What the Australian of the Year is actually worth

One Sunday morning in February, I listened to Abraham Kuol on ABC Radio. Kuol spent the first seven years of his life in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. His family came to Australia as refugees. In 2010, he was elected captain of his primary school. Now he is an Associate Research Fellow in Criminology at Deakin University, a Westpac Social Change Fellow, and a mentor to at-risk young people through basketball. He is also the 2026 Young Australian of the Year for Victoria.

It is the kind of story that reminds you why these awards exist. But it also prompted a more mercenary question: when a person connected with a charitable organisation wins an award, what actually happens to the organisation connected to them?

That is, at least approximately, an answerable question.

The data

It is possible to assemble a dataset of Australian of the Year award recipients from 2014 to 2025, to identify the charitable organisations connected to each laureate from their public profiles, and to match these to annual financial data held on the ACNC register.[1] The methodology has limits and I will acknowledge them at the end. But the dataset is large enough to reveal a consistent pattern.

The award creates two distinct funding windows. Most organisations are likely only aware of one.

Window one: the philanthropic surge

The year of the award, call it t0, produces a median donation uplift of 11.2%, with 59% of connected charities showing positive movement. That is both real and meaningful. It is also fleeting.

Organisations that fail to capitalise in the year of the award have only a 15% chance of recording a positive donation result at t+1, with a median decline of 33% against their pre-award baseline. Otherwise, donors who feel moved to give will do so immediately after the award is announced or not at all.

This is not entirely surprising. An award generates media coverage, public goodwill, and a brief moment of visibility. What is perhaps more striking is how complete the penalty is for organisations that are unprepared, and how durable the benefit is for those that are not. Of charities that gain at t0, 76% remain positive at t+2, with a median cumulative uplift of 52%. An organisation that sleeps through the announcement might as well not have had an individual associated with it nominated.

Window two: the government grants slow burn

Here is the finding of which I suspect most organisations are unaware.

Government grants to connected charities do not spike at t0. They grow slowly, and they compound. The median absolute uplift in government funding is approximately $50,000 in the award year, $179,000 at t+1, and $348,000 at t+2. The pattern is consistent with the rhythm of how government funding works: applications submitted in the months following a high-profile award result in funding decisions twelve to eighteen months later, which then roll into multi-year programs. The award creates a credibility signal that reverberates through the grants cycle for two full years after the announcement.

For most organisations, the announcement triggers an immediate sprint toward private donors. That sprint is right, and as the t0 data shows, necessary. But the slower, quieter opportunity is to treat the award as a government funding platform for the 24 months that follow. Grant applications that might otherwise be marginal become more competitive. Program officers who might otherwise have had little reason to prioritise a particular organisation now have one. It is logical for organisations to deliberately work this window.

Does it matter which award you win?

Yes. Significantly.

For national Australian of the Year recipients, the sector-adjusted return is large and statistically significant: a median 74% above comparable charities in the year following the award. For state and territory nominees, the effect does not clear the significance threshold after correcting for multiple comparisons.

The honest caveat is that both groups face a selection problem. Nominations tend to come from already high-profile, growing organisations, and national laureates are the most selected-for group of all. What the data shows is a correlation between national awards and funding outcomes, not a clean causal story. But a median sector-adjusted gap of 74% is not nothing, and the consistency across the national winner sample is striking enough to be worth noting.

This does not mean a state nomination is worthless. Profile, networks, and community recognition matter in ways that Annual Information Statements do not capture. But organisations considering whether to invest substantial effort in a nomination should be realistic about the fundraising dividend: the data does not support an expectation of a surge in funding unless there is a national win.

What this means in practice

For organisations connected to national nominees and winners, the strategic implications follow from the data. Have a fundraising campaign ready to launch at t0. Have grant applications ready to submit in the weeks after the announcement, not the weeks before. The award ceremony is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a 24-month government funding opportunity that most of your peers are not exploiting.

For philanthropists backing organisations whose leaders are in contention for a national award, the compounding effect achieved by subsequent government grants is worth factoring in. An investment in an organisation whose leader wins a national AotY award is likely, on this data, to be followed by meaningful government co-investment over the following two years. That is a form of leverage that is hard to manufacture through most other means.

A note on Black Rhinos

Afri-Aus Care, and its Black Rhinos basketball program in Dandenong is not in the 2026 dataset. Abraham Kuol’s award is too recent for the financials to be available. It will be interesting to watch the trajectory over the next year or two.

Nonetheless the programme’s history is worth noting. In 2017, the ABC’s Background Briefing profiled the Black Rhinos, a basketball team founded by Jamy Alex, a reformed offender who found his way through Selba Luka’s Afri-Aus Care. The award attached to Abraham Kuol in 2026 is because of work he and the community gathered around Afri-Aus Care and Black Rhinos had been doing, together, over a long period.

While state winners do not always win out with funding, in Black Rhinos case I hope it does.

[1]Methodology note: Nominee and winner profiles are drawn from the Australian of the Year Awards website (australianoftheyear.org.au). Identifying connected organisations requires judgment: profiles sometimes reference program names or project titles rather than the registered legal entity. Not all individuals connected to the awards work with ACNC-registered charities; some work in government agencies, universities, or unregistered community organisations, and these cannot be matched to AIS financial data. Where an individual is connected to multiple organisations, I have attempted to identify the primary charitable entity. Financial data covers Annual Information Statement submissions from 2013 to 2025, sourced from the ACNC register. The 2026 award year is excluded as financial data is not yet available.