Bendigo Community Health Services is truly delighted at being named Social Enterprise of the Year at the 2017 Bendigo Business Excellence Awards.
Under the award guidelines, the social enterprise category is defined as a not-for-profit organisation that applies commercial strategies to maximise improvements in human and environmental wellbeing.
Our award entry was based around the present restructure of the organisation and the biggest change in focus of our 40-year history to concentrate on early years to deliver sustainable change to disadvantaged families and break the cycles of disadvantage that have become entrenched in too many areas of Bendigo.
In accepting the award our CEO Kim Sykes said the organisation was truly shocked by the success.
“We are so sincerely thrilled and absolutely gobsmacked to have won this just because of the quality of the people with whom we share the finalist position in these awards,” Kim said.
“So thank you, we know that to achieve real success in an industry such as ours, we need to have great governance, we need to have an inspiring vision, and we need to have values that we can live by.
“But more than anything we need great staff who do terrific work – we have great staff. And they do terrific work because of the clients that we serve, our clients really do give us purpose and our clients are people for whom their needs are so invisible for so, so long, way too long, and most of them have very little voice.
“We really thank both our staff and our clients for this award, it’s they that have helped us to achieve and thank you to Be.Bendigo too.”
We congratulate the other finalists in our category Amicus and Make A Change Australia for the wonderful work they do – great recognition.
We also congratulate Bendigo Business of the Year Frankie and Co, all the other nominees, finalists and category winners who together form the great business community of Bendigo.
Special mention to young appreciate of the year Josh Brown from Lend Lease for delivering the speech of the night.
And thank you to the awards sponsors The Bendigo Advertiser, Be.Bendigo for organising the event and Access Australia for supporting the social enterprise of the year category.
Well done all.
