How we work 2026

We have a Giving Back page on this site now. That is new. The giving itself is not, Letecia and I have been doing this quietly since the business was a few years old. We have just never put it on the website before. This is a short note on why we have, and what sits behind the choices.

The shape of the work matches

I have been an MSP guy for a long time. The thing I have come back to over and over is that small businesses are how most people get a chance at a life they have chosen. Without one, you work for someone else on their terms. With one, you decide what you do, who you do it with, and what good work looks like to you. That is the work Agile IT does for our clients here, and it is the same shape of work the organisations we support do for people in much harder situations than ours.

Opportunity International Australia gives families, mostly women, mostly in India and Indonesia, the capital to start or grow a small business. A few hundred dollars buys a sewing machine, a few buffaloes, bulk goods to resell at a market. The loan is repaid, and the same money helps the next family. It is the most efficient way I have ever seen to convert a donation into a measurable change in someone’s life.

Fusion Mornington Peninsula does a different kind of foundational work: catching young people on our doorstep before they fall through. Forty years of supported accommodation for homeless youth out of the old Mt Martha barracks, plus the schools and mentoring work that prevents homelessness in the first place. Their current project, Fusion The Village, is a $3 million purpose-built housing village for young women and families fleeing domestic violence, breaking ground next year. It is the kind of community-led capital project that only happens if a lot of local businesses say yes.

How we pick

Three things make the cut for us.

One: the work has to be the right shape. Helping small enterprises start, helping people stabilise enough to do their own work, building the practical scaffolding around an early-life crisis. That is the connecting thread.

Two: a mix of local and global. Local because the Peninsula is our home and we want to keep it a place that supports its own. Global because the maths of small loans overseas is so favourable that a relatively small amount of money goes a long way.

Three: it has to survive a long look at how the money is used. Both organisations have decades of track record, audited accounts, and the kind of programme structure that means our contribution genuinely arrives at a family or a young person, not at a marketing campaign. The 98% repayment rate at Opportunity is one of the cleanest examples I know of an organisation built to scale a good idea.

Consistent, not loud

We do not run an annual campaign. We do not put a percentage on a tin and call it a marketing line. Giving has just been a quiet item in the way the business is run, year after year. That has been deliberate. A multi-year, predictable contribution is more useful to an organisation than a one-off splash, and easier for us to fund as part of normal operations.

The reason we have now published a page is not because we want credit for it. It is because plenty of small business owners I talk to wonder how to make this part of how they run, and seeing it laid out somewhere may help them get started. Pick one organisation, or two. Pick the ones whose work feels related to your own. Stay with them. That is the whole methodology.

If your business is doing well, give. Pick one or two organisations whose work resembles yours in shape. Stay with them. That is how giving becomes consistent, and how it actually adds up over years.

What you might do with this

If you are running a small business and weighing up whether to take this seriously, the answer is yes, and earlier than you think you should. The amount that matters is small. The discipline of doing it every year is what compounds.

If you are looking at our Giving Back page and wondering whether either of the organisations there might suit your business, the links are opportunity.org.au and morningtonpeninsula.fusion.org.au. Tell them we sent you, or do not. The money and the time matter more than the credit.

, Linden Jackson
Founder and Managing Director, Agile IT