Volunteering Gippsland - 2026 Tidy Towns Young Legend Finalist
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 garden, raising $950 through their own fundraising, and creating original artwork for the ward. Nobody assigned them roles. Students who were good with people gravitated to fundraising and stakeholder engagement; others took the landscaping, construction or design. Leadership sorted itself out.
The moment that mattered most, by several accounts, wasn't the planting. It was presenting their finished project to the Gippsland Southern Health Service and GippSport Boards, a genuinely nerve-wracking experience for a group of teenagers, that one board member said left them realising "just the far-reaching impact your project has made to us." One student's presentation led directly to a hospital traineeship offer.
What the program proved, according to Volunteering Gippsland, is that trust is the actual variable. Give young people a real project with real stakes, rather than a simulated one, and the leadership shows up on its own.
The X-factor is that this wasn't one standout student carrying a group project. It was 22 teenagers, each discovering their own capacity to lead.
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