Is this our most awarded month ever? We are celebrating three amazing champions this week with She Coders on opposite sides of the country receiving awards for their work in the tech community.
In Brisbane, Bel Lloyd, an alumni of the She Codes Plus program who has gone on to teach the most recent cohort received a Women in Digital award for Digital Marketer of the Year. This award, powered by Salesforce is focussed on “celebrating a data-driven Digital Marketer who has achieved exceptional results across any medium, including but not limited to search, paid, programmatic, EDM, content or social media completed in the Australian market during the 2022/23 Financial Year.”
Bel describes her aspirations as, “to be on the front line of transforming marketing with ML & AI for the radically evolving future”.
Since graduating from the She Codes Plus program, Bel has been very active in the community. She has been teaching and mentoring with the Brisbane cohorts, speaking at webinars and conferences like DDD Brisbane, and was recently invited to join a panel to discuss digital marketing trends at the Martech Symposium.
Congratulations Bel!
Over in Perth, we are super excited to announce that our Founder Kate Kirwin was applauded as the 2024 WA Young Australian of the Year. The celebration was held at Government House ballroom, with politicians, the Governor of Western Australia, and other notable attendees in the audience.
Kate shared, “It was so special to receive this award, and when asked what receiving it means to me my first response was that I’m excited about the platform this provides for ALL WOMEN, especially those in the STEM community. I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, with past recipients of the award for WA including Kendall Whyte and Sam Kerr of the Matildas, as well as incredible other finalists sharing the stage with me like Kate Raston, Madison Heady and Samuel Thomas”.
Read her whole Linkedin post about it here, and if you’d like to watch the moment where she was announced as the recipient – you can watch the livestream recording here.
From here Kate will go to Canberra in January for the national Australia Day awards ceremony with all the other state finalists. We are so excited to follow that journey.
And finally, to top off an incredible fortnight, our own Jo Minney received the Shining Star award in her category Advocacy, Community and Volunteering at the Women in Tech WA awards on Friday night. Jo has been an integral part of the She Codes community for many years now, from building this very website, to writing the WordPress tutorial, mentoring at countless workshops (including Perth, Brisbane, Geraldton, Karratha and Port Hedland), and Lead Mentoring the last 2 cohorts of She Codes Plus. She is an inspiration to many of us in the Perth community and we couldn’t think of a more deserving Shining Star.
Please join us in congratulating all these incredible women, and remember in Kate’s words – “it’s about women aggressively supporting other women – nominate them for awards, speak up for them in meetings, give them a reference on Linkedin – that’s how we make meaningful change.”