Young achieving Southbankers

A 24-year-old software engineer who was announced as a semi-finalist in the awards, Anita Miller said she was “pretty excited” about her nomination. “I wasn’t expecting it, but my friend put me up for it without telling me,” she said. 

Ms Miller was nominated for the oacdigital Online Achievement Award after creating the online platform EverEvolving.Me which encourages women to join the tech industry as well as providing female-centric financial advice. 

The oacdigital Online Achievement Award recognises creativity and innovation in the online landscape.

Ms Miller said she developed the platform to address the gender imbalance in the tech and financial industries after noticing a severe lack of information and online resources that were targeted towards women.

“The industry is so male-dominated and I felt like I was being ignored. They were not even listening to me or keeping me in the conversation,” Ms Miller said.

“So, I said, ‘I’m just going to do my own thing’, and it just worked.” Ms Miller said if she went on to win the award, she would use it to encourage other people from similar backgrounds to take meaningful action in their local community. 

“I’m a brown, immigrant, 20-something-girl who did it. Maybe someone can look at it and say I can do it too,” Ms Miller said.

Fellow nominee 26-year-old Tina Kuek received a nomination for the Bridge Create Change award after starting Kazi Victoria, providing employment workshops for people from a migrant and refugee background.

The Bridge Create Change Award recognises young people driving activities, programs and initiatives that promote or create change.

Ms Kuek, who ran on Lord Mayor Sally Capp’s City of Melbourne council election ticket last year, said she was motivated to start Kazi Victoria after conversations with members of the African-Australia community who struggled to find employment that matched their qualification levels.

“They were quite over qualified and quite ambitious. But they were stuck doing survival jobs,” Ms Kuek said. “I know there are systemic issues to do with that.

But I started thinking of practical ways to address this and I saw that there was space to actually help.”

“Through Kazi Victoria, Ms Kuek teamed up with recruitment agencies and specialists in human resources to design free workshops which assist in resume writing and preparing for interviews.”

Ms Kuek said a few quick success stories in the program’s initial stages motivated her to continue with her work.

“For as long as I’m able to keep doing that and keep helping people, I’m happy to do it”. 

The winners of the 7News Young Achiever Awards Victoria will be announced later this month •