NOMINATIONS for the 2024 Advancing Race Equality Awards have closed with a record number of names being put forward across all categories.
Following six months of encouraging the public to tell us about an individual, organisation, group, school, university or business they feel deserves to be recognised for their good work, the window of opportunity finally shut at 5pm on Monday, December 2.
The number of nominations has surpassed all other years and entries will now be turned over to the judges who will examine them before drawing up their shortlists.
The North West Migrants Forum’s Media and Communications Officer Conor Sharkey said, “Through our collaboration with other organisations and through events like our recent Black History Summit, we know the work that goes on every day to build a more inclusive Northern Ireland.
“And by and large that work goes unseen and unheralded, carried out by people who seek neither recognition nor reward.
“The Advancing Race Equality Awards were designed as a way of celebrating those efforts, to say thank you to those individuals and groups bringing communities together while also chipping away at discrimination through their acts, their attitudes, their campaigns and their policies.”
The judges will spend the next two weeks sorting through the many entries before making their decisions. Shortlists will be published early in the new year with the Advancing Race Equality Awards themselves taking place on March 6 in the Ebrington Hotel. Updates, including how to buy tickets, will be posted on our website, www.nwmf.org.uk.
“It has been another phenomenal year with so many colleagues, teachers, parents, bosses, community leaders and members of the public contacting us about a person, place or project that inspires them,” Mr Sharkey added.
“The judges have a tough task on their hands, trying to whittle each category down to a shortlist of just three. Thank you to everyone who sent in a nomination and who knows, maybe we will see you on the red carpet on March 6.”