Seven women have been named winners across six categories as part of the 2022 Canberra Women in Business Awards.
The awards were announced at a gala event at QT Canberra on Thursday night. The event was back in person this year, following a virtual event in 2021 due to COVID restrictions.
Canberra Women in Business president Sheena Ireland said it was wonderful to fill the ballroom with outstanding women in business and enjoy a night together celebrating their achievements.
"Often women don't put themselves first and don't celebrate their successes, that's what so important about our gala awards, it provides that opportunity," she said.
"Judging this year was an extremely tough task for our judging panel with so many high-calibre applications.
"I'm told it was an extremely tough decision across the categories, with point scores very close at the final count.
"Looking at the finalists across the six categories, the winner could have been awarded to any of our finalists, as they're all delivering such an impact in our business community and community generally."
ACT business minister Tara Cheyne congratulated all the finalists and winners.
"These awards are a powerful reminder of the successes that women in business can achieve in Canberra," she said.
"It's equally inspiring to see such a strong community of women supporting one another in business and their ambitions."
The 2022 award winners are:
Business Woman of the Year
Kate Freeman, The Healthy Eating Group
Young Business Woman of the Year
Rae Knopik, GREN and the CBR Gals Network
Indigenous Business Woman of the Year
Dixie Crawford, Nganya
Small Business Woman of the Year
Amanda Snashall, Digital Design Partners
Innovation Business Woman of the Year
Chaturica Athukorala, Aurabox
Social Impact Business Woman of the Year
Jo Farrell, Kane Constructions and Build Like a Girl
Kristine Hewett, Adamas Nexus
The following profiles and pictures of the winners have been supplied by Canberra Women in Business as organiser of the awards.
BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Kate Freeman, The Healthy Eating Group
Kate is the founder and chief executive of the Healthy Eating Group. Founded in 2010, it's now Canberra's largest nutrition and dietetics practice.
The Healthy Eating Group is comprised of the Healthy Eating Hub and the Healthy Eating Clinic.
The Healthy Eating Hub is an online habit-building platform aiming to teach long-term, sustainable nutrition through incremental learning and support. It provides ongoing, high-value nutrition and food resources at its members' fingertips.
The Healthy Eating Clinic is a face-to-face and virtual dietetic clinic that conducts consultations with clients all over Australia to provide individualised nutrition therapy from a dietitian.
Kate is a registered nutritionist with the Nutrition Society of Australia and has over 15 years' of experience in the field.
In 2020, she started the Daily Dollop podcast, which has achieved more than 140,000 downloads and hit number three on the Australian podcast charts in the nutrition category.
YOUNG BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Rae Knopik, GREN and the CBR Gals Network
Rae Knopik is a feminist, speaker, author, honours graduate of the University of Florida, and chief executive of GREN, a Canberra-based environmental firm focused on providing hyper-local merchandising solutions to businesses across the world.
At GREN, the team takes cotton from landfills, turn it into new T-shirts for businesses, and at the end of those T-shirts' lives, recycle them back into the system again and again.
GREN uses hyper-local, ethical, and transparent supply chains, by coordinating relationships with ethical businesses in our local areas. They take ownership of every product they create, working to end the 'take-make-dispose' fashion model.
The initiative launched in 2021, helping small businesses create circular supply chains that are better for people and the planet.
Ms Knopik also founded and is the current board president of the CBR Gals Network, a grassroots, volunteer-led not-for-profit, whose mission is to consciously connect and advance Canberran women and their businesses.
INDIGENOUS BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Dixie Crawford, Nganya
Dixie Crawford is a Barkindji woman from Brewarrina and Broken Hill, she lives on Ngunnawal country in Canberra and is the founder/director of Nganya, an Aboriginal engagement consultancy specialising in cross-cultural leadership, along with the development of reconciliation action plans.
Growing up in Brewarrina, Ms Crawford spent her days with cousins on the riverbank swimming, fishing and listening to the stories of her aunts and uncles and their teachings to care for country.
