ix months into the job, the chief executive of one of WA’s longest running social enterprises is already re-imagining what the place could be.
The WASEC team sat down at Be Free, Perth City Farm’s on-site café, and witnessed Megan MacNeill light up describing her vision to turn the junk yard out the back into an urban garden bar, explain why her 90-person GIN (Grow, Inspire, Nurture) club has a strict no-business-cards rule, and passionately argue the case for pickling.
MacNeill leads with personality, and a genuine delight in being exactly where she is.
“I love working at the Farm. It’s not a struggle to get here on a Monday. I’ve never had a day where I’m going, ‘I’ve got to go in there.'”
Founded in 1994, Perth City Farm is a non-profit community environmental centre in East Perth. Open six days a week, it runs everything from a volunteer-led market garden and plant nursery to weekly Saturday farmers markets, a recycling station, community events and education programs, corporate volunteer days, all on a patch of urban land backing onto a train station, surrounded by carparks and high rises.
Walk through the gate at Perth City Farm, she says, and something shifts in others, too.
“It is an equaliser. You can have everyone from the janitor to the CEO of a massive company walk through, and the hierarchy just floats away,” she said.
“Someone’s got dirt on their hands from the worm farm sitting next to someone who’s just come from a meeting on St George’s Terrace and it just feels normal.”
MacNeill herself used to be one of those corporates. Her previous organisation turned over 40 times what Perth City Farm does. But success means something different to her now.
A key challenge is that not enough people know this place exists. Despite decades of history, Perth City Farm remains what MacNeill calls the city’s best kept secret.
“If you know City Farm, you know City Farm. But I’ll have conversations with people and they’ll say, ‘Oh, is that place still there?’ or ‘I went to a wedding there 10 years ago.’ People might know one part of it, but not many people know there’s venue hire, a community garden, a market, a café.”
Her answer is to build relationships with people who have influence – not just for awareness, but as a way of future-proofing the place she clearly loves.
“I need people with influence to be supporters of Perth City Farm should anything ever threaten it. Unfortunately, a handful of volunteers trying to protest grassroots wouldn’t have the same impact as having one person in the right place.”
MacNeill is clear-eyed about what she inherited, being a business that hasn’t quite kept up with its own growth.
“The business has been built layer by layer as it’s got bigger, it has grown in directions that perhaps weren’t considered right back at the start. So, you’ve got people falling out of a system that doesn’t quite support the magnitude of it. Lack of systems, lack of resources, time, money… that’s the biggest challenge. Which I think is true for any charity or social enterprise.”
Perth City Farm gives a lot.
Last financial year around 350 events were held at the Farm, with roughly 80 per cent of the community-facing ones free to attend.
In return it receives volunteers, skilled contributors, and partnerships with organisations that share its values, like Circular Economy WA and WA Climate Writers, which now calls the Farm home under a venue hire partnership.
“Perth City Farm is perfectly situated to be Perth’s primary sustainability hub. And we are starting to see this happen as other sustainability focused initiatives, organisations and businesses are starting to put down roots here for their gatherings.”
That relationship-first philosophy spills into MacNeill’s personal life too. For several years she has run an informal GIN (Grown Inspire Nurture) club – now 90 women strong – built entirely on conversation rather than commerce.
“No business cards allowed. It’s relationship-led. It brings opportunities, because it’s unofficial – it’s GIN.”
Which brings us to money. Something MacNeill thinks could help the Farm is a tougher approach to generosity – something she said many social enterprise leaders with a strong sense of empathy quietly struggle with.
“I used to spend so much time doing things for free because it didn’t feel chargeable – it didn’t take me very long, so I just didn’t charge. Whereas here, this is not me. It’s not personal. So I can say: an hour from Perth City Farm costs you this.”
Her biggest vision for the Farm’s future is an off-farm commercial arm that generates income without touching what makes the place special. High on the list is an ESG consultancy, built around the Farm’s own lived experience as a sustainable, community-led organisation.
“We’ve been baselined here. That’s essentially the product I want to package and sell to small and medium businesses -particularly those that aren’t yet required to do compulsory ESG reporting but will be feeding into larger companies that do.”
There’s plenty of fun in the pipeline too. On 11 July, Perth City Farm will host a Winter Ceilidh – a traditional Scottish dance night featuring the Metro Pipe Band and internationally touring ceilidh band Gallus.
And longer term, there’s that garden bar idea she’s had since day one.