Wilderhoods empowers residents to work together to retrofit their own neighbourhoods, creating networks of urban habitat across public and private green spaces to meet the needs of both people and wildlife in a changing climate.

The Wilderhoods project was initiated in 2022 by Cassia Read and Ada Nano with funding from the Adapt Loddon Mallee program to run a pilot workshop series in the West End neighbourhood of Castlemaine, providing knowledge and tools for community co-design of urban habitat. The West End Wilderhooders continue to meet regularly to create grassland gardens for pollinators and a creek-to-creek corridor for the Superb Fairy-wren.

In 2023 Wilderhoods was funded by WWF-Australia to refine and test our co-design approach in a second pilot in the South Side neighbourhood of Castlemaine. Neighbours continue to meet to create a network of refuges for the Superb Fairy-wren and to green, cool and beautify their dusty naturestrips.

In 2024, Wilderhoods took an important next step, partnering with the City of Greater Bendigo to adapt the model for a larger, council-led suburb-wide pilot. This collaboration allowed us to test Wilderhoods as a scalable resilience program for local government, exploring how councils can support neighbourhood-level action, strengthen ecological corridors, and build climate resilience at a broader urban scale. 

To learn more about the Wilderhoods process for working with neighbourhoods, download the Wilderhoods report here.