She leverages her personal and professional experiences to challenge ideas and change the way "it's always been done". She wants to make a difference in the way Aboriginal people are heard and understood. Her passion is helping others to understand the cause of barriers that impact thinking and doing when it comes to engaging with and creating opportunities for First Nations peoples and communities to thrive.
This year she launched a podcast, and was named one of 20 Australian Women Making Moves in 2022 by the Australian Business Journal, was a speaker at the 2022 Reconciliation Australia conference and was appointed to the Cricket ACT board.
Nganya is 100 per cent Aboriginal, female-owned and operated.
SMALL BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Amanda Snashall, Digital Design Partners
Amanda Snashall is the co-founder of Digital Design Partners. Her bachelor's degree was in software engineering, which led to an honours degree in multidisciplinary engineering.
Her first career steps were into the world of ICT and engineering that culminated with her being a project manager for the Canberra Clean Energy Connection. While working on her PhD she took on roles at the ANU to provide herself with an income, which led to meeting her business partner, Lakshmi West.
Digital Design Partners was founded to help organisations better engage with their customers and provide services that enhance their experience. Together with their team, the business brings extensive experience in innovation and design thinking to drive change, guided by an empathetic view of people, process and service experience.
The initial idea behind the company was to help businesses to use information and communication technology to improve.
INNOVATION BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Chaturica Athukorala, Aurabox
Chaturica Athukorala is a radiologist, co-founder and chief executive of Aurabox.
She obtained her Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of Adelaide in 2007.
Ms Athukorala was appointed a fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists in 2016 and currently practices at the Canberra Hospital and BreastScreen ACT.
She has a subspecialty interest in breast imaging and co-founded Aurabox in June 2021 to solve issues faced by herself and her colleagues when accessing medical imaging in clinical practice.
Medical Imaging is critical patient information that needs to be accessed and shared by doctors in order to diagnose, manage and monitor patients.
Currently this process is difficult, as medical imaging practices use different data storage systems that do not communicate with one another.
This means doctors are unable to view a patient's entire imaging history in one place, which often causes treatment delay, unnecessary repeat imaging and potential clinical inaccuracy.
Aurabox is a cloud-based medical imaging storage and viewing platform which allows doctors to access complete imaging histories for their patients, regardless of which medical imaging practice they attended.
SOCIAL IMPACT BUSINESS WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Jo Farrell, Kane Constructions and Build Like a Girl
Jo Farrell's career spans over two decades and across multiple spectrums of the construction industry. A qualified carpenter by trade, licensed builder, certified building designer and now general manager of a multi-million-dollar construction company, she has literally worked from the ground up to be where she is today.
Her journey started in 1996 when she finished high school and had no intention of going to university. Her passion had always been to become either a vet or a builder. Given her aversion to blood and needles and what she says were lacklustre grades, vet science was out of the question. So she decided that building was the way to go.
Ms Farrell is passionate about seeing more women in construction, and increased gender equity. She also founded the not-for-profit organisation, Build Like A Girl, which aims to help women enter trade and apprentice roles.
Established in 2020, Build Like a Girl is a model and a movement for women in trade roles.
She developed the foundation of Build Like A Girl from her own experience working as a female tradie in the building and construction industry. She wanted to develop something more than a program, she wanted to create a movement to create change.
Kristine Hewett, Adamas Nexus
Kristine Hewett is the co-founder and director of Adamas Nexus, a registered charity that helps women to deal with the post-crisis life-long trauma of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
With Adamas Nexus, Ms Hewett uses her experience of childhood domestic violence to help others, and as healing and support for herself.
Adamas Nexus has been operating for four years both face-to-face and online using a repeated format each meeting that provides the attendees with a known agenda and allows them to be as involved as they wish to at each meeting they attend.
Ms Hewett is passionate about helping women through peer support, resources, and community.
By enabling survivors to know they are not alone, hearing similar stories, experiences and emotions and being able to speak in a confidential and supportive environment, Adamas Nexus aims to positively affect this complex social problem.
