House Push Up Challenge: SASC We are Better Together

The HOUSE team organised and facilitated a HOUSE Push Up Challenge in order to improve our mental and physical health, have some fun, but also to raise ‘awareness’ for mental health here in Australia and at SASC (The Push Up Challenge 2024). Our community helped to raise money for Youth Mental Health by completing 3,249 push-ups over 1 week. Every lunch time on the COLA, we met to smash out some push up’s in order to reach our goal. On average, our target goal each day was 55 push-ups. However, some staff and students exceeded these expectations each session by completing 140 push ups.

The main aim of this challenge was not about how many push ups students or staff could do. Rather, it was about raising ‘awareness’ about mental health, ‘reduce the stigma’ and demonstrating our ability as a school community to work together to achieve a common goal (The Push Up Challenge 2024).

Around 40% of ‘young Australian’s aged between 16-24’ years are ‘experiencing’ mental health concerns (The Push Up Challenge 2024). Here at SASC, our aim was to show that when we work together we can make a difference to mental health, support our students and staff at SASC who may be experiencing poor mental health, and raise some money for organisations (such as Life Line) so they can continue conducting research to save the lives of many in Australia. 

The challenge began on Wednesday June 5, which proved to be quite difficult with our aim of 55 push ups. We had 12 people volunteer their time at lunch to complete the challenge. One PE class also completed 5 push ups each, equating to 300 in total during period 3 and 4. For our first day, we achieved an outstanding 1053 push up’s as a community. However, by Friday we had doubled it as we completed 2065.

On Tuesday 11, it was a little bit of a tight squeeze in the weights gym due to the wet day timetable, but we managed to reach 4952 push ups! We again had PE class’s periods 1 to 4 who completed 20 push ups each, equating to 4100!! What an amazing achievement for the PE department.

Please see below our tally of push ups for each day below:

Our success in this challenge truly shone as we have completed 10,529 push up’s and raised $140 as a school community within 1 week! This is not including the generous cash donations we have received. Thank you so much for those who have donated both through cash and online payments.
 
If you haven’t done so already, you can also make a donation if you like by June 24 using the link below https://www.thepushupchallenge.com.au/fundraiser/sascwearebettertogether

Our school has truly shown that we ARE better together! Thank you to all the staff and students who volunteered their time to raise awareness for this great cause. Without your help, our achievements as a school would not have been possible.

A huge thank you from the HOUSE department to Thuan Doan, Joshua Hall, Frank Fan, Sand Dinh, Craig Moore, Julie Panayiotou, Jennifer Papagianopoulos, Alex Chan, Ben Beagley, Tracey D’Elton, Andy Nguyen, Simone Papagianopoulos, Amra Pajalic, and the PE department for their continued support and involvement in the program.

 

The Push Up Challenge Information PDF:

The Push Up Challenge 2024, Information Pack 2024 Schools, viewed 13 June 2024, <https://d2kpu7m6sms0zn.cloudfront.net/6ec90a0cd81650c353979c0029cf1d30.pdf>

 

 

Ms Emily Obeid – Junior Sub School Coordinator | House Leader