Community Impact is an important way to measure a company’s contribution and the difference it makes to the world. You may remember earlier this year when Calxa achieved a crucial milestone for its not-for-profit donation program. The tally hit a whooping $2.5million of software value benefitting over 1350 community organisations. You can read about our donation program in this article.
Award for Community Impact
It was a surprise to our team when on the 1st May, we were awarded the 2024 Technology for Community Impact Award.
The event was part of Infoxchange’s Technology for Social Justice Conference 2024 held in Melbourne. With almost 70 nominations across 6 categories, this year’s Australian Not-for-Profit Technology Awards were well represented.
Worthy Award Winners
This was cause for celebration by the Calxa team – evidence is posted further down in this article. But all fun aside, there were some deserved winners across the board. Here is the full list:
1. Best Technology Achievement by a First Nations Person or Group
The winner of this award was the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO). It was awarded for The Wominjeka (Welcome) ecosystem – a benchmark approach for curating and co-designing culturally safe client management solutions. It provides holistic mainstream services for Indigenous health, wellbeing, and justice services.
2. Best Accidental IT Person Award
Jaron Green from St Patrick’s Community Support Centre. Jaron was nominated by his colleague for his journey. Taking him from experiencing significant hardship as a client experiencing homelessness of St Pat’s, to managing the in-house IT for one of Western Australia’s key homelessness support services and community housing providers.
3. Technology Volunteer of the Year Award
Brian Hibben from Artworks Community Studio was awarded for leading the implementation of digital technology in the studio. Moreover, services range from installing a network to creating a website and running digital skills workshops. All for the benefit of a community with previously limited access to technology.
4. Best Use of Data for Community Impact Award
The Smith Family for the Education Dashboard South Australia (EDSA). Essentially, EDSA is a partnership between The Smith Family and the Department for Education, South Australia. In short, it uses data and technology to address educational inequality.
5. Technology for Community Impact Award
Calxa – Since 2011, Calxa has donated $2.5 million of its budgeting and reporting software to over 1,350 organisations throughout the region.
6. Not-For-Profit Technology Innovator of the Year Award
Justice Connect for their AI model which helps to identify people’s legal issues in their own words. The result: Connecting them to support faster and strengthening the legal help sector.
Working Together towards Community Impact
Our collaboration with Connecting Up and TechSoup, these days under the Infoxchange umbrella, has provided a strong foundation for our partnership. From Calxa’s perspective, it has assisted in reaching grassroot organisations that make good use of our software.
