NEWS

In 11 hours and 15 minutes, a Beechworth teenager and eight friends walked 40 kilometres for the 40 Hour Famine, raising more than $2,000. When adults supervising the walk told her to stop after she picked up injuries, her answer was blunt: "If others do it every day, I can do it once." That's Amy Schilling's approach to most things. In 2025 she founded Teens Who Care, a youth-led volunteering program she built almost entirely herself, partnering with the Beechworth CFA, Land

Ten volunteer repairers, one Saturday morning a month, and a growing list of things Beechworth residents no longer throw away. Since 2018, the Quercus Beechworth Repair Café has met in the Neighbourhood House hall to fix whatever locals bring in: garden tools, kitchen appliances, clothing, even a drone. The bike program has become a quiet favourite, ten bikes rescued from the tip mostly for spare parts, four fully repaired and passed on to people who need them. Since 2022 alo

A regional Facebook post about bushfire relief donations turned into four carloads of sanitary products, delivered to Wangaratta because a Beechworth collection box overflowed, more than once. That kind of response is what convinced local group "What Women Can Do" that period poverty needed a dedicated local answer, not just Share the Dignity's national campaigns reaching regional Victoria secondhand. Founded after a chance newspaper interview question about who the founder w

Four short, deliberately small events. That was Beechworth History and Heritage Society's answer to a big question: how do you get a town to actually engage with its own layered history, rather than just walk past the plaques? Timed to the National Trust's Australian Heritage Festival, "Dig into Beechworth" ran a Ching Ming commemoration at the town's historic Chinese cemetery, marking more than 2,000 Chinese people, many of them goldminers, interred there since the 1850s. Al

An 89kW battery bolted onto the Old Beechworth Gaol is about to do double duty: cutting emissions and keeping the lights on when the grid can't. Indigo Power's BEECH01, part of the ARENA-funded Community Batteries for Resilience Project, pairs a 339kWh battery with new rooftop solar (installed on internal-facing roof sections to protect the heritage site's appearance) to store local solar generation and share it with participating households through the Beechworth Community E

A lightning-struck Californian sequoia from Beechworth's Centennial Park is now seating in the town's revitalised Railway Precinct. That's the kind of detail that sums up this project. Led by Indigo Shire Council and Tourism North East as part of the Murray to Mountains Rail Trail Enhancements, the precinct has gone from an underused paddock to a landmark stop on the trail: nature play by Yackandandah sculptor Ben Gilbert, a public pavilion, accessible amenities, lighting upg

Meet Indigo Regen, Tidy Towns finalist in Behaviour Change Campaigns and Education. Beechworth has a food waste problem, like everywhere else. Indigo Regen's answer isn't a lecture. It's a seat. Cool Seats are raised garden beds with a hinged lid: drop your food scraps in, and worms do the rest. Five are now installed around town, outside the Early Years Learning Centre, Quercus Neighbourhood House, Beechworth Montessori, the Old Beechworth Gaol and Bandit Café. Each one dive