Green Gown Awards 2015 – Sustainability Student Champion - Margaret Jennings - Highly Commended

Student (Fine Art 2nd year) - Goldsmiths, University of London

Margaret takes environmental conservation to heart. She is one of the more genuinely environmentally conscientious people on campus and can be seen regularly recruiting her fellow students to pillage waste skips and rubbish bins for “art supplies”. She follows through on all her promises to green the campus.

When not volunteering with various biodiversity and waste reduction projects, Margaret is conceiving original and practical participatory ideas, communicating environmental issues directly to the community at large. Margaret not only gets involved herself, she encourages her classmates to become more environmentally friendly, and beyond this even inspires outside stakeholders to reduce their environmental footprint.

Essentially Margaret has made waste reduction and re-appropriation of waste products fundamental to her community-driven Art Practice.

Participating in Green Impact since starting at Goldsmiths in 2013, Margaret has not only impacted her department but also changed the mind-set of the administrative staff who originally resisted the idea.

Top 3 learnings

1 Be creative and open your mind to the possibility to re-appropriating discarded items

2 Re-assessing your role as a consumer in relation to what truly makes you happy

3 Be brave, embrace behavioural change and show people “how it’s done”!