Two special women nominated for national enterprise awards

l FAR NORTH

| Isabella Guzman Gonzalez

TWO Far North female entrepreneurs will represent the region on the national stage for their publishing and charity work achievements at the AusMumpreneur Awards in Sydney this August.

The AusMumpreneur Awards, celebrated in Sydney from August 22-24, is a national event that recognises the achievements of Australian mums in business.

Julatten-based author and founder of publishing company Bowerbird Publishing Crystal Leonardi is nominated for three different awards: author of the year at the AusMumpreneur Awards, woman of the year at the Beam in Business Awards and sole entrepreneur of the year at the Cairns Business Woman’s Club (CBWC) awards.

Ms Leonardi’s experience with the brain cancer diagnosis of her three-year-old son Sebastian inspired the book Boy of Steel, which earned her the author of the year award at the AusMumpreneur Awards in 2022. She is now nominated for her children’s book ‘My Brother Sebastian: Explaining Cancer to Kids’.

“When my son got sick, it gave me more courage to go for what I want and listen to my intuition in what I want to be doing with my time, so writing came very organically,” she said.

“It’s very humbling to be nominated in the first place, but to become a finalist for the second year in a row, validates and celebrates the work that’s been going on behind the scenes,” she said.

“This second year in business

(Bowerbird Publishing) was all about helping other writers tell their stories, so being a finalist in the CBWC awards and Beam in Business cements my place in the industry and amongst my peers.”

Another inspiring Far North woman moyamoya advocate Nicola Baker is also a nominee.

Based in Ravenshoe, Ms

Baker started her journey when her son Jed had a stroke at 11 months.

After he was diagnosed with moyamoya, she founded Moyamoya Australia to support families with a moyamoya diagnosis and fund research.

Ms Baker has been nominated in the AusMumpreneur Awards’ rural and remote business excellence and not-for-profit excel- lence categories. “Our biggest goal for this year is to raise awareness so more medical practitioners pick up this disease early,” she said. “Awards of any kind give me more people to talk to. When I won the Michelle Commins award last year, there was a room of 250 people that heard the word moyamoya, and that’s very crucial.”

Visit www.ausmumpreneur.com