Romiley's Great Big Green Day
On a sunny day in July, St Chad’s eco-church team and a few dozen volunteers ran a ‘Great Big Green Day’ to bless the community and celebrate God’s wonderful world.
Around 200 neighbours