Last night I was humbled to receive the Special Recognition Award at the North East Charity Awards.
I want to say something honest about what an award like that actually means, because it is very easy to accept one as though it belongs to you.
It does not. Recognition like this is never down to an individual. It belongs to a sector that too often works unseen.
The work that nobody photographs
Most of what the charity sector does happens quietly, and it happens without an audience.
It is the phone answered at ten o’clock at night by someone who has already worked a full day. It is the volunteer who has driven the same person to the same appointment every week for four years. It is the caseworker sitting in a waiting room, saying nothing, simply so that a woman does not have to sit there on her own.
None of that is photographed. None of it makes a headline. It is simply done, and then it is done again the following week, and the week after that.
That is the work this award recognises. Not mine. Ours.
Holding communities together
I have spent more than twenty years in this sector, and I have watched what it carries.
It holds communities together. It delivers care. It builds cohesion in places where cohesion is hard-won and easily lost. And increasingly, it steps in where public services can no longer reach.
That last point deserves to be said plainly, because it is the one we tend to talk around. Charities are not topping up the state any more. In a great many communities they have become the first place people turn, and sometimes the only place. Organisations that were built to complement statutory provision are now absorbing what statutory provision cannot hold.
They are doing it on short funding cycles. They are doing it with small teams. They are doing it while being asked, year after year, to prove their worth to people who have never sat in the room where the work happens.
And still they do it.
Why recognition matters
I have never been especially comfortable with awards. But I have changed my mind about what they are for.
They are not really about the person holding the trophy. They matter because visibility matters. Because a sector that works unseen eventually gets treated as though it is not there. Because the quiet, patient, unglamorous work of keeping people safe does not advocate for itself, and someone has to hold the door open so that it can be seen.
An evening like this puts communities on a platform. It says that this work counts, and that the people doing it are not invisible. That is worth something, and not only to the people in the room.
Thank you
Thank you to Michelle Cooper at Point North for supporting our sector so consistently, and so genuinely, over so many years.
Thank you to RBC Brewin Dolphin, and to everyone behind the North East Charity Awards, for creating a platform that puts communities first.
And thank you to every person across this region who does this work without expecting to be noticed. To the teams at the Halo Project, and to the many organisations alongside us who carry the same load.
This award sits with all of you.
Never underestimate the power of the people.
Published by the media team on behalf of Yasmin Khan CBE. For press and media enquiries, contact media@yasminkhan.co.
