As head of Virgin Unite, Jean Oelwang brings together the social and business sectors as a force for good. With a wealth of commercial skills and a spell working with America's poor behind her, she's well placed to bridge the gap

Jean Oelwang wants to break down barriers. When we meet, she talks a lot about stopping people working in silos. Oelwang is chief executive of Virgin Unite, the charitable foundation part of Virgin Group. Its slogan is "turning business as usual upside down" and it quickly becomes clear what this means for Oelwang. "The scale of the problems facing the world mean they are never going to be resolved by people working in silos," she explains. "I am passionate about not putting issues in silos."

The social and charitable sectors, she suggests, tend to focus on one issue at a time and are divorced from the world of business. The
answer is more collaboration. "It's about how you work together to scale things rather than just continuing to work in silos." Her frustration—and one of her ambitions for Virgin Unite—is that the solutions to many problems are already out in the world. Some have been implemented already on a local level in small-scale projects. But most of these initiatives fail to grow because charities tend not to collect or share data or look beyond their immediate surroundings.

Oelwang's confidence in the social sector to deliver the right solutions is obvious. And it underpins her approach to charity, which, says Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company—a charity that Virgin Unite supports—makes her different from others involved in philanthropy. "Jean has created a culture where they work in partnership with charities. Everything is a partnership between equals, rather than it being about the wealthy helping the poor. We tell her what we need and she makes sure she helps us get it."

Before joining Virgin Unite, Oelwang worked in telecoms and was deployed all over the world by Cable & Wireless to launch mobile-phone operations in various markets. So she is familiar with the way business models can be fitted into local markets. The problem is that the social sector doesn't act in this way and successful smaller projects are not rolled out elsewhere.

"One of the things I noticed working in Bulgaria, Colombia or South Africa was that there were the same social issues. I saw great people on the front lines doing heroic stuff, but it became like a market of good intentions, where you do things on a small scale. People were trying to drive change but it wasn't scaling. I'd meet these incredible people and think, 'wow if you could share these ideas across countries it would be very powerful'. At the same time, the mobile-phone business was taking a basic core and scaling it very quickly. That's what got me passionate about the crossover between business and the social sector."

But blurring the boundaries between charity and business can be awkward. People prefer business to be about profit and charity about charity. This doesn't phase Oelwang: "What excites me the most is how you take the best of the business sector and the best of the social sector, and bring them together," she says.

Patrick McCall, Virgin Group's managing partner, health, wellness, space and rail, says one of Oelwang's strengths is seeing things in a new light. "Jean is a one-in-a-million person. She has incredible energy and drive, and is always looking for new ways of doing things. She also has an amazing ability to talk to anyone. She can talk as easily to doormen as to prime ministers and presidents. And she'll usually get money out of their pockets, too."

Batmanghelidjh recalls her first meeting with Oelwang, at which a troubled child Kids Company was looking after was present. "She was great with her, really compassionate and understanding." Jane Tewson, a legendary figure in the charity sector—she has been credited with creating Comic Relief, set up Pilotlight and is a Unite Trustee—concurs: "Jean is not seduced by power. She's a great team member and spends time listening and talking. She always asks questions about how she might do things better. Her passions are above all for the people Virgin Unite is working to support."

Oelwang's desire to mix the best of business and charity goes back a long way. Having started a career in telecoms, she opted to take a year out working with Vista (Volunteers in Service to America) in the US. "I wanted to save the world," she jokes now of the experience that saw her spend a year working at a homeless shelter in downtown Chicago.

"I needed to understand the issues facing the US on a local level. I landed in Neon Street with 25 kids living with us and hundreds visiting our drop-in shelter every day. The objective was to get them back into education. It was a learning experience. I got my wallet stolen on the first day. But I learnt that the reason the child stole my wallet was because he had no other choice. I realised then I was going to learn more than I was going to teach. My ambitions of changing the world blew up. After watching the same thing happen again and again with the same kids, I realised we had to start scaling up and changing at policy level. It was the first point where I saw we were working on issues in isolation."

Oelwang returned to the telecoms industry and joined Cable & Wireless in London just as the mobile-phone revolution took off. A peripatetic career launching mobile-phone companies across the world followed, taking her from Colombia to South Africa, Bulgaria to Singapore and eventually to Australia. Having seen the same social problems in many countries, the solution seemed simple.

