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Amazing response to council's youth awards
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Posted: 12/06/2009
A TOTAL of 95 nominations across eight categories have been received for Wodonga Council's inaugural RED Carpet Youth Awards.
The awards were open to young people aged between 16 and 24 years in the following categories: community service, environmental, apprenticeship/traineeship, behind the scenes, endurance/persistence, technology/IT, group helping hand, and emerging artists (includes musician – solo, duo or band, performing arts and visual, multi-media and film).
Manager community planning and youth services Jaime Carroll said the young advisory committee were currently shortlisting the applicants in each category.
“Once we have shortlisted the categories, we will then be discussing the nominations with the nominees,” she said.
“We have been overwhelmed by the response from the community and the quality of nominations.
“It shows how many terrific young people we have in Wodonga.”
The council has secured former magistrate Barbara Holborow as the guest speaker at the invite-only RED Carpet Youth Awards ceremony on Friday, July 24 at the Wodonga Catholic College auditorium.
Ms Holborow served for 12 years as a magistrate in the children's court, where her compassion and outspokenness were legendary, perhaps because of her own beginnings.
Although she describes her childhood as happy, it was also lonely. An only child, her parents were fiercely protective. When she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 13, her overwhelming feeling was one of guilt, a fear that she had let her parents down.
It was a feeling she conquered later in life. However, Ms Holborow lost her first child (a boy) soon after he was born due to complications from her diabetes. Although she later gave birth to a healthy girl, the death of her first child reverberated through her life.
Not long after her second child's birth, she split from her husband and moved back with her parents. She resumed her studies and completed a law degree. Ms Holborow was 39 when she graduated as a solicitor.
Ms Holborow specialised in children's cases and it was through her work at a women's refuge that she met Jacob, a young Aboriginal boy that she adopted.
Since then, many foster children have come under her care, but it is as a magistrate that Ms Holborow has had an impact on the lives of thousands of children.
