Last year, President’s Prize winner Lydia Sia CA was recognised for her work within the accounting and legal communities, her involvement with Harvard Business School (HBS) Online and her dedicated volunteering efforts for a charitable organisation focused on supporting young people facing trauma.

The prize is awarded annually to a CA ANZ member under the age of 35, to recognise an outstanding commitment to the professional body, the profession and the community.

Sia originally trained as a chartered accountant, working for both EY and KPMG in tax and audit before moving to the Corporations team at Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). She now works as a lawyer in private practice, helping clients prepare to list on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Seeking out new experiences

Sia attributes her varied career path to a strong sense of curiosity and a love of both words and numbers.

“When I started at university, I really just wanted to know about the world and how it functions. I felt that studying commerce and law would give me a good foundation to understand a lot of the things that I was reading in the newspaper, but not quite fully getting,” she says.

It is that inherent need to learn and explore that led her to complete the Leading with Finance course through HBS Online prior to the global pandemic.

While it wasn’t ideal timing, with lockdowns making in-person catch-ups impossible, it gave Sia the drive to organise online events with alumni, culminating with her leading the Melbourne Chapter of the HBS Online Community, which she says was a key turning point in her career.

“I think when you step outside your comfort zone, you meet people who can give you different perspectives – and by just being able to be in the same room with them, you learn a lot,” she says.

Giving back

All of those learnings have combined to give Sia a perspective on life that means she wants to contribute to the broader community.

“I find that the conversations come a lot easier when you’re just following your passions. You connect with people naturally in that way,” she says.

Through her involvement with HBS Online, Sia co-led the Team Australia Community Challenge proposal that won the first Community Challenge Pitch Competition in 2023.

HBS Online teams from across the world competed to come up with a proposal for an African not-for-profit, Bantwana World Education Initiative, which helps families and children affected by HIV/Aids. The challenge was to help the organisation become self-sustaining and provide opportunities for the people that they serve to better their lives.

“Our proposal was to create a social enterprise in the form of a waste-management business, harnessing technology (that is currently in the commercial testing stage) to convert green household waste to a liquid fertiliser. This technology breaks down household waste, like food scraps such as orange and banana peels, into liquid fertiliser,” says Sia.

“By selling the fertiliser, with all proceeds going to Bantwana World Education, the funds would then support financial literacy programs for young women affected by HIV/AIDS.”

The technology is now being tested in Australia, with a large food manufacturer agreeing to provide food scraps for 12 months to determine its feasibility.

Sia admits it is an ambitious project, but having the skills to run the numbers in the projections for HBS Online set the Australian team apart.

“I really do attribute that to having a background in chartered accounting and being able to explain the numbers, to explain why we think it's a feasible idea, why this idea can become a reality. It's very helpful to have those skills,” she says.

Closer to home

Putting her skills to use outside of work, Sia is also a volunteer board member for Wolfmark, a charitable organisation focused on helping children and families dealing with trauma.

“I work with a great team of people and some of them have had some really interesting backgrounds in social work and mental health. I am very passionate about mental health, and so it is a very special group to be involved with,” she says.

“We are also looking to become formally incorporated and register with the ACNC [Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission], so my next job is to organise ourselves so we can achieve that.”