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megram - 55NovOttawa - Index

Major Awards
to Maude Barlow
2008
The Canadian Environment
Awards Citation of Lifetime
Achievement is presented to an
individual who has demonstrated
exceptional dedication and made
an outstanding contribution to
environmental protection.
The candidate’s initiative and
leadership on environmental
issues may take the form of hands-on work, promoting
environmental awareness or education, developing
environmental policy or pursuing groundbreaking
environmental research.The candidate is distinguished
by a long-term commitment and dedication
to environmental protection.The recipient is someone
who has been nationally recognized for environmental
work.
2005
The Right Livelihood Award was established
in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull to honour and support
those “offering practical and exemplary
answers to the most urgent challenges facing us
today.”
Presented annually in Stockholm at a ceremony
in the Swedish Parliament, the Right Livelihood
Award has become widely known as the alternative
Nobel Prize.The prize money is for ongoing successful
work, never for personal use.
The Right Livelihood Award is widely recog-
“They’re busy, wonderful people doing wonderful
work themselves and raising the younger generation. And
I’m a very hands-on grandmother. These babies give you
commitment for a whole new generation.”
Meanwhile, she says, her husband of 30 years, lawyer
Andrew Davis, counts his life’s work as making her life “livable
and easy.” In recent years, he has often accompanied
her on her travels as the national chairperson of the
Council of Canadians or as an author on tour promoting
her latest book.
Her work with the Council is “superbly, never-endingly
exciting,” says Maude, who has been with the group since
its founding in 1985 and its chairperson since 1988. “My
nized as the world’s premier
award for personal courage and
social transformation.Besides the
financial support, it enables
recipients to reach out to an
international audience.
Because it recognizes that the
most inspiring and remarkable
work often defies any standard
classification,the Right Livelihood
Award has no categories. People
who start out with an environmental
goal, for example, frequently
find themselves drawn into issues of health,
human rights and social justice.Their work becomes
a holistic response to community needs.
2005
The two-year Lannan Foundation Cultural
Freedom Fellowship is a cash award to encourage
and support leaders in American and foreign communities
to contemplate, reflect, write and study,
and then to use the knowledge gained to educate
the public.
The Lannan Foundation describes cultural freedom
as the right of individuals and communities to
define and protect valued and diverse ways of life
currently threatened by globalization.
The Lannan Foundation is a family foundation
based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dedicated to cultural
freedom, diversity and creativity through projects
that support exceptional contemporary artists and
writers,as well as native activists in rural indigenous
communities.
November/December 2008 • 12 • Fifty-Five Plus Magazine
biggest difficulty is trying to maintain a balance between
the work and my big, loving family.”
A product of the women’s movement, she was the
executive director of the Office of Equal Opportunity for
the city of Ottawa when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott
Trudeau selected her as his senior advisor on women’s
issues.
After a brief sortie into the political arena — an unsuccessful
attempt to seek a Liberal nomination — she determined
that she would be more effective as a non-partisan
activist.
“I got involved early on as an extension of equality
issues,”she says.“I thought that social programs were going