NEWS

Watering a mangrove seedling every morning and afternoon doesn't stop for a weekend or a school holiday. The Mangrove Warriors at St Joseph's Catholic Primary in Crib Point kept it up for four straight months. The student leadership group grew out of the school's wider Sea is Our Best Friend program: once the whole Grade 3/4 cohort had planted mangrove seeds, the Mangrove Warriors took over daily care of the seedlings as they grew, watering, monitoring and troubleshooting, wi

Six months before the maternity garden project began, teacher Jess O'Neill says some of her Year 12 Vocational Major students "would never have done what they did." Twenty-two students from Leongatha Secondary College spent 18 weeks leading, not just helping with, the regeneration of Gippsland Southern Health Service's maternity garden: consulting with the hospital's Aboriginal Cultural Liaison Officer on culturally significant planting, designing a low-maintenance dry rock g

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

Nine thousand, three hundred and thirty-nine plates, cups and dishes washed and reused instead of binned, in the Wash Against Waste trailer's first year alone. Built in 2024 to support Mornington Peninsula Shire's target of zero waste to landfill by 2030, the trailer is essentially a commercial kitchen on wheels: enough reusable crockery, glassware and coffee cups to service events of up to 1,000 people, plus a commercial-grade dishwasher that clears the hygiene barrier that

Three people, within two months of each other, asked A Fitting Connection the same question in 2022: what do you do with a deceased relative's entire fabric collection when nobody in the family sews? That question became The Fabric ReStore, Melbourne's only dedicated shop for donated fabric and sewing supplies, now based in Eaglemont. What started operating out of a borrowed room at Banyule Nillumbik Tech School, rehoming just 9kg of textiles a month, has grown fast: 100kg a

Most sustainability programs ask a business owner to sit through training before they see any benefit. LoopLab Yarra flips that order: it starts by looking at what's actually happening on site. Cirque du Soil's fully funded program walks up to 18 City of Yarra businesses, hospitality venues, retailers, offices, manufacturers, through a site waste assessment, tailored mentoring and a practical Circularity Action Plan, built around real opportunities in their own operations rat

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

When Maryam arrived in Melbourne with her four children, having fled the war in Syria via Lebanon, she found a job at Green Collect within three months. "I am learning how to talk with customers, and about job contracts, wages and taking leave," she says. "This will help me for any job in the future." That's the other half of what Green Collect does. Alongside sorting and reselling office furniture, stationery and electronics that would otherwise go to landfill, the 21-year-o

For years, three Rye locals argued that mechanically raking beaches to make them look tidy might actually be doing more environmental harm than the litter it was clearing. Mornington Peninsula Shire has now agreed with them, on paper. Hand in Hand for the Coast, led by Josie Jones, Melanie Bird and Cara Hull, started as straightforward litter prevention and grew into a decade-plus body of citizen science: documenting how mechanical beach raking fragments hard plastics into sm

For people seeking asylum, day-to-day life often means being on the receiving end of services, food parcels, housing support, casework. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre's Member Recipes Project deliberately flips that arrangement, at least for an afternoon. Members are invited to teach, not just attend. Each quarter, a handful of ASRC members share two or three recipes from home, demonstrate how to cook them, and run a workshop for Community Kitchen volunteers, most recently

For Chinese-speaking stroke survivors and their families in Victoria, recovery can mean navigating serious health decisions in a second language, often alone. The Chinese Stroke Support Group, was built to close that gap. Volunteer-led and entirely community-run, the Blackburn-based group offers bilingual health education, mobile health screenings, gentle exercise classes for stroke survivors and seniors, and respite support for family carers, alongside community outings and

Before February 2026, LGBTIQA+ residents on the Mornington Peninsula wanting a Midsumma event had to drive to Melbourne. Now they have their own. Out Loud on the Ninch, held at the Mornington Peninsula Community Theatre, was the Peninsula's first Midsumma event, born after four local organisers noticed the gap and decided to close it themselves. More than 300 people turned up on the night, a number organisers say they'd never seen in one room locally before. At its centre was

Some participants at Frankston's accessible beach pilot hadn't touched sand in decades. Inspired by an accessible beach program in Nice, France, and adapted with a lived-experience advisory committee steering every decision, Frankston City Council ran Australia's Most Accessible Beach as a free pilot from December 2025 to February 2026: beach matting, specialist wheelchairs, hoists, shaded accessible loungers and trained staff and volunteers, all designed to get people with d

The Mornington Peninsula has the highest rate of homelessness of any local government area in Victoria, and until recently, one motel was doing almost all the work of housing people in crisis. When that motel's future became uncertain, Mornington Community Support Centre didn't wait for government funding to fill the gap. Two philanthropic foundations, the Payton Foundation and the Upotipotpon Foundation, bought a block of seven units in central Mornington and leased them to

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

Mallacoota's population swings from 1,100 permanent residents to around 10,000 in peak summer, and every one of those extra visitors brings extra rubbish with them. The Mallacoota Foreshore Holiday Park and Friends of Mallacoota built a simple fix: trailers placed around the park let guests sort their eligible containers for the Victorian container deposit scheme instead of tossing them in general waste, with volunteers from Friends of Mallacoota collecting and depositing the

Every bag of litter collected by Brimbank and Banyule's Litter Work Teams does two jobs at once: it cleans a park, and it gives someone completing a Community Work order a genuine, visible way to give back. The partnership between the Department of Justice and Community Safety and both councils began in 2025, adding dedicated litter collection across parks, activity centres and known hotspots, work designed to complement council cleansing services rather than replace them. Su

Most mornings, before Leopold wakes up, one man is already out walking 5 to 15 kilometres collecting other people's rubbish. Jason Cunningham started walking in 2023 on medical advice, to strengthen his back and manage a chronic health condition. What began as rehabilitation became something else once he noticed the litter piling up along his route. Now, most days weather and health permitting, he covers the Bellarine Highway, shopping strips and sports grounds in the quiet h

When Rochester lost its container recycling collection point, the Lions Club didn't wait for someone else to fix it. They opened a shed on Baynes Street and ran it themselves. Staffed entirely by volunteers, the depot takes cans, bottles and plastics, counts them by hand, and pays residents in cash, EFT, or donations to charity, with a handling fee from the scheme going straight back into the local community. What's grown alongside it is arguably just as valuable: four Year 9

Zero Plastics Australia has recycled 4.8 million plastic lids into more than 250,000 finished products, sold to the likes of Officeworks, Sea Life and Zoos Victoria, all designed and manufactured from a workshop in Ballarat. The founder built the entire operation from scratch: sourcing the supply of single-use lids, buying and learning to run the recycling machines, then teaching himself to design and make the moulds needed to turn ground-up plastic into pens, clipboards, jew