TALKABOUT BRIGHT IDEAS DR FEELGOOD Disease, hunger, genetic testing, technology and education are the drivers fuelling one man’s need to give back. WORDS DEBORAH TARRANT PHOTOGRAPHY QUENTIN JONES “WE CAME TO THIS COUNTRY with nothing. The government gave $200 to a young family to make a new start.” Dr Sam Prince is sitting in an office high above Sydney’s glittering Circular Quay, recapping his career. The son of smart, hard-working Sri Lankan migrants became a successful entrepreneur while still at university, then a medical doctor, an aid worker and a philanthropist with a strong bent for building purpose into his for-profit ventures. The 31-year-old has a diligent crew of about 200, who tend to the central concerns of Zambrero, a fresh Mexican food franchise group now with 75 outlets in Australia, and operations in New Zealand and Thailand. On their agenda as well is Mejico, an establishment with tortillas and tequilas, which is giving nearby Jamie’s Italian restaurant a run for its well-suited money. The HQ is also the Sydney base for One Disease, an aid organisation that Prince founded in 2010. Its ambitious aim is to eliminate, within five years, the skin condition of crusted scabies from Indigenous communities in East Arnhem Land. Another of Prince’s humanitarian initiatives is Plate4Plate – for every meal sold by Zambrero, one is donated to help alleviate worldwide hunger. This is run through a distribution partner, Stop Hunger Now, and provides meal packaging in developing nations from Afghanistan to Zambia. Zambrero has donated some four million meals so far. Coming 108 Q A N TA S F E BRUA RY 201 5 soon is a biotech business, Life Letters, which promises to make genetic testing widely and responsibly available to the community. “Just spit in a tube,” suggests its website. A rock-star board has been assembled for the venture, with members including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Brian Schmidt, medical research pioneer Professor Ian Frazer and ethicist Dr Simon Longstaff, among others. Prince is not quite ready to talk about it, but is so enthused he almost can’t help himself. He thinks his timing is good. “I’m lucky to be a doctor in the genetic revolution.” Prince may be the sum of all these parts, but as he points out, to make sense of his story, you need the story before. His parents, Thilaka and Sena, were Sri Lankan village kids whose lives turned on a free education policy introduced by the forward-thinking Dr CWW Kannangara in 1944. While their schools had no walls and Thalika worked in the paddy fields to help her family, with this opportunity and with the help of university scholarships, she amassed five degrees in the 1970s, all with an economic bent. Education was their great enabler. Sam, born in Scotland where his mother completed her PhD, was brought to Australia in 1986 at the age of three. His parents soon had good jobs in the public sector in Canberra – his mother with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and his father at the CSIRO. Prince was 21 and working part-time as a chef in a Mexican restaurant to pay his way through Monash University when he saw a gap in the market for healthy fresh Mexican food. He started Zambrero in Braddon, in the ACT, where he’d grown up, with $10,000. The first franchised restaurant opened in neighbouring Civic within two years. The chain grew slowly as Prince practised medicine in hospitals in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. He also participated in aid work in Sri Lanka. “I went with the reckless condescension that my people needed saving,” he recalls. “I learned that aid work is a full-body-contact sport. You have to be completely devoid of agendas, religious or political. You can sway people’s views because they are desperate.” Spurred by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s statements on technology being the determinant for children’s progress from primary to secondary education in developing countries, Prince set up 15 technology education centres in the Asia-Pacific through his not-for-profit Emagine foundation. These have since been fully integrated into schools and Emagine no longer operates. “I’m an Australian and it seemed fairly hollow to make money and be prosperous in this country and then give money to another country when people [here] are still dealing with some very difficult issues.” That’s where One Disease came in, inspired by his mentor, Professor Frank Bowden, on the One Disease board and now ACT Health’s chief administrator, who directed the program to eradicate sexually transmitted donovanosis from Australia. The thinking is that you have to not only treat patients in an epidemic, but also their contacts. “We’re responsible for creating Australia’s first disease registry for crusted scabies, to close down the epidemic.” Prince’s profit-with-purpose notions had unlikely beginnings. At 23, he started writing a novel about a reconstructed big-city lawyer who ran a cafe that gave some of its profits to aid work. The fictional lawyer went on to run a hugely successful business as a result. “Customers liked to be connected as global citizens, it’s a magnet for staff members. I was giving wings to my imagination, trying to build purpose into the future. A couple of years later, I thought ‘we can do this!’” Prince now sees the motivating purpose as part of his disparate organisations’ DNA. It’s not unusual for people who volunteer to end up on the payroll. “We look for people who believe in what we believe in – who understand the difference between basic human rights and responsibilities, what a government or community should uphold, and that if you go too far, you disempower people.” Social impact is a common theme for the new breed of entrepreneur, but Prince is reluctant to be cast as a generational spokesperson. “I’ve never felt my age. Young guys should be allowed to be young rather than bear the burden of the world’s problems, but it’s important to be authentic. I’m an extension of my story and my parents’ story. There was a lot of kindness bestowed by that policymaker who enabled my mum to have an education. She grabbed it with two hands and passed that baton of kindness to me and now I have to decide what to do with it next. What legacy will I leave?” A “It’s important to be authentic” – Dr Sam Prince