Inside the club more exclusive than the Chairman’s Lounge
Private equity legend Bill Ferris explains why sending non-profit CEOs to Harvard is the ultimate investment in the “social glue” holding Australia’s economy together.
Macquarie Group Foundation executive director Lisa George and private equity legend Bill Ferris are both Harvard club members. Louie Douvis
Rachael BoltonWork and careers reporter
Every year for the past quarter-century, Bill Ferris has paid to send two not-for-profit leaders to Harvard because he does not trust government alone to maintain social stability through times of turmoil.
At 80, the father of Australian private equity believes a flourishing NFP sector is existential to the Australian way of life.
“It’s becoming a worldwide challenge, and you can’t just rely on governments at a time of global mess,” Ferris says, citing geopolitical volatility and social fragmentation.
His Family Ferris Nonprofit Fellowship is currently finalising its 2026 intake, a milestone that coincides with the 75th birthday of the Harvard Club of Australia.
With about 600 members, the club is one of the most exclusive in the country. It boasts members including the chairman’s chairman, David Gonski, former Labor leader Bill Shorten, former ANZ retail head Maile Carnegie and Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat.
But geopolitical and social fragmentation were not the primary concerns of a 23-year-old Ferris when he first set foot on the Harvard campus – which is sometimes euphemistically called “the little business school just outside of Boston”.
It was 1968 when Ferris arrived at Harvard on the back of a tag-team pair of academic scholarships – the Denison Miller from the University of Sydney and a Fulbright. “That enabled me to contemplate going to the US,” he says, a time he describes as “two very exciting years”.
Former US president John F. Kennedy had, as Ferris puts it, “sadly just been knocked off”.
“I was focused selfishly on what I could do in the world of business, with innovation, at that time,” he admits.
But a speech by the late president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, at the University of Kansas shook a young Ferris to his core.
Within three months of that speech on March 18, 1968, Robert would himself be dead, gunned down in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary.
But on this day at the University of Kansas, he told a crowd of 20,000 supporters that gross national product was a poor measure of a nation’s character.
That speech, Ferris says, “was a wake-up call”.
He realised Australia’s globally high living standards, built on the back of a robust gross national product and replete with a world-class social safety net, needed a stronger “glue” than governments alone could supply.
“The socio-economic structure that this country enjoys is under lots of pressure,” Ferris says. “That glue has to be, in my view, provided by not-for-profits. I learnt during this time we could not just rely on government.”
Ferris returned to Australia in 1970 with the idea of starting the country’s first venture capital fund, which would go on to make him a lot of money.
And another idea: to get more Australians into the hallowed halls of Harvard, grow the local network of alumni, and eventually, bankroll non-profit leaders to attend with an idea to further professionalise the local sector.
These days, Australia has what Macquarie Group Foundation executive director – and Harvard Club member – Lisa George calls “a very large and professional” non-profit sector.
It employs more than 10 per cent of our workforce – more than 1.5 million people – and contributes over $200 billion annually to the economy – about 8 per cent of gross domestic product.
George, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School, is one of the panel of judges who select the successful fellowship recipients.
Each year, the Ferris family forks out more than $20,000 per person for two candidates to receive the “once in a career opportunity”: a high-intensity, one-week executive course at Harvard Business School.
Lisa George and Bill Ferris are working to get more Australian not-fot-profit leaders into Harvard. Louie Douvis
“The original vision was a pebble dropped in a pond, and the ripple effect that comes from that,” says George, who has been involved with the fellowship for almost two decades.
“We’ve invested in the individual, but we’ve seen many go on to be chief executives of two or three other non-profits over their careers, and they’ve taken that experience and those learnings and those collaborations and networks with them.”
The fellowship’s 54-strong alumni is a who’s-who of Australia’s non-profit heavyweights: Salvos boss Matt Davis; Adrian Collette, former boss of Opera Australia who now directs how the government funds the arts as chief executive of Creative Australia; and Jerril Rechter, who was running the Footscray Community Arts Centre when she became the 2006 recipient and was recently appointed chief executive of the Australian Sports Foundation.
“We look at what is a relevant, topical issue for society, and what is pressing for that organisation in this moment,” says George.
Successful applicants arrive at Harvard with a honed and very specific problem to solve and spend the week workshopping solutions to that problem with the college’s brightest minds.
One of last year’s recipients was Gary Groves, chief executive of online youth-focused mental health organisation ReachOut. His Harvard experience coalesced around developing an ethical, safe way to use AI to meet the ballooning mental health crisis.
“If Gary can crack that, it would really have a multiplier effect on the impact [ReachOut] can have,” George says. “I’ve no doubt that model will be taken up by other organisations.
“I don’t want to pretend one fellowship is going to help solve [every challenge] in Australia, but I think if they are collaborative, work within their sector and across sectors, that goes a long way.”
Receiving a fellowship also affords these executives entry to a club more exclusive than the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, and the opportunities to network that come with it.
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