Evolve Lighthouse
Creating the disability employment models of the future.
Evolve Lighthouse is a job creation strategy.
Whitebox is partnering with a small number of ambitious disability enterprises to acquire established commercial businesses and transform them into inclusive businesses that create new jobs for people with mild intellectual disability
Rather than starting new social enterprises from scratch, Evolve Lighthouse uses the commercial strength, assets and experience already sitting within disability enterprises to buy good businesses with the potential to become strong job generators.
Expressions of interest for Evolve Lighthouse are now open.
The opportunity
Most transformation efforts focus on strengthening the disability enterprise itself. Lighthouse takes a different approach: instead of changing what’s already there, it starts with the workplace we want to create and works backwards.
Find a good business. Acquire it. Transform it. Create more jobs for the people who need them.
Connecting the pieces
Evolve Lighthouse connects five pieces to create a new model for disability employment. Together, these pieces form the basis of a new model and way of doing things for creating more inclusive employment opportunities.
Stronger businesses
There are established businesses with the commercial strength, assets and potential to create sustainable jobs. Lighthouse looks for industries and businesses that can provide the foundation for new employment opportunities.
A highly inclusive model
Lighthouse is designed around award wages, high workforce integration, skills development, progression and opportunities to transition into other employment.
An underserved cohort
Many people with disability, including people with mild intellectual disability, have high capacity for work but fall between existing employment models. They may need more support than mainstream employment typically provides, yet want more opportunity, development and progression than traditional supported employment workplaces offer.
Disability enterprise expertise
Disability enterprises bring experience in running businesses and delivering high-quality disability support, providing an important foundation for the model.
Transformation Support
Whitebox brings expertise in disability and social enterprise, employment supports, mergers and acquisitions and strategic transformation to help turn the model into practice.
Who Evolve Lighthouse is for
Lighthouse is designed for ambitious disability enterprises with the commercial capacity and leadership appetite to make acquisition a significant part of their growth and employment strategy.
You may be a good fit if you have:
- A genuine ambition to create better and more varied jobs for people with intellectual disability
- Strong CEO and Board commitment to transformation
- The commercial scale and organisational capability to take on an acquisition
- A strong balance sheet, access to capital or capacity to borrow
- Comfort with commercial risk, investment and growth
- Values aligned with developing people’s skills, earning potential and opportunities
What makes a good Lighthouse opportunity?
Commercial potential
- Sustainable revenue and customer base
- Strong or improvable margins
- Growth potential
- Operationally sound
- Appropriate acquisition price
- Strategic fit
Employment potential
- Significant number of suitable roles
- Roles that can be redesigned or created
- Opportunities to build skills
- Potential for progression and higher earnings
- Integrated, inclusive workforce
- Sustainable employment with the right supports
Ready to express your interest?
Expressions of interest for Evolve Lighthouse are now open.
This round will partner with up to six disability enterprises over three years. Organisations will receive expert strategic advisory support (averaging 300 days per organisation), alongside access to business brokers and a granting pool of up to $1.7 million, allocated according to individual organisational needs and opportunities.
Together, participating organisations are expected to help create more than 750 new jobs for people with disability over five years, while demonstrating how commercial growth and inclusive employment can work hand in hand to inspire other organisations, investors and funders.
If your organisation has the ambition, capability and appetite to explore this new approach to disability employment, we’d like to hear from you.
Find out more about Evolve Lighthouse, including what we’re looking for in participating organisations and potential acquisition opportunities.
Complete the EOI form to tell us about your organisation and your interest in participating.
Why Whitebox?
Transformation takes more than a strategy.
Whitebox is home to the nation’s leading experts on disability enterprise. Evolve Lighthouse builds on two years of Evolve Pilot, where we worked hands-on with disability enterprises through the commercial, social and organisational changes required to create better employment outcomes.
That experience has reinforced something important: transformation does not happen through strategy alone. Organisations need practical capability alongside them to test, implement and embed change.
Whitebox brings that transformation experience together with commercial, business-building and advisory capability. The role is not simply to recommend an acquisition, but to work alongside the organisation from strategy and due diligence through to integration, transformation and delivery.
Our approach in action
Whitebox has already done this kind of work. We supported Intelife through the acquisition of Brightwater’s Linen Division, a commercial laundry business that has operated in Western Australia for more than 25 years.
It brought together commercial growth, disability employment expertise and transformation, exactly the kind of work Lighthouse is designed to help more disability enterprises take on.
The bigger ambition
Whitebox’s goal is simple: a job for anyone who wants one.
We use different levers to get there, from building and running jobs-focused social enterprises, to testing new ideas and running programs to inform systems change.
Evolve Lighthouse is a new lever to help us get there sooner.
By working with disability enterprises to use their existing capital and commercial capability to acquire and transform businesses, we can create new jobs for people who are too often overlooked in the mainstream labour market.
The ambition is not simply to transform disability enterprises. It is to create more jobs, faster, for the people who need them.
Read our latest insights
Explore what we’re learning about what works in jobs-focused employment and disability enterprise, from sector evaluations to systems-change research.
Need advisory support?
From social enterprise strategy and growth to disability enterprise transformation, our team brings hands-on experience to help you navigate change.