Green Light Festival

Green Light Festival is a yearly environmental event at the Queens Building on DMU campus and this year I volunteered to help out! This is part of my volunteering experience for the Leicester Award for Sustainability, which is part of the Leicester Award Scheme, a series of awards available for students to take part in. I plan on completing the Volunteering Award next year as I’ve just been elected for Projects and Development on the Contact Volunteering Team, which will provide some interesting blog posts.

The Leicester Award for Sustainability is brand new this year! It has 3 assignments to complete and you need to attend the workshops in order to take-part. For the first assignment I need to complete 30 hours of volunteering and write 5 reflective blog posts on the employability skills I’ve developed, hence this blog post. The blog posts are only allowed to be 100-200 words (don’t ask me why) which is difficult for me, as you may have noticed from my previous posts! I only need to reflect on the C.V skills I develop in the blog posts for the award, so I thought I’d include an extended personal account on here. Lets start with the Green Light Festival:

Skills Post:

My time management skills were tested for the Green Light Festival because I had to walk from Evington which takes an hour, but I also didn’t know how to find the building and had to figure that out once I got there. My first task on this day took me back to when I used to be a waiter greeting customers at the restaurant; I greeted people at the entrance stamping their hands for attendance then swapped for awhile to ask people to provide feedback on their way out. So this job helped me build on my communication and presentation skills. For my next job I had to steward a few of the talks and one film, during this time I also had to make a few announcements, again building on my communication and confidence this time. The event was well organized and I worked with the team on the day to be flexible between a number of different tasks and help them clean up at the end.

Done!  One short paragraph of 168 words. My only regret is that I don’t have space to write about my experience of the event, hence this post!

Originally I agreed to be there for 8am and I’ll admit that I underestimated how tired I would be and the fact that it would take me an hour to walk there. So instead I volunteered 2-8:30 and went to the amazing after party! More on this later.

The decoration was excellent, with banners hanging everywhere and some disguised as helpful signs, I recognized the building straight away, when I eventually found it. As soon as I walked through the door I saw Lilly, she’s also doing the Leicester Award for Sustainability, so I’m sure I’ll be seeing her again. I spent the day running around doing different jobs and I kept bumping into people I hadn’t seen for a long time who are also students at Leicester University and DMU. I also made lots of new friends who are part of Transition Leicester, something else I’ll be volunteering for in a couple of weeks. The friendly environment at these events allow you to meet old friends and make new ones, which shows how inclusive university life really is. I actually can’t wait to put my plans into action next year for the Contact volunteering team!

They also had an art contest, although I didn’t hear who won but I got a photo of this beast:

When the festival was over and we’d finishing clearing up, we went to join everybody else at The Font, a pub on the DMU side of Leicester. They had an event on called the ‘MUD Collective’ which involved DMU students painting artwork for Earth hour, video DJ’s and playing old school video games, in a pub! So I could go and dance one minute then go and relax on a sofa to play Street Fighter the next.

I had a great time at Green Light Festival so I’ve offered to help organize the meeting for Transition Leicester on the 16th, this will allow me to get some experience organizing projects before I join the Contact Committee next year. As Leicester University students we spend too much time on our side of the river from my experience and from now on I’ll take the time to explore the other side.