What’s the first thing that comes to mind for you when you hear the words ‘Beauty Pageant?’ Do you swoon at the thought of the evening gown competition? Do you remember the infamous blunders of contestants past? Or do you scoff, writing off the whole endeavor to a callous modern culture that makes objects out of women’s bodies?

If you’re like Caroline Pemberton, your reaction is something along those latter lines—when former Miss Australia 2007 was first asked to participate in the state-level beauty pageant in New South Wales, she ‘pooh-poohed’ the idea, thinking it would be ‘all dolled up bimbos who were a bit ditzy parading around in bikinis.’

But what Caroline found after getting involved with pageants, was ‘the opposite—smart, beautiful girls who were making a massive impact in their communities and abroad.’ At present, Pemberton is about to head out on an adventure race: a 10 mile mountain bike ride followed by a 5 mile whitewater paddle & a 4 mile run—not your typical ‘dolled up bimbo’ weekend outing.

Her desire to become involved in charitable work and awareness-raising began while visiting a Sherpa community in the Everest region of Nepal. There, at 19, she accompanied her brother to Everest Base Camp, coming face to face with more intense poverty than she had ever seen. She was amazed by ‘how these people who had nothing in terms of material wealth and an amazing wealth of community and such generous hearts and spirits. I fell in love with being part of their world and determined to do my bit to make it a little easier for them.’

Once she got involved in beauty pageants, she says, “They become a platform for me to make the difference I was looking to make.’ So she branched out to raise awareness about the needs of other communities. Pemberton has lent herself to more than working to raise awareness about the Sherpa community in Nepal: she has also worked at a rape crisis center in Uganda on the Sudanese border, where the civil strife ongoing in Sudan means that many households are headed by children; in Papua New Guinea in villages along the Kokoda trail; and she has worked in Kenya providing medical care.

Among the communities she has worked with is a group of orphans in East Timor. “I connected with the Timorese and felt my value was in really getting amongst the people, and working on that level. After my trips I used my profile to talk to the media and the public in Australia about my experiences and found I had a gift at getting people excited and wanting to be involved in charity work. So I spend a lot of my time working on awareness-raising campaigns these days when I'm not working at the grassroots.”

Pemberton’s reflections on the relative efficacy of development work lend insight into her personal philosophy and motivations. “One of the biggest problems I've seen [with development] on an individual level is this: No one likes to be pitied, it takes away our sense of pride...No one likes to feel helpless and like a victim, but if you continually treat people like they are victims… they end up believing that they are helpless and incapable of improving their situation. The solution… is having dedicated, passionate people who see a problem, come up with a viable solution, work alongside governments and local people, respecting culture and often tribal law and boundaries to start to solve that problem…it should be about throwing people, passion, purpose, brain-power supported by money and resources that donor nations can provide to help solve the problems. It's about collective action.”

She added, “In my opinion, we start with empowerment; ensuring each child gets the opportunity to be educated, or for example through micro-finance alongside vocational programs, where people are given opportunity to take control of their futures.... It gives people choice and responsibility. What they do with the opportunity is then their decision but that is where we should be using our people power.”

The months Pemberton has spent in various developing nations were obviously spent with open eyes and a thoughtful mind.

Along with all this work in developing nations, let it not be said that Pemberton has forgotten anyone back at home. Recently, she began a campaign called Real Body Image—a program she developed herself for young women and men in high schools across Australia to educate young people about healthy body image. Pemberton explains, “It looks at the pressures we all face these days to have the "perfect body", where these pressures come from and how they affect our body image and self esteem.”

She says of the program “I like that Real Body Image is my way of connecting with and helping my immediate local community here in Australia, which have a really different set of problems to some of those remote, poor communities I support with my grassroots work.” What does she think about the differences between these communities—some in which people struggle to feed themselves, and others in which people struggle to diet?

“This is a really hard question to answer briefly, because if you look at the research, eating disorders and dieting are of highest incidence in Western communities. We live in very different worlds and face very different pressures. Yes, it's incredibly hard for me to watch families in East Timor struggling to feed themselves, while I worry about my weight—it is so contradictory and it seems so superficial and selfish when we compare the two, but can we fairly make that comparison?”

“It is also very hard for me to watch young women in my own community hating themselves and their bodies and endangering their health. The only way I can link the two is the mutual lack of control the two groups of people face, those that can't get enough nourishment and those that feel they can't control their bodies. We all face different pressures arising from different situations and they need to be addressed differently.”

Caroline Pemberton is not the stereotypical beauty queen—in some of the most difficult situations imaginable, she strives to make good on the promise of ‘Beauty with a Purpose,’ both at home and overseas. “It's also about resetting the way the general public view charity. I think to motivate people and to spread awareness we need to understand the real gravity of these situations as well as to focus on the positives we experience from giving—to get people to see it's not hard and it doesn't feel bad. It feels fantastic. The intrinsic reward: the smiles, the laughter, the connection. The kindness of these communities who will give you everything even when they have nothing.”

In the end, her attitude can be a motivation for everyone—love what you have, and work to make the world a better place. As she says, “At the end of the day the motivation is to make a difference where it is needed and that’s what keeps me smiling and getting out of bed in the mornings, whether it is in Kenya or in the local high school.”