Community
3 July, 2025
Raising awareness
MORTLAKE College P-12 students have rallied behind mental health awareness – and have completed thousands of push-ups in the process.
Throughout June senior students took part in a push-up challenge to raise mental health awareness amongst the senior student cohort.
The challenge for each person was to complete 3214 push-ups throughout the month, with each one representing the 3214 deaths in Australia to suicide throughout 2023.
More than 23,000 Australians participate in the challenge each year, which since it began has seen more than $12.5 million raised and 329,154,203 push-ups completed.
The challenge was organised at Mortlake College P-12 through school captains Jack Fowler and Molly Goddard, who were delighted to see such a strong representation of students taking part.
“We’ve done it before,” Molly said.
“We wanted to take initiative and do something which is quite relevant at the moment.
“The school is working with students on a ‘growth mindset’ at the moment so we felt the push-up challenge worked well with our overall school values.
“We thought we might as well do it – we worked on getting more coverage for the idea so we started doing things at assembly each week to keep it alive.”
While the goal was for the school to raise awareness rather than funds, it didn’t stop Mortlake College students raising $150 for the cause.
“People decided they wanted to give back where they could, but we wanted to raise awareness while also having fun,” Molly said.
“There are a lot of things going on at school and the work can get quite stressful, so the push-up challenge was a fun way to relieve stress.”
Students participated in the challenge via a phone app which not only tracks the number of push-ups completed, but the daily targets also relate to a mental health fact – giving participants a moment to reflect on the severity of the issue.
“The push-up challenge app helps you log out many you do each day,” Jack said.
“It can be push-ups, sit-ups or squats – whatever you’re able to do.
“Each day, there was a new number which was the number of suicide deaths for that day, for that month.”
Molly said she was thankful for the number of students who took part in the challenge, and enjoyed seeing peers bond over the experience.
“It was really good,” she said.
“Sometimes I would be walking around school and would see people dropping and doing 20 push-ups.
“It was quite fun to see everyone getting involved.”
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