2025 LGBTQ+ INCLUSION AWARD NOMINATION FORMS

Consider nominating a colleague or campaign for their outstanding contributions to LGBTQ+ inclusion within your organisation, within the categories listed below.

These awards are announced at the annual LGBTQ+ Inclusion Awards, hosted by Pride in Diversity. Each award recognises outstanding advocacy, support and/or contribution to LGBTQ+ inclusion within the workplace by leaders, role models, allies and more.

Click on the title of each award to download the Nomination Form.

CEO OF THE YEAR

This nomination recognises the outstanding support, promotion, and/or contribution of your organisation’s CEO (or equivalent) or your most Senior Executive to LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion.

Culture is led from the top, so Executive support for LGBTQ+ inclusion speaks volumes to employees. Their contributions should include both internal and external work, sending strong messages to potential employees, customers, stakeholders, LGBTQ+ people who engage with your organisation, and the general LGBTQ+ public.

Annual AWEI Employees Survey data shows that the visible, active senior allies has a significant impact within an organisation, on employee support for organisational LGBTQ+ inclusion initiatives, and specific support for LGBTQ+ employees. Visible support from executive/leadership teams positively impacts health and wellbeing, inclusion, and acceptance. It reduces incidents of bullying and harassment and contributes to an environment where people feel safer to deal with negative behaviours.

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP AWARD

This nomination recognises the outstanding contribution(s) to LGBTQ+ inclusion from an executive and senior leader within your organisation.

Culture is led from the top, so Executive support for LGBTQ+ inclusion speaks volumes to employees. Their contributions should include both internal and external work, sending strong messages to potential employees, customers, stakeholders, LGBTQ+ people who engage with your organisation, and the general LGBTQ+ public.

Annual AWEI Employees Survey data shows that the visible, active senior allies has a significant impact within an organisation, on employee support for organisational LGBTQ+ inclusion initiatives, and specific support for LGBTQ+ employees. Visible support from executive/leadership teams positively impacts health and wellbeing, inclusion, and acceptance. It reduces incidents of bullying and harassment and contributes to an environment where people feel safer to deal with negative behaviours.

This nominee may be an Executive Sponsor, but their work should be above and beyond their requirements of the role including:

      • advocacy for the importance of networks and their work to senior leaders
      • oversight and approval of network strategy
      • priority-setting based on overall organisation business strategy
      • provision of guidance and organisational know-how to support network objectives
      • visible support of LGBTQ+ network and employees to whole of organisation

LGBTQ+ INCLUSIVE INNOVATION AWARD

This award replaces the External Media Campaign Award of previous years and looks more broadly at inclusion of LGBTQ people within the development and promotion of your organisation’s products and services, processes, or ways of working.

Innovation can occur in new internal inclusion projects, stakeholder engagement, external communications including media campaigns, product and service design, representation of LGBTQ+ people, and many other areas of the work of an organisation.

Due to the wide variety of services and organisational size, innovation is often required to ensure inclusion is appropriate to the industry, region, and client cohort as a result many service providers are innovative in their inclusion initiatives.

This award will celebrate the most innovative LGBTQ++ inclusion initiative(s) from the assessed calendar year.

LGBTQ+ ROLE MODEL AWARD

This nomination is for an LGBTQ+ individual within your organisation who is highly visible as an LGBTQ+ role model and has made an outstanding contribution raising awareness, advocating for, and promoting LGBTQ+ inclusion within the organisation.

We often hear “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Year after year, the AWEI Employee Survey and other data shows that LGBTQ+ employees are working in organisation that have improved their workplace inclusion outcomes, including increased sense of safety, health and wellbeing, feelings of belonging, and ability to see a career path for themselves in their organisation, and more. LGBTQ+ employees are seeing other LGBTQ+ people being accepted within their organisation and being successful in their career path – particularly when they see them in senior leadership positions – at growing rates.

Having visible role models is even more important for people where they have multiple intersecting under-represented facets of their identities, for example we see LGBTQ+ women in particular value having role models, but they are not seeing them. This is also true for other under-represented LGBTQ+ populations.

NETWORK LEADER OF THE YEAR

This nomination recognises the impact of individuals within LGBTQ+ Employee Network leadership groups who perform above and beyond the expectations of their role and significantly impact LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion as a result.  This nomination is open to anyone who has a formal and leading role within their organisation’s LGBTQ+ Employee Network leadership group.

Network Leaders can often carry the burden of their organisation’s LGBTQ+ inclusion work, in addition to their formal role within the organisation. Their continued endeavours should not go unnoticed, as they not only directly impact LGBTQ+ employees and allies but also contribute to the overall workplace culture and environment.

