Students from Nottingham College are getting ready to share their creativity with the public at this year’s Green Hustle Festival, after winning funding through the College’s Sustainable Futures programme.
Our fashion students are getting ready to share their creativity with the public at this year’s Green Hustle Festival, after winning funding through the College’s Sustainable Futures programme.
As a main sponsor of this year’s festival, we're proud to support student-led projects that encourage creativity, sustainability and community involvement across the city.
The group behind the project, called Eco Day, will be running a range of hands-on sustainability workshops in Nottingham’s Market Square on 30th May. Visitors will be able to get involved in activities including sashiko stitching, weaving, making planters from recycled plastic bottles, and contributing to a community quilt project.
The students say the aim is to show that sustainable fashion and creative reuse can be simple and open to everyone.
“The techniques we’re teaching are so simple to do, and literally anyone can do them,” one student said. “It doesn’t cost a lot of money, it doesn’t take a lot of time, it’s just a good way to promote sustainability in an easy, effective way.”
The project has also brought together students from different creative courses across the College. Photography students involved in a sustainability exhibition at the Surface Gallery from 17–24 June recently photographed the Eco Day team ahead of the festival, helping promote the work and collaboration taking place between the groups.
For many of the students involved, the experience has been about much more than sustainability. “Confidence, definitely,” one student explained. “I’m not normally a public speaker at all, so pitching to big groups was completely out of my comfort zone.”
Another added: “We started in lessons just coming up with ideas, and then suddenly we were pitching them to professionals.”
The Eco Day team hope their community quilt project will continue to grow long after this year’s event, becoming something the Nottingham community can keep adding to year after year.
By supporting projects like Eco Day and sponsoring events such as Green Hustle Festival, we continue to encourage students to turn creative ideas into real projects that benefit both the community and the environment.