LDN London takes care of the environment

BY: Ciaran Willis

CATEGORY: News

Community Engagement Manager for Camden, Laurence Swan, writes about how service users have been helping the environment through litter-picking and clothes swaps

LDN London is committed to environmental sustainability across all our services and offices. In Camden, we have been helping the planet by enjoying fun activities with service users.

Being an environmentally-conscious business means caring about our local community and creating healthy, sustainable places to work. We want to create an environment where the people we support and staff thrive – now and in the future.

LDN Eco Champions

Earlier this year, we invited people with learning disabilities in Camden to become ‘LDN Camden Eco Champions’. This is what we call people we support who take part in activities which involve nature and green activities. Using this title helped to get people excited and interested. Thankfully, many people have eagerly taken up the challenge and become our first Eco Champions.

During lockdown we also focused on educating people we support, and staff members, about the environment. We hosted online recycling training sessions and a discussion about climate change on our YouTube channel, LDN TV. We also held a quiz session over Zoom.

One service user said that, after the session, they encouraged their housemates to think more about recycling in their flat – just the kind of response we’d hoped for!

The Big Spring Clean

During June we took part in a campaign by the charity Keep Britain Tidy, called The Big Spring Clean. People we support and staff cleaned up local streets, working together as a team, using litter-pickers to make our local area look nice and tidy.

Everyone wore high-viz vests with our Eco Champion logos, which attracted lots of attention from passers-by, who asked what we were doing and gave us lots of encouragement. It turned into a bit of a competition with a prize for the person who collected the most litter.

The following week we met up for the Big Camden Spring Clean in Gospel Oak, joining many other organisations for people with learning disabilities to again clean up the area. Then, after the event we all had a picnic. (We cleared away the rubbish after, of course!).

Environmental action and swapping clothes!

We have also been working closely with Think & Do Camden, a brilliant organisation which hosts pop-up community spaces in Camden and Islington. They focus on local environmental action, creating a more sustainable and environmentally friendly place for the community.

We jumped at the chance to run a clothes swap stall with Think & Do at the York Rise Street Festival in September. The idea was that people brought clothes they no longer wanted and swapped them for items someone else had brought. It costs nothing and there is no waste. We also tried making our own apple juice from locally sourced apples at their stall, which was fun to do and tasted delicious.

Thank you to Think & Do Camden for the chance to work together and to everyone who went out with a litter picker to make our streets a much nicer place to live!

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