a short meditation. It took a fair amount of discipline to instil this in my routine with a demanding job and busy, blended family, but it makes all the difference.
If you constantly live in your head and forget to bring your body and breath along for the ride, staying motivated and focused is extremely hard because you can’t sustain a holistic equilibrium.
What is your favourite holiday destination?
Somewhere with trees. I grew up in rural WA, surrounded by bush on all sides, with the smell of eucalyptus, tea tree, and wattle in the air. Put me in a forest over a beach any day! I love the Margaret River area in WA and the Otways here in Victoria. (This is not an ad for Tourism Australia, I think I’ve just forgotten how to think about overseas destinations!)
If you could choose to do anything for a day, what would it be?
Wake up in a cabin surrounded by gorgeous linens and unlimited hot coffee and dark chocolate, in lush forest, with a writing desk overlooking the trees, with an idea for a bestselling novel buzzing around in my head, a great book ready for when I need inspiration, and absolutely no-one else around for miles.
What is your favourite movie or book?
This awful question! How very dare you! I don’t know! Let’s go with The Turning by Tim Winton and Benang by Kim Scott, two of my favourite WA authors.
If you could invite 3 guests to dinner, who would they be?
Assuming time travel is a thing, then it would be Maya Angelou, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Thanks for sharing with us, Simonne!