In our latest conversation, we sat down with Mark Dombkins, the inspiring founder of Forever Projects and a high school maths teacher by trade.
From his early career in education to his transformative years in Tanzania, Mark’s journey is one of resilience, compassion, and a commitment to making a lasting impact. He shares his experiences of juggling family life, teaching, and leading a non-profit that’s empowering women and children across Tanzania.
Let’s start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what you’re currently up to?
I’m actually a high school maths teacher by trade! I studied Mathematics and Finance, then did a Diploma of Education and began teaching in high schools in Western Sydney & Wollongong.
In 2010, after I’d been teaching for about 7 years, my wife Anna and I moved our young family to Tanzania in East Africa. We had two kids aged 4 and 1 at the time, and we were living and working at an International School on the southern slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro.
We’d always felt strongly about opening up our home to children without hope of a family of their own. So during our years in Tanzania, we fostered and eventually adopted three more beautiful kids.
Like all adoptive parents, we asked ourselves the question “What would need to have changed in our kids’ biological mother’s story for them to have never been abandoned in the first place?” That question ultimately led us to launch Forever Projects as a non-profit in 2015 after we’d moved back to Australia.
Our mission is to invest in the power of women to create lasting change for their families. The Forever Projects community raises funds for locally-led Tanzanian teams to deliver programs that move this mission forward.
After a few years of growing Forever Projects as a side hustle while still teaching full-time, in 2020 I reduced my teaching load to part-time and stepped into a part-time paid role with FP.
We’ve just passed $2M sent to Tanzania since we began, empowering 1,750 women and 2,250 children across 6 cities! That’s a staggering number of children who didn’t need to be abandoned, remain malnourished, or needlessly lose their lives because of poverty.
We’re effectively an early-stage startup, so I still work 50/50 on Forever Projects / Maths teaching to keep the burn rate low and pay the family bills!
We’d love to know what a typical day is like for you. Could you describe a recent workday?
We have six kids aged between 10 and 18 and so to be a present father (and for my wife Anna and I to protect time for ourselves too!) I need to be laser-focused on what I’m saying yes and no to.
I’m up at 5am to do exercise for an hour, usually a hike or trail run in the gorgeous Illawarra escarpment. For the first 30 minutes or so, I have no inputs like music or podcasts, and I find that protecting that time of silence and solitude while moving in nature is the foundation of my day.
So much of my best creative and strategic thinking happens here when I trust my subconscious and quieted mind to surface and solve deep problems. When solutions and ideas pop up, I quickly open Trello, add a card, then get moving again without the anxiety of losing the idea of keeping too many open loops in my mind. Credit to Cal Newport for sharing great tips like this on his ‘Deep Questions’ podcast!
Back home for family breakfast at 7am – the one meal of the day we’re all 100% there for! Our ‘Hopes and Dreams’ family ritual is to go around the table and each briefly share what’s happening in our day so we’re in sync.
My work day starts by 730am, where I’m either working on Forever Projects (remote) or teaching maths classes (school is 3 mins from my house). Typically by 4pm there’s some combination of kids’ afternoon activities Anna and I are juggling, so I really need to make those 8-9 work hours count.
Having two part-time roles makes this challenging, constantly switching contexts between genres & projects. I recently read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and have found his philosophy and practical suggestions have really helped optimise these hours and reduce the overwhelm I’ve felt previously. Rituals like time-blocking, batching related tasks, and pre-scheduling time on the calendar for recurring projects have been incredibly helpful.
A 100% remote and flexible team at Forever Projects also allows me to avoid work creeping into family time. Eg weekly 1:1s and team calls can be done in the car during the afternoon while waiting for my kids at their Monday run club and Wednesday piano lesson!
Once the afternoon’s activities wrap up we enjoy dinner and relax before getting to bed at around 10pm.
Overall, my effectiveness as a leader day to day relies heavily on trusting the systems, routines, and rituals we’ve set up. By reducing daily decision fatigue, I can devote my energy to the people and projects that matter most.
Can you define work-life balance for yourself and share with us your approach in maintaining it?
I think the key is to ensure you’re investing in a diverse identity and embracing a range of roles in life, avoiding going all-in on any one of them e.g. working too much. This is especially important as a founder, where so much of our identity is naturally tied to the startups we’re leading.
Practically, this means establishing and maintaining firm boundaries that help me invest the right amount of time in each of those roles in my life. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, every action we take is a vote for a particular identity.
So spending lots of time with my kids in the afternoon is a vote for an identity as a present parent. Saying no to the good (but not great) opportunities in my role at Forever Projects is a vote for my identity as an efficient and effective founder.
Change is constant, and it’s essential for growth. Have you made any lifestyle changes in the past year to improve your work-life balance?
With a big family and two very different part-time roles, getting the balance right sometimes feels like walking a tightrope made of fishing line! I’ve recently done some work with an executive coach (shout out to Hannah Yan Field, you’re amazing!) and as part of that, have identified the saboteur voices in my head getting in the way of achieving that balance.
This self-awareness has helped me better anticipate and mitigate decisions that aren’t aligned with my life and work objectives. An example of this is bringing awareness to my tendency to please people. By setting more realistic expectations for them and myself on what’s reasonable and possible, I can deliver my unique value across roles in a sustainable way. Feels very freeing!
We’re always on the lookout for new resources! Can you recommend any books, podcasts, or newsletters that have helped you in your journey towards balance?
Hannah shared an amazing podcast with me on ‘Mastering Change’ by Brad Stulberg and I’ve listened to it at least two times. Brad acknowledges that to be great at something, you must care deeply and go all-in, but you just can’t do it all the time. It’s super hard to pull yourself away from work you care about, right?!
Especially when (1) you’re experiencing flow on an exciting project, or (2) your startup is on fire and rest doesn’t feel like an option! In both cases though, as in investment in your longer-term diversified identity, Brad suggests you honour your boundaries, stop working, and don’t compromise on time in other areas of your life e.g. people, exercise, play etc. At the moment it feels counterintuitive and inefficient to switch roles, but longer term, you’re more holistically healthy and much less likely to burnout.
That diversity also means when inevitably you’re not receiving affirmation in at least one of those role (eg we didn’t meet our most recent fundraising goals due in part to the economic downturn) you still have plenty of other areas of life that bring you joy (eg I’ve been getting back into running and recently reached 10km, which felt great!)
Before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom or insights on work, life, or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?
The advice I’d give is the same I’m trying to give myself: have some self-compassion! Finding balance is hard, and we’re all doing our best, making it up as we go, iterating when change inevitably happens.
The other advice I’d give is to try and embrace the tension between loving people and projects dearly, but holding them lightly (another lesson from Hannah!) I loved Jerry Seinfeld’s advice at a recent graduation in advising young people who are embarking on a life as changemakers:
“All of you here, without question, are the best of the best. Just don’t lose your humour. It’s not an accessory. It’s your Stanley Cup water bottle on the brutal, long hike of life,”
