Rotary Club Southern Mitchell

13/10/2026

The Rotary Free Laundry at the Wallan Laundry Lounge is on again Wednesday 9-12 noon. If you need a hand getting your laundry done we’ll be there to help you out.

11/10/2026

Thank you to every Rotary club that wore a hat yesterday. Here is the kind of thing your money goes looking for.

No eleven year old decides one morning to dislike her body.

It accumulates. A comment at school, a filter, a hundred images of a face that does not exist, and somewhere in there an ordinary child starts auditing herself in a way she will not easily stop.

The window to interrupt that is narrower than most parents realise. It is late primary school and the first year or two of high school, which is exactly the age when nobody is talking to children about any of it.

So a team at Flinders University built eight lessons. Not a talk about self-esteem. Eight classroom lessons that show children how the images are actually made, why they are made that way, and what to do with the feeling when it arrives.

Then they tested it properly, which is the part almost nobody pays for.

In a trial of 1,316 students, the girls who did the program had half the risk of the control group of developing clinical concerns about their body shape and weight a year later. Half. Twelve months on. From eight lessons in an ordinary classroom.

In 2019 we backed that team, Professor Tracey Wade and Dr Simon Wilksch, to take the online version of their work further and reach more young people with it.

This is what we mean when we say we fund possibility. Not a slogan about children’s mental health. Eight lessons, 1,316 children, and a measurable difference a year later in how a girl sees herself.

There is a great deal more of this waiting to be funded.

Back the next breakthrough with us. australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

If body image or eating is hard for you or someone you love, the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline is 1800 33 4673.

07/10/2026

30/09/2026

Members of Rotary Southern Mitchell made a presentation this evening on our environmental project, Collect to Protect, to our Rotary friends at Kinglake Ranges. It was great to catch up and share news about projects each club is working on. Rotary club projects are so diverse, driven by local volunteers responding to their community.
Thanks to Jordan for the fun Rock, Paper, Scissors warm up to kick things off.