This is an individual award for a single network leader. If you have more than one Network Leader worthy of nomination, please submit an additional submission.

SALLY WEBSTER ALLY AWARD

This nomination recognises the outstanding contribution of an individual who has made significant contributions to workplace inclusion as an active ally and supporter to LGBTQ+ people and LGBTQ+ employees.

Having visible active allies in a workplace contributes to a culture of inclusion. According to AWEI Employee Survey data, 72.6% of LGBTQ+ people who have allies agree that they have positively impacted their sense of inclusion in their workplace. Allies can provide LGBTQ+ employees and networks with an opportunity to extend reach and support mechanisms, increase their voice and impact the prevalence of homophobic bullying, harassment, taunts, jokes and exclusion that still exist in organisations.

An ally can be anyone who actively and visibly supports LGBTQ+ inclusion. People often use the term ally to refer to non-LGBTQ+ support of inclusion. While non-LGBTQ+ allies are important in lifting the burden of inclusion work from LGBTQ+ employees, LGBTQ+ people can also be allies for other LGBTQ+ people (e.g., a cisgender gay man can be an ally for lesbians or trans and gender diverse people, etc.).

Active and Visible Allies are people who tend to want to make positive and effective changes for LGBTQ+ people. Such characteristics of an Ally might include but are certainly not limited to:

      • general advocacy for inclusion
      • equity and respect for all
      • understanding important terminology/ies, myths and challenges LGBTQ+ face
      • have a strong awareness of language and assumptions made toward LGBTQ+ people
      • an ability to focus on and role model person-centred language
      • have a willingness to respect privacy and confidentiality
      • play a part in addressing negative behaviours toward LGBTQ+ employees

This nominee may be a person with a role in diversity and inclusion, but their LGBTQ+ inclusion work should be above and beyond the requirements of this role.

SAPPHIRE INSPIRE AWARD

This nomination is for an LGBTQ+ individual is or may be perceived as a woman.

This submission acknowledges the dual impacts or “double glass ceiling” that LGBTQ+ people who are or may be perceived as women deal with in the workplace.

This is most apparent when looking at people in senior leadership roles, where those in the Sapphire cohort are half as likely to be in these roles than both LGBTQ+ men and non-LGBTQ+ women. Year after year, we continue to see differences in AWEI data between the Sapphire cohort (those who are, or are perceived as, LGBTQ+ women, and therefore face many of the same barriers), other LGBTQ+ populations, and the general population. In particular, the Sapphire cohort is less likely to be out in the workforce than LGBTQ+ men, which has an impact on the health and wellbeing, and productivity and engagement of individuals in the workplace.

Nominees should:

      1. Be a visible role model for other LGBTQ+ people who are, or may be perceived as, women.

We often hear “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Year after year, the AWEI Employee Survey and other data shows that LGBTQ+ employees are working in organisation that have improved their workplace inclusion outcomes, including increased sense of safety, health and wellbeing, feelings of belonging, and ability to see a career path for themselves in their organisation, and more. LGBTQ+ employees are seeing other LGBTQ+ people being accepted within their organisation and being successful in their career path – particularly when they see them in senior leadership positions – at growing rates.

      1. Be an advocate for the advancement of under-represented genders and working toward making structural and cultural change within their organisations to improve gender inequities within Pride networks and throughout their organisation and industry.

Having visible role models is even more important for people where they have multiple intersecting under-represented facets of their identities, for example we see LGBTQ+ women in particular value having role models, but they are not seeing them. This is also true for other under-represented LGBTQ+ populations.

This nominee is active and highly visible as an LGBTQ+ employee, but has also made an outstanding contribution to raising awareness, advocating for, and promoting inclusion for LGBTQ+ women and under-represented genders within the organisation.

DUE DATES

We can accept nominations between Monday, 6th January 2025 and Monday 24th February 2025.

For hand-delivered, couriered or mailed submissions (hard copies, USB, etc):

Pride in Diversity – AWEI Submissions
414 Elizabeth Street
Surry Hills, NSW 2010

For large file transfer program URL (Including but not limited to Dropbox, Google Docs, Parcel Post, SharePoint or any other internally approved large file transfer system):

      • Send to awei@acon.org.au
      • Note: File attachments will not be accepted within emails. Pride in Diversity will take no responsibility for attachments sent via email.

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For more information on the AWEI and Australian LGBTQ Inclusion Awards event, please contact the Pride in Diversity office on (02) 9206 2139 or at AWEI@acon.org.au.