Celebrating great New Zealanders driving environmental change.
BLAKE Awards - Supported by Westpac
November 2025
Invitation
NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN!
Click here to nominate before 16 JUNE
BLAKE Awards – Supported by Westpac
For more than two decades, the BLAKE Awards have recognised New Zealander’s whose leadership has delivered impact across all walks of life. Now, as we step into our 21st year, the BLAKE Awards evolve to honour our history while reflecting the future.
From 2025, the BLAKE Awards will exclusively celebrate environmental leadership – recognising those individuals and groups whose work contributes meaningfully to environmental sustainability, conservation, and a better future for Aotearoa.
Nominations for the 2025 BLAKE Awards are NOW OPEN!
BLAKE Award categories for 2025
BLAKE Medal:
The BLAKE Medal recognises and celebrates one person each year whose leadership has helped create a more sustainable future for New Zealand and/or globally, usually over an extended period of time. One BLAKE Medal is awarded annually.
BLAKE Award Categories below:
- Pūtaiao/Science – sponsored by NIWA: Recognising a leader in the research and scientific field, including leaders in Māori methods.
- Pakihi Auaha/Business – Recognising a leader in developing solutions through innovative or entrepreneurial action, likely to be in a business or social enterprise context
- Pouako / Communication & Education – Recognising a leader contributing to environmental progress through effective communication, including education and knowledge sharing.
- Poutoko Hapori / Community – Sponsored by Metlifecare; Recognising a leader contributing to the environment through their work with and in their community, including Māori settings.
- Rangatahi / Youth – Sponsored by Westpac: Recognising a young person (24 and under) demonstrating significant environment leadership.
- Ngā Kura / Schools – The only ‘group award’ – this is for a school/kura making a significant impact with their delivery of environmental education. Schools of any age group are welcome to be nominated.
For more information email Hana Hielkema at [email protected] or phone (09) 307 8875.
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Meet our 2023 BLAKE Leaders:
When Dame Rangimarie Naida Glavish worked as a telephone operator for New Zealand Post in 1984, it was only natural for her to greet her callers by saying ‘kia ora’. Having been raised in Kaipara Harbour by her Māori-speaking grandmother, Ngapeka Teririkore Nahi, Te Reo Māori was part of her identity. She never expected that […]
On the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Sir Peter Blake Trust, a lifetime achievement leadership award has been presented to former New Zealand Prime Minister and global development leader Helen Clark. At age 12, Helen Clark left her childhood home on a Waikato sheep and beef for boarding school in Auckland. In New […]
Kerikeri’s Eva-Sky Gundry was just 16 when she launched a business aimed at empowering wahine and sharing her passion for ocean sports. Three years later, Sky’s Surf School reaches up to 100 rangatahi a week across surf camps, weekly lessons, and a weekly academy programme for international students. The business utilizes powerful concepts from Te […]
Hayden Smith came across a floating mass of rubbish one day more than 20 years ago, and it changed his life. “It was a stormy day. I was kayaking up through Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour and found myself surrounded by this rubbish and I thought: why is there no-one out here cleaning this up?” Then aged […]
Peter Burling and Blair Tuke wish to have more in common with Sir Peter Blake than their sailing prowess. With six World Championship titles to their names, as well an Olympic gold and two silver medals and key roles in the winning team that helped Emirates Team New Zealand successfully defend the America’s Cup on […]
When broadcaster Stacey Morrison was growing up in Ōtautahi Christchurch, she had one fluent speaker of Te Reo Māori in her life – the grandmother she called Kui-Kui. “I grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch and I didn’t speak Māori at all, actually. I was too scared to be in the whanau unit at Aranui High […]
In 2017, 23-year-old Canterbury engineering student Oliver Hunt saw a problem, and threw everything he had at fixing it. It was while hunting around for a research project for his Master of Engineering in Management that Oliver had a fortuitous conversation with an uncle about all the used single-use medical equipment and devices going to […]
When Dr Ellen Joan Ford (Nelson) comes across a situation that annoys her, she goes all-in to make a difference. As a researcher, she discovered working parents were being forced to work as though they didn’t have families to care for – so she committed to normalising and valuing the very modern, very common plight […]