Congratulations go out to UVic Writing professor & Climate Disaster Project founder Sean Holman on being named the 2025 recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation’s Bill Good Award.
Presented annually by Western Canada’s preeminent journalism foundation, the Bill Good Award goes to a BC individual or organization that makes a significant contribution to journalism in the province, or addresses a community’s needs and benefits via journalism — which describes Holman’s work to a tee.
“I’m honoured and humbled the Jack Webster Foundation has, to my surprise, named me as this year’s Bill Good Award winner,” says Holman, who is both UVic’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental & Climate Journalism and a UVic alumni himself. “I’ve devoted my life to journalism because of the harms it can repair . . . . As the founder of the Climate Disaster Project, I’m working with my colleagues and students to support the recovery of climate-impacted communities around the world by documenting and investigating their stories.”
Recognizing community & cooperation
Described by the Webster Foundation as a “tenacious journalist and journalism educator”, Holman’s win comes on the heals of the Climate Disaster Project’s own 2023 award from the National Newspapers Association and the CDP’s 2024 documentary theatre project Eyes of the Beast winning silver in the “Environmental & Climate Change” category at the Canadian Association of Journalists Awards.
“When the Climate Disaster Project won a National Newspapers Award in 2023, judges applauded the trauma-informed approach to journalism, as well as the structure of the project and its many partnerships,” noted the Webster Foundation in Holman’s award citation. “They said it was a model of cooperation that can be replicated in other newsrooms as they shrink.”
Holman admits that his devotion to journalism “has come at both professional and personal cost. But that cost has been worth it because I know these past 27 years of public service have made a manifest difference in the lives of the sources and survivors who have placed their trust in me.”
A remarkable year
The 24/25 academic year has seen a remarkable amount of high-profile activity for the Climate Disaster Project, including:
- presenting the world premiere of Eyes of the Beast: Climate Disaster Survivor Stories, a creative collaboration with Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre, debuting at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre in September before being remounted for a Vancouver run in June 2025
- collaborating with influential UK media outlet The Guardian to publish a series of internationally focused climate-survivor testimonies timed to COP29, the UN climate change summit
- creating a partnership with Brazil’s O Globo newspaper
- appearing at UCLA’s Sci Art Gallery in an installation by Canadian media artist Joel Ong (who joins our Visual Arts department in 2025)
- releasing a set of survivor testimonies by Thompson Rivers University students, part of an exhibit at Kamloops Art Gallery
- presenting a two-day workshop as part of the UVic Legacy Gallery exhibit, Fire Season
- seeing Holman selected as one of just 20 speakers at the international My Climate Story project, hosted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media and the Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute
- applying for a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant for “From Catastrophe to Community: A People’s History of Climate Change”.
“We are entering a new era of disaster, where our seasons will become increasingly defined by the traumatic events they bring, and we need to learn how journalism can help us survive those traumas together,” says Holman.
The Webster Award was announced on July 2, and will be presented at a gala dinner and evening on November 3. Along with Holman, journalism industry icon Keith Baldrey was named the 2025 Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and broadcaster/podcaster Laura Palmer earned the 2025 Shelley Fralic Award.
A scene from 2024’s Eyes of the Beast (photo: Hélène Cyr)