When your role is to persuade the wealthy to give away a portion of their riches to the poor and worthy, the hard and fast rule is never ramble.
''I could talk under wet cement to a fault,'' Kristi Mansfield says. ''I've had to learn to …'' and she brings the forefingers of her hands together, ''to be focused''. ''I need to know the values of the donor and what their passions are because I'm there to assist in their decision-making.''
To friends and family Mansfield is a philanthropy coach, advising them where to put their charity dollars. On another level she is a player in a fast-growing sector that hitched its wagon to the awakening conscience of mega rich donors of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
Her firm, Greenstone Group, advises private individuals, mainly women, and progressive foundations in Sydney, Melbourne and the US, on ways to invest in social change. She is a board member of the Australian Women Donors Network, the micro-donation project Footprints Network, and the digital story-telling project SharingStories.
She is also director of the Sydney Women's Fund whose aim is to build a culture of philanthropy among Australian businesswomen, for the benefit of women and children.
Mansfield, 38, is dynamic and passionate on the subject of private philanthropy. Despite her clientele's high net worth, she's more likely to eat sandwiches in the car than partake in a ''glamorous'' lunch.
Right now she's looking to match an involved donor to a small project based in Blacktown to help mothers affected by anxiety or depression during pregnancy and in the four years following childbirth.
It isn't only about the money - $12,600 to fund the six-month pilot - but finding the right individual or foundation that understands the need for long-term investment in mental health and perinatal care. The idea is to create a mutually beneficial ''contract'', in which the donor, for their generosity, gets to know the women whose lives they improve..
Here, at the end of the long burnished steel communal table of Sailor Thai's canteen, Mansfield sat 15 years ago for her first business lunch. Just 21 and fresh out of Charles Sturt University where she majored in public relations, she had found a job with a consumer marketing firm selling crumpets. She orders a glass of New Zealand white, perhaps a nod to her husband Jason, a Kiwi whose kitchen specialty is a mean Thai chicken curry.
''I grew up in the era of nuclear weaponry and when AIDs was first an issue and I was just deeply disturbed by it all. I was also a typical generation X-er coming from a divorced family. Mum had her own business; she stressed the importance of independence and a career. Then I went to the States [as an exchange student] at 15 and ended up, in all places, in a trailer park where very poor people lived on the outskirts of a small town in Texas.
''It was my first experience of poverty, I never before was conscious of money-lacking … They were farmers who had somehow lost their farm, lovely people, but they lived hand to mouth.
''My host sister who was my age did not have the opportunities the world offered me, of going to college without struggling. Later in life at 24 I travelled around South America and lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for a while and that crystallised my concern about the growing gap between rich and poor.''
Those formative personal encounters of poverty sparked compassion in Mansfield and fear that she could be reduced to the same fragile station in life, and it drove her to relentlessly pursue success in the corporate world.
She worked as an international marketing director for software companies and was named a finalist in Telstra's Young Business Woman of the Year awards in 2003. Once she had her MBA, next stop was vice-president of marketing.
''It was an exciting time in the IT sector and I had a very thrilling job because here I was 27, based in Singapore, travelling the world, running marketing for a fast growing start-up software company headquartered in Boston,'' she says.
''But then the company went through a few mergers and acquisitions and it lost some of its innovation and I felt lost in the organisation, like the job was no longer for me.
''So there was a day when I had just launched a software product at another press conference as the marketing director and I just felt, 'I cannot do this any more.''
Mansfield also shared this turning point in a speech at a function to launch the Indigo Express Fund, the first philanthropic sub-fund to be established by the Sydney Women's Fund.
Standing in the offices of Ernst & Young before a group of about 60 corporate and charity leaders, Mansfield described her enthusiasm for philanthropic projects targeting girls. She recalled to the audience how she had looked out from her high-rise office to the green hills of Hong Kong island on that life-changing day and had a ''spiritual awakening''.
In that ''split instant'', she decided to pack the job in and picked up the phone to apply for Swinburne University's first master's degree in philanthropy and social investment.
What she didn't reveal then is that some disparaging remarks by her boss about her gender had helped her make the decision.
She takes a sip of wine. ''I thought, 'why put all my energies here when I was going to be disrespected? Why not use my skills constructively?' I had this deep desire to do something, I didn't know quite what I was passionate about, but if I got my degree I would see where it took me.''
In Melbourne she found her purpose in more ways than one, meeting Jason Mansfield, an IT entrepreneur. They fell in love and within three months of having their first child in 2005, she started Greenstone, a company whose day had come as the generosity of Buffett, Gates and Oprah Winfrey gave philanthropy a profile in Australia. It was a quick lesson in the ''joys'' of juggling career and family.
''Jason, God love him, was pushing the pram while wondering what I was doing. It was a magnificent gift he gave me in those early days,'' she says.
Charity is something Australians associate with former sporting greats, balls and auction nights in which the sociable are offered a good time to dig deep. It's door-knocks, walkathons, telethons and koalas dangling plastic buckets on street corners. Occasionally it's celebrities cradling African babies.
Dick Smith and the Sherman family have long been the public face of philanthropy in Sydney but they are the exceptions to the rule. The wealthy are usually reluctant to talk about philanthropy, believing it to be boasting, which is why Mansfield speaks in generalities on those whom she advises. Unfortunately, diplomacy can hide the true scale of giving, or indeed the extent of parsimony among the better-off.
The Sydney Women's Fund has found donors for six projects, including a tie-dying task to assist recent arrivals from Sierra Leone; weekend respite for 20 mothers of children with disabilities, and aid to children of incarcerated parents.
Within 10 to 15 years Mansfield foresees women being the central drivers of household donations and corporate philanthropy. But women will demand more for their donations. Women want accountability, and to be involved, informed and empowered, and they want results. The quid pro quo as Mansfield sees it is women using the skills gained from the not-for-profit sector to springboard into the male-dominated world of profit and loss, correcting the gender imbalance where a mere 13 per cent of board positions at Australian Securities Exchange companies are held by women.
Mansfield personally donates to programs helping indigenous women to overcome domestic violence in the Kimberley, an area she has visited several times. It's her eventual aim to tithe 10 per cent of her household income to charitable ventures. And now that her young family has grown to three, she is hoping to imbue in them a sense of social responsibility as they grow to adolescence.
She passes on dessert to collect her two boys, Koroki and Tane, from family day care, and relieves her husband of one-year-old, Ciara. Before leaving, she relates a fable told to her by the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, with whom she once struck up a conversation at a US conference.
''There was this forest that was on fire, and all the animals left homeless by the blaze were standing on the edges of the forest wondering what they should do because the fire had a hold on the trees. A hummingbird swooped down and dipped her beak into a nearby lake and flew over the flames of the fire dropping that teardrop of water onto the fire. To and fro the hummingbird went between the lake and the fire. The other animals cried out to the hummingbird, 'you are crazy, you will never put the fire out. What are you doing?', and the hummingbird turned and replied, 'I'm doing the best I can!'.''
''I wrote to my husband back home and he sent me an inspiring message back: ''Wouldn't a million hummingbirds be just like rain?''
