Benalla has won two awards in Keep Victoria Beautiful’s 2020 Sustainable Communities – Tidy Town Awards. The awards recognise, celebrate and share grassroots initiatives and positive actions taken by community groups, educational institutions, businesses and councils in rural and regional areas in Victoria. At a virtual awards ceremony on Saturday 10 October,…

In May, Benalla’s community foundation, Tomorrow Today, appointed local pharmacist Marsha Watson to their board of directors. Marsha shares the organisation’s vision of a brighter future for our community. We ask Marsha a few questions about her new role. Q: What do you love about Benalla, Marsha? Well, that’s a…

Jenny Reaburn has been volunteering with Tomorrow Today as a Reading Buddy since 2014. Trained Reading Buddies are matched with a Benalla P-12 College student in Year 1 or 2, visiting the classroom twice a week for the year. They read quality picture books to their buddy, listen to their reading, and help with spelling and other…

The weekly sessions of our Parents Early Education Partnership (PEEP) program have become a fixture in the lives of Benalla’s young children and their parents, with over 220 families taking part this year. As well as being a place to share songs, stories and parent discussion, PEEP offers an important…

Benalla Uniting Church received a grant from Tomorrow Today’s Community Fund in 2018. We visited the garden to check on their progress. “Prior to lockdown,” explains Tanya Walker, Presbytery Secretary at Benalla Uniting Church,“we had been enjoying weekly working bees in the garden, with up 20 volunteers helping out. The produce from…

Twenty one of Benalla’s young people took on a challenge earlier this year – to identify and solve a local issue, using creativity, teamwork and technology. The students, aged 11 to 16 years old, attended a series of workshops offered by Tomorrow Today to foster skills needed for future work….

It was a somewhat unusual setting for the Venturers – an online Zoom chat rather than a Scout Hall meeting or mountainous hike – but that didn’t prevent new connections and new experiences at their meetup with Connect9 last week. Connect9 is a program unique to Benalla, run by Tomorrow…