LEADERSHIP
At Canva we’ re only 1 % of the way there
Melanie Perkins Co-founder and CEO Canva
– to the Canva Foundation, directing it toward poverty alleviation. A US $ 10m programme of direct cash transfers to rural households in Malawi was among the first major disbursements. More than 250,000 nonprofits now access Canva’ s premium platform for free. The thinking behind it was formed long before any announcement. Perkins has spoken of a trip to India in which she encountered a man working every available hour for less than a dollar a day.“ Even without Canva,” she said,“ just if I was in a normal job, I’ d earn many times that.” The Canva Foundation has since made her Australia’ s second most generous philanthropist.“ It has never felt like our money,” she wrote at the time.“ We’ ve always felt that we’ re purely custodians of it. If it were all about building wealth, it would be the most boring thing I could imagine.” Eyeing the future, Perkins has stated that Canva is entering a new era, leveraging AI and new technologies to evolve into a comprehensive creative operating system for individuals and major enterprises – and targeting one billion monthly active users while doing so. Writing about this journey, she says:“ We often say internally at Canva that we’ re only 1 % of the way there – and it’ s certainly never been truer than it is today, as we dream bigger dreams.”
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