Resilience and awards

Posted by Jenni Colwill on 29 May 2009 | 1 Comments

Tags: Rural women, australia, women, resilience, RIRDC Award

I spent a couple of days this week with over 100 winners of the Australian Rural Women's Award. This Award which recognises the contribution that women make to the sustainability of rural Australia is into its 10th year. What impressed me most about these winning women was their resilience so I thought I'd spend a bit of time reflecting on the subject'

First thought I had is that resilience is crucial if you are going to move beyond surviving. It is the capacity to be flexible, to recover from and move past setbacks. Winston Churchill was quoted by one of the women: he said 'Success if going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm'. That's resilience for you.

My second thought is that resilience comes from a range of qualities, including the ability to adapt, having the confidence and resolve to pursue a particular path, the ability to see failure as a positive and the ability to make good use of what you've got.

And I guess it is something you have to acquire when you live close to the land, where natural disasters occur on a regular basis. Bushfires, floods, locusts, mice, rabbits, and drought -let alone trees falling on fences, no Internet access, and regular power failures.

Perhaps resilience is more conspicuous in rural women because they are constantly required to deal with things that are outside their control.

Urban women have resilience too, but we tend not to extol the virtues of resilience formed in response to city and suburban challenges. These challenges are subtler than natural disasters, but they can be just as difficult.

If you are like me, you probably don't want to wait for the next flood to build up your resilience. So take a look at the Resiliency Resource Centre website.

Although it is designed for primary schools, this web site contains a lot of useful information about resilience and how to get it.

Having said all that, I should clarify that the RIRDC Rural Women's Award isn't actually awarded for resilience, although there is a strong case that self-esteem and resilience are closely linked.

However, the Award is for commitment to the sustainable primary industries and the role of rural women, for potential to achieve and deliver benefits to primary industry and rural Australia and for leadership. The Award is a Commonwealth government initiative, run by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. It is strongly supported by a range of sponsors and by the Minister for Agriculture, the Hon. Tony Burke. Each year, each of the seven State and Territory winners receive $10,000 and the opportunity to attend the Australian Institute of Company Directors course to learn how to be better business people.

Burke seems to be doing a good job as far as recognising rural women is concerned. According to his media release, over the past 18 months the proportion of women on rural research and development corporation boards has increased from 20% to 43%.

What a shame the Minister for Industry, Senator the Hon. Kim Carr, hasn't achieved a similar result with industry boards. The last census conducted by EOWA showed that the rest of Australia is going backwards - the proportion of women who hold board directorships has dropped down to 8.3% in 2008 from 8.7% in 2006.

Perhaps Minister Carr could set up an Urban Women's Award to encourage and recognise the potential of city and suburban women. Why not?