Book Noah Yang for your next event

Pursue the impossible.

Profile

Noah Yang is the Founder and CEO of We Are Mobilise - a technology-driven charity that has distributed over $4 million to people facing homelessness, supported more than 1,500 people into housing, and built a 50+ partner national charity network spanning every Australian state and territory. All with a team of eight.

We Are Mobilise has deployed Australia's first direct cash transfer programs, backed by the Paul Ramsay Foundation with research from the University of Melbourne. The model applies startup thinking to one of the country's most complex social challenges - technology that turns a process that used to take weeks into same-hour delivery.

Noah started this journey at 20, heading out onto Melbourne's streets with bags of bread after a lecture at Monash University. He built Mobilise alongside a career in management consulting before leaving his job with $6,000 in the bank to go all-in. Six months later, Mobilise partnered with Nedd Brockmann for his run across Australia, and together they have since raised over $9 million across multiple national campaigns.

That combination of commercial thinking and relentless ambition has defined Noah's approach. He sits at the intersection of business and impact - building partnerships across corporate Australia, government, and philanthropy to prove that homelessness is solvable at scale.

Mobilise won the Telstra Business Award for Outstanding Growth in Victoria (2025), was the charity partner for the Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown in both 2025 and 2026, and Noah was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Social Impact (2026).

Noah is a leading voice on impact, fundraising, and innovation in the social sector. He speaks on entrepreneurial leadership, technology for social change, building from scratch, the power of direct giving, and what it takes to go all-in.

Expertise

Talking Points

Start Before You're Ready

Noah Yang founded We Are Mobilise at 20 with no funding, no business plan, and no roadmap. But rather than wait for conditions to improve, he started. What followed was 900 videos in 900 days, a nationally recognised organisation, and a technology platform that has distributed over $3 million directly to people in need. This Keynote makes the case for action as a competitive strategy: why the leaders and organisations that move before conditions are perfect are the ones who define what comes next, and why waiting for a better moment is one of the most expensive decisions a team can make.

Key Takeaways:
- A reframe of risk: why inaction carries a cost that most leaders consistently underestimate, and how to name it
- A practical decision-making framework for moving forward when evidence and resources are limited
- Tools for building momentum before proof of concept exists, drawn from one of Australia's fastest-scaling social enterprises
- The mindset shift that separates teams who drive change from teams who deliberate it

The Long Game

We Are Mobilise was unglamorous for years before anything worked. No applause, no media coverage, no visible return on the time being invested. Just a team building something the sector had never seen, trusting the work would eventually speak. Ten years later, it has. This Keynote is a practical argument for patience as a competitive advantage: what a decade of building without recognition taught Noah Yang about strategy, motivation, and the discipline of staying in the game when the scoreboard is blank. For leaders navigating the tension between short-term pressure and long-term ambition, this is a talk about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.

Key Takeaways:
- A framework for distinguishing productive persistence from misplaced stubbornness, and how to apply it at team level
- Why metric-driven cultures often work against long-term value creation, and practical steps to course-correct
- How to sustain team direction and motivation through the phases of any major ambition that do not yet show results
- A clear model for communicating long-term strategy in ways that keep people genuinely invested in outcomes that are years away

Commercial Thinking Meets Social Purpose

The best social impact does not come from good intentions. It comes from rigour. Noah Yang left management consulting to build We Are Mobilise, and brought with him tools the impact sector had been refusing to use: commercial discipline, startup logic, and a refusal to manage problems instead of solving them. What followed was Australia's first direct cash transfer programme, a technology platform that disburses funding in minutes rather than weeks, and a model that over 200 charity partners are now waiting to access. This Keynote challenges the false choice between head and heart, and shows what becomes possible when organisations stop treating purpose and performance as separate conversations.

Key Takeaways:
- A clear case for why commercial rigour and social purpose are complementary priorities, not competing ones
- Practical tools from the startup world that translate directly into innovation culture, team performance, and faster decision-making
- How to identify where your organisation is managing a problem rather than solving it, and the questions that open that conversation
- Frameworks for embedding purpose into organisational strategy in ways that produce measurable outcomes and connect to performance

Brave Over Easy

When We Are Mobilise had the option to scale what was simple and stay safe, they chose not to. They pioneered direct cash transfers when the sector called it impossible, partnered with an endurance athlete who had 3,000 Instagram followers, and pitched major philanthropic foundations on a model Australia had never tried. Noah Yang's Keynote is a practical examination of decision-making under uncertainty: the difference between genuine courage and dressed-up risk aversion, what organisations consistently get wrong about bold decisions, and why the choices that define careers and companies are almost never the comfortable ones.

Key Takeaways:
- A framework for distinguishing smart risk management from fear-based conservatism, and how to spot the difference in real time
- Why organisations consistently underinvest in the decisions that matter most, and the structural patterns that create that tendency
- The conditions under which conviction is more valuable than waiting for more data, and how to make that case internally
- Practical tools for making and advocating for harder, better decisions at every level of an organisation

Homelessness is Solvable

122,000 Australians are experiencing homelessness right now. Only 6% of them are sleeping rough. The other 94% are invisible: mothers escaping domestic violence, young people couch-surfing, families one rent payment from crisis. We Are Mobilise was built on the premise that this is a solvable problem, not a condition to be managed indefinitely, and a decade of work has produced the evidence to back that up. Noah Yang shares the data behind direct cash transfers, the technology that makes them viable at scale, and what genuine intervention looks like when you trust the people at the centre of the problem to make their own decisions. Whether your audience leads a charity or a corporate with a giving programme, this talk changes the frame.

Key Takeaways:
- A clear-eyed look at why conventional charitable giving is often less effective than assumed, grounded in randomised control trial data
- The case for direct cash transfers: what the evidence shows, what it means, and how to think about it for your own organisation's giving strategy
- A practical framework for moving from charitable relief to systemic contribution, applicable to corporate, government, and community sector audiences alike
- A new way of thinking about trust and autonomy that applies as much inside organisations as it does in social policy

Topics

Business

Motivational Speakers

Media

Video

Nedd Brockmann + Noah Yang | Australian Philanthropic Services & Philanthropy Australia

Australian Philanthropic Services had the privilege to explore the unique partnership between ultramarathon runner Nedd Brockmann, and Founder & CEO of We Are Mobilise, Noah Yang.