Hi, my name is Halle and I am a Student Green Office Projects Officer. I am currently in my second year of a BA in Games Design and hope to find a job in the industry as a narrative designer. In my free time I like to write creatively, mainly poetry, surrounding topics that my lived experience gives me the understanding to write about. I also enjoy making multimedia artwork- though this is a newfound interest that I am currently engaging in for personal projects. 

Coming to Canterbury Christ Church has been a turning point in my life, and I’ve had the opportunity to do so many amazing things here. I feel as though I have grown as a person, found the happiness I was looking for for years, and have finally found a community of people that mean a lot to me. I had the incredible opportunity to attend Downing Street for the London Design Biennale alongside my course director Dr Alan Meades; and have traveled to Krakow Poland as part of a delegation to build a relationship with Tischner European University. Both of these experiences have led to a lot of opportunities for me, and I feel as though the past year has probably been the best of my entire life.

Sustainability, though, is not a new concept at all for me. A lot of my passion for sustainability has come from my grandparents, who are two huge supporters in my life that have inspired me to do almost everything I have done. They encouraged my pursuits in academia, taught me to be the person I am today, and proved to me the importance of sustainability, both socially and environmentally.

They taught me the balance that I now equip in my work, and most of all, they taught me to care for those around me – whether I knew them or not. Those are the reasons I find such importance in social sustainability – the idea that we must protect those most vulnerable, ensure equality, and improve the quality of life of those around us. While a lot of my projects so far have been based almost entirely around environmental impacts of fast fashion, I’d like to spend a lot of my life focusing on social sustainability on campus and in the wider community.

I also have a passion for sustainable fashion, which started as a way to better express myself, and turned into a genuine attempt to slow my consumption of mass-produced clothing. I love vintage fashion and found myself unable to dress the way I wanted to as the styles weren’t represented in the shops I looked in, so I turned to second-hand retailers, online vintage clothing stores and charity shops to find the items that I wanted to integrate into my wardrobe. Now, I spend a lot of my time educating the people around me on how to curate their wardrobe using second-hand fashion, where the best places to look are; and attempting to break the stigma that is often carried with wearing second hand clothing. 

As an SGO officer, my goal is to change how students think about sustainability. I think there is a huge pressure on students to be sustainable, and because of this they reject the concept entirely. I want to encourage the idea that sustainability is not a case of all or nothing – but instead something you can implement into your life slowly in small steps.

I want to encourage conversation with those who normally would reject the ideals because of the caricatures painted around sustainability, and show them that most of the time, sustainable practices can be more beneficial to us all than unsustainable ones.

By Halle Mills, SGO Projects Officer