As joint managing director of Virgin Mobile in Australia, she had access to Sir Richard Branson and decided to pitch an idea for bringing together her experiences in the social and business sectors. "I went to the board and said that I wanted to do something that was between the business and social sectors and the board mentioned Richard had been talking about a foundation. I pulled together a business plan and talked with him about it and he said, 'let's do it'."

That was six years ago. Oelwang describes Virgin Unite's remit as  "uniting people to tackle tough issues with entrepreneurial
approaches". Her desire to mix business and social aims is at the centre of the organisation. But for all its charitable work acting as a catalyst for high-minded projects, Unite also has a specific function in Virgin's business plan.

"One of the reasons Richard wanted to start the foundation is to get staff engaged," says Oelwang. "It's not a top-down approach, it's also bottom-up and everything in the middle. We did tons of focus groups across the businesses to find out what this should look like. Staff came up with the name and the logo and built it with us. That exercise shaped what we could do within the businesses."

The challenge was to place what staff do at the heart of Virgin and not have it dangling as a charitable appendage. "The financial crisis signifies what's wrong with business as usual. When we talk about turning business as usual upside down it's about how do we place it at the core of a business, so it makes sense for that business strategically. It's not just a check-in-the-box exercise. It's about it being a part of your DNA and it's something that every employee thinks, lives and breathes. You can get businesses to change. If you can get them to really put it at their core and have business as a force for good that's where we'll see the scale of change."

But is it consistent for an airline—and sponsor of a Formula 1 team—to place the facilitation of projects such as the Carbon War Room at the centre of what it does? "Virgin Atlantic has a team looking at how they can be the most sustainable airline. They are looking at how they can turn business as usual upside down within their company. People aren't going to stop flying overnight. If we can own an airline that becomes the most sustainable airline and then the airline gets involved with the Carbon War Room... The Carbon War Room was started by a group of entrepreneurs and is an independent body but we might look with them at helping scale a new [greener] fuel for the industry. It's about collaboration and how you work together to scale things rather than just continuing to work in silos."

Virgin Unite has been using all its leader's reputation and influence to bring together political figures at the highest level. Its global leadership initiatives are something Oelwang relishes. The most prominent is The Elders, an invitation-only group of senior former politicians, religious leaders and world luminaries that includes Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The group has been described by journalist and co-author of Philanthrocapitalism, Michael Green, as "freeing up blockages in international diplomacy" and has intervened in some of the world's worst trouble spots.

But Oelwang is keen to stress Virgin's role. "These initiatives are independent of Virgin. We never use Richard's voice unless it is linked to a specific issue and is targeted to a specific audience that we know will catalyse significant change," she says.

There also appears to be a desire not to overdo bureaucracy.  The operation has stayed "light and nimble", in Oelwang's own words. There are 25 permanent staff and three part-time. "Our objective is not to build a large organisation, it is to build a nimble, fast-moving one that can then pull in people when we need them." Efforts have included bringing together entrepreneurs for a series of entrepreneur schools, and getting groups of Virgin staff to form "hit squads" to tackle problems. "One of the things businesses in the Virgin Group wanted from Unite was to help them build staff and customer engagement programmes that would have impact on the front line. We've found that putting together these hit squads has worked."

Turning business as usual upside down requires everyone to take risks and Oelwang says the recession hasn't discouraged this. "We thought we would experience people getting more conservative, but we've experienced the opposite. What the recession brought back is the importance of community and working together.

"Businesses are realising that this is meaningful for them. The social sector is going to be critical to their survival. If anything we've seen growth in interest from businesses. On the other side, social sector organisations are seeing donations being pulled, and they realise they have to be more effective with their funds. We are starting to see people collaborating more and realising that they are going to have to have a slightly more entrepreneurial approach."

Matchmaking between the social and business sectors remains Oelwang's biggest task. She admits it can be tough to get both sides to respect skills and benefits the other brings. "People from business have to have humility and realise they are getting as much as they are giving, while the social sector has to realise that businesses can add benefit to what they are doing. It's all about listening."