The Coonawarra Running Festival is an all ages, all abilities, all-inclusive event aimed at raising much needed funds and awareness for mental health. This year’s event will be held on 8 November, 2025.
In November 2021, the Penola Wellness Group hosted an event where we were fortunate to have members from the Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation (BMHRF) make a presentation to over 100 people in our Penola/Coonawarra community. We were amazed by the ground-breaking research that they were accomplishing for mental health issues. BMHRF have identified that mental health concerns are growing at an alarming rate, with existing services unable to slow the growth of mental illness.
Prompted by the desire to raise awareness, and to help support the BMHRF, we decided to host a major fundraising event and hence, the inaugural Coonawarra Running Festival emerged in 2022. Our mission is, “together we can make a difference to mental health in our community”. Unfortunately, mental health problems are not discriminatory, and a large percentage of our community will be impacted in some way.
The Festival attracts a significant number of visitors from across Australia, who contribute to our local economy. Previously there has been a yearly average of 300 participants who have ran, walked, wobbled or toddled across the various events over the day. The Festival is held at Coonawarra Park where people can gather to support participants and enjoy Food stalls, markets and family entertainment.
Since its inception, the Coonawarra Running Festival has been a remarkable success. It promotes physical activity and community engagement and has raised $57,000 to date. These funds are held in trust by The Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation. The Coonawarra Running Festival committee collaborated with Breakthrough in initiating a Pilot Youth Mental Health Awareness Program which
has already been rolled out to high school students at Penola High School and Lucindale Area School. We aim to continue the positive momentum by expanding these workshops to other schools in our area. This also includes training local facilitators to conduct these sessions in the future. Our goal is to provide all high school students within our region the opportunity to attend these workshops free of charge.