YOUNG minds from across five Secondary Colleges in Northern Victoria came together at Notre Dame College Emmaus Campus, on Friday, June 19, for the 2026 GV Youth Environmental Congress.
It’s the second year that Notre Dame has hosted the event led by NDC sustainability coordinator Phillip Guthrie, and has grown to five schools taking part in the event with greater student engagement from Notre Dame, Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), All Saints Anglican School, Galen College (Wangaratta) and FCJ College (Benalla).
A range of guests spoke at the congress as the students workshopped topics around biodiversity, and developing a biodiversity initiative for their respective schools that will have a positive impact long after their time at school finished.
Each of the schools have environmentally conscious programs for students to get involved in. At GSSC they have things like pollinator gardens, backward recycling, and CDS recycling.
“It’s the environmental leaders that organize these things with the help of staff. We spread it around school and put it up on the bulletin, so then students at our school know what we’re doing. They usually participate in a lot of the programs because they tend to find it interesting, it’s not something you would expect from students, but you see it,” said GSSC student Harytharany (Hary) Ganeshan.
All Saints Anglican School is still in its infancy, but that hasn’t stopped them from engaging their students to plant seeds for a better environmental future.
“We’re new, so every year we get the year threes to plant a bunch of trees along the side of our school, so we can have more trees, because at the moment it’s just a bunch of dirt,” said Isobel Black-Griffin.
