When confronted with the question of what we can do to help the environment, finding out where to start can be quite complicated, especially in a big city like London. While living in such a vibrant metropolis surely comes with its advantages, trying to help contain its high levels of waste and pollution mostly seems like an impossible task, especially when we attempt to accomplish it on our own. 

Luckily enough, last Saturday I joined Student-Led Volunteering Project Green Walkers for their monthly litter-picking walk around the Bloomsbury campus. I found out that as long as you do it with the right people, helping the environment can not only be easy, but fun too! Having met outside Mully’s to gather the necessary equipment, volunteers walked together towards Fitzrovia. Throughout their walk, passers-by provided the volunteers with plenty of motivation, thanking them affectionately for their services and for the dedication they showed to their community. After their hard work, the volunteers enjoyed a well-deserved break together.

The UCL’s Green Walkers’ litter-picking session gave me the opportunity to to spend the time with an incredibly diverse group of people. Undergraduates from different years and courses were present, as well as graduate students and even people from UCL’s academic staff. While many of the volunteers who where present had been on the walks many times before, several others had only joined in for the first time, after having heard about the event on social media. All along the litter-picking walk, I had the chance to get to know many of them, and soon understood why the Green Walkers’ project is so popular.

 The walks are a way for us to actively make a difference and the results of our work are immediately visible. -  Green Walkers Volunteer 

It only took me a short while to realise that something as simple as gathering up once a month for a couple of hours to pick up litter from our streets, can have a huge impact on our surroundings and the community we are part of.

 

Written by Sofia Esposito, Student Photojournalist 

We hope you this article has opened your eyes to all the fun things that volunteering in a Student-Led project can do. If you want to try leading a project, check out our page here