Andy DevaneyFan voting has opened for the 2026 Dow Impact Award, with Brooke Henderson, Danielle Kang, Jeeno Thitikul and Angel Yin competing for an LPGA honour built around work done well beyond the tournament ropes.
Supporters can vote once at LPGA.com/Impact before 5 p.m. EDT on Friday, 18 September, with the winner due to be announced during the week of 21 September.
Four LPGA players, four very different causes
The shortlist is neatly varied, which helps.
Henderson’s work centres on raising funds for the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Kang has established her own foundation to tackle child food insecurity and support education initiatives around Las Vegas.
Thitikul has focused her efforts in Thailand, donating school and hospital supplies. Yin, meanwhile, serves as an LPGA*USGA Girls Golf Ambassador, encouraging more girls into the game.
There is no obvious attempt to make four very different forms of community work look identical, and that is probably the award’s strongest feature.
Golf is fond of counting things. Birdies, cuts, points, rankings. Social impact is rather less obedient. It refuses to fit neatly into a box on a leaderboard, which may be precisely why these stories deserve some daylight.
Why the Dow Impact Award matters beyond a trophy
Created in 2025, the award is still young enough to be establishing what it wants to represent.
Lexi Thompson was its inaugural recipient, recognised for work involving youth golf organisations, breast cancer research and veterans’ causes.
The second edition broadens that picture rather than simply repeating it. This year’s nominees are connected with healthcare, hunger, education and participation in golf, giving the award a more useful identity than the vaguely congratulatory territory these things can sometimes wander into.
There is commercial logic here as well. Dow’s partnership with the LPGA gains a public-facing community element, while the Tour gets another way to present its players as people with interests and responsibilities beyond a scorecard.
Sponsorship, at its best, ought to achieve rather more than occupying a patch of visual real estate. This at least asks the partnership to carry some substance.
Fan voting gives the award a different edge
The winner will be determined through a public vote, with each supporter permitted one selection.
That introduces the obvious popularity-contest complication. Profile and fanbase can influence a vote just as surely as the merits of the work being recognised.
Yet the system also brings supporters into stories they might otherwise miss. Someone arriving merely to back a favourite player is still presented with four distinct community projects. That is a modest but worthwhile form of exposure.
For the LPGA, it also turns an award announcement into something participatory rather than ceremonial. Fans are not simply being shown the result afterwards; they have a hand in producing it.
Prize money with a charitable consequence
The nominee receiving the most votes will collect a $25,000 cash award, accompanied by a matching contribution to a charity of her choice.
The runner-up will receive $15,000, while the remaining two nominees receive $5,000 each.
The charitable match attached to first place gives the result rather more consequence than a plaque, a handshake and the inevitable photograph. The winning player’s chosen cause benefits directly, while all four nominees receive financial recognition.
It is a practical detail, and therefore an important one.
Golf’s quieter leaderboard
The 2026 Dow Impact Award will not settle an argument about the best golfer in the world, nor is it designed to.
Its value lies elsewhere: in giving four players’ off-course work enough prominence to interrupt the usual churn of leaderboards, equipment launches and Sunday-afternoon drama.
Henderson, Kang, Thitikul and Yin have taken notably different routes to the same broad idea — that professional sport can provide a platform as well as a profession.
Voting closes on 18 September, with the recipient to be revealed during the week of 21 September.
For once, the most interesting number beside an LPGA player’s name may have nothing to do with par.
