This post has been sitting in my drafts for four years. I knew there was something I wanted to say, but every time I returned to it, it sounded like a grievance. So back into drafts it went.
Now I know what I was trying to say.
When Bob Hawke died in 2019, the four of us who had received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award wanted to do something small and heartfelt. We wanted to make a joint statement about what the award had meant to us. Each of us had a story to tell about meeting Bob, the contribution that led to the award and what came afterwards.
Landcare Australia, which managed the award, chose another approach to its public tribute. I was disappointed. At the time, I saw it largely through the lens of that disappointment.
Four years of sitting in drafts, and some completely unrelated conversations, have helped me see the much bigger question.
What happens after we give people awards?
I was the inaugural recipient of the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. At that time it was an individual award carrying a $50,000 prize. The award has changed considerably since then. It is now worth $30,000 and can be awarded to an individual, community-led group or eligible not-for-profit organisation.
But something in the criteria remains fascinating to me.
Recipients are recognised for qualities that include inspiring others, mentoring people, encouraging action, sharing knowledge and supporting communities.
In other words, the award seeks people who build capacity in other people. But who creates the opportunities for them to build that capacity together?
Australia has hundreds of awards recognising people for their contribution, knowledge, leadership and experience. We find them. We assess them. We celebrate them. We put them on stages, take photographs and tell their stories. Then, quite often, we send them home. The following year, we may come back and ask them to promote the next round of awards.
This is a lost opportunity.
The Bob Hawke Landcare Award records its alumni, with recipients going back to the inaugural award in 2012. That recognition has value, but an alumni list is not an alumni network. If an active network exists that brings Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together to learn from each other, I have never been invited to be part of it.
Belltrees Public School showed me what is possible. The small rural school, with around 20 students, organised a regenerative agriculture day that brought former Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together. We heard from each other, asked questions and exchanged ideas. I attended, and it was brilliant. A little school had recognised the value of connecting people with different knowledge and experience and created the opportunity for us to learn from each other.
The Banksia Foundation also experimented with this idea. Award recipients were brought together to visit the businesses and organisations of category winners, see what they were doing and learn directly from them. I attended one of those visits and it was brilliant too.
Both experiences showed me the difference between recognising knowledge and connecting knowledge. You can put someone’s name on an alumni page, or you can create opportunities for people with different knowledge and experience to learn from each other.
For years I worked alongside people in agriculture who gave organisations their time, credibility, relationships, lived experience and knowledge. They spoke at events, sat on panels, joined committees, opened their farms, told their stories and helped organisations demonstrate what was possible.
Many of them gave enormously.
Too often, I watched the infrastructure around them benefit from all that human capacity without creating the same opportunities for those people to benefit from one another.
We are very good at identifying individual achievement. We are less good at asking what becomes possible when we connect the knowledge and experience of the people we have recognised.
Interestingly, this was part of what I was talking about when I received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. I wanted to “find innovators, early adopters and people doing extraordinary things and help connect and amplify what they knew.”
Two years later, a Landcare publication described me as “a connector” and quoted me saying I was “obsessed with finding and nurturing talent, and supporting it”.
So apparently I have been banging on about this for quite some time.
What I did not have then was the question I have now.
Is the community serving the infrastructure around it, or is the infrastructure serving the community?
Over the past few months I have been conducting a completely different piece of research, interviewing people who have made significant commitments to their communities. Those conversations finally gave me the language for this four-year-old draft.
People bring enormous assets into organisations, programs, campaigns and movements. They bring knowledge, relationships, credibility, experience, energy and trust. Organisations are often very good at mobilising those assets.
The more interesting question is what they build around the people who provided them.
Do those people leave with stronger relationships? Do they have access to the knowledge of others who have travelled similar paths? Can they learn from each other? Are they introduced to people who could extend what they are already doing? Does the organisation ask them what would make the relationship valuable to them? Does the collective capacity become greater because those people were brought together?
That brings me back to awards.
Imagine if part of running an award program was asking recipients a year later: What would be valuable to you now?
Perhaps they want nothing further from it. That’s fine. But perhaps they would value meeting other recipients. Perhaps somebody who won ten years ago has knowledge that could transform what a new recipient is trying to achieve. Perhaps an experienced recipient could mentor somebody emerging in the same field. Perhaps two people working on opposite sides of the country are tackling versions of the same problem.
Perhaps the most valuable thing the organisation could provide is simply the introduction.
This does not require another glossy program. It requires seeing the award differently.
The award ceremony recognises what somebody has already contributed. The alumni community asks what might become possible next.
There is another question here too. We invest considerable resources in finding, judging and celebrating award recipients. Awards can involve substantial events, sponsors, communications, judging processes and hundreds of guests.
What proportion of that investment goes into connecting recipients after the event?
I do not know the economics of the Landcare Awards, and I am not suggesting what that answer should be. But it is a question worth asking across the awards sector, particularly when some of the most valuable connections may require little more than bringing people together.
Belltrees Public School managed it with around 20 students.
And I now understand why my original experience with the Bob Hawke Landcare Award bothered me enough for this post to sit unfinished for four years. It was never simply about a statement after Bob Hawke died. It was about the difference between recognising human capacity and building it.
Landcare itself grew from people connecting knowledge, experience and effort. Farmers, conservationists, neighbours and volunteers discovered they could achieve more together than they could separately.
It moved people from “I to We”.
An award bearing Bob Hawke’s name has an opportunity to continue that tradition. So do thousands of other awards.
We spend considerable time and resources identifying people whose experience and contribution we believe are worth recognising.
Perhaps the next question should be: What are we going to do with all that human capacity now that we have found it?