SHARING women\u2019s success is Kimberley Furness\u2019 passion, but last week she celebrated her own win taking home the Victorian AgriFutures Rural Women\u2019s Award.<\/p>\n
Ms Furness was recognised for her work with OAK Magazine<\/em>, a quarterly publication she founded in 2017 filled with stories of regional and rural women making waves in the business world.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got to interview these past finalists and winners and I\u2019ve seen what an amazing group of connectors these women are,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be part of that alumni now and have that network is a bit of a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n As a former journalist, Ms Furness always wanted to create a magazine that changed the status quo of how women\u2019s stories were told.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was this growing frustration with how our stories were being treated in the media and I think a big part, though, was I would stand in front of the magazines at a supermarket and I couldn\u2019t see myself there. That is, a woman who runs a business in regional Australia who also has four kids,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother part of it was I was travelling around rural Victoria and New South Wales doing social media workshops. In these workshops these women would tell you about their business and the \u2018why\u2019 behind it.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d come home and I\u2019d be telling other people, sharing it on my social media and it came to a point where I thought \u2018why are we condensing our stories into 2,000 characters or less with just one pretty picture? We need to see these in longform in a tangible product that we can hold and treasure\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n From concept to first published product in six weeks, OAK Magazine<\/em> has grown from 27 pages to more than 100 pages in just five years.<\/p>\n \u201cI can still remember back to issue one, I had shown a guy and I was really excited. He was like \u2018oh, aren\u2019t you worried that you\u2019ll run out of stories?\u2019. He could not have been more wrong,\u201d Ms Furness said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe share stories of women from all different backgrounds in all different industries right across Australia. That is what makes OAK <\/em>unique.<\/p>\n \u201cIt comes back to that quote \u2018you can\u2019t be what you don\u2019t see\u2019. It was only recently that my daughter had questioned whether a female could be a firefighter.<\/p>\n