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| Awards for Excellence Gill Hicks
Gill Hicks is founder of Making a Difference for Peace (M. A. D. for Peace), which exists to communicate the importance of our individual responsibility in creating a world in which extreme conflict is ended. Gill Hicks established the organisation after losing both her legs from the knee down after the horrific bombings that took place in London in 2005. Given her own subsequent disability and the horrific things that happened to her, Gill Hicks could probably be excused for feeling sorry for herself and looking negatively at the world.
Instead Hicks and her colleagues have set about making sure that a horrible negative be used as an overwhelming positive. She has dedicated her life to looking for ways to bring communities together, to talk, to work and to play together.
In 2008, Gill Hicks and her team of volunteers set about walking from Leeds to London via Luton, covering all areas that had significance to the suicide bombings of July 2005. Hundreds of people from all faiths joined them en route coming out to show that what sets to divide us can only do that if we allow it to.
In 2006 Hicks was appointed Ambassador for Peace Direct (Best New Charity 2005) and in 2007 an Advocate for Leonard Cheshire. Her first book, One Unknown, was shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year, 2007. Hicks was named a Member of the British Empire for services to charity in the 2008 Queen's New Year's Honours List, and is both Australian of the Year and Australian Woman of the Year in the UK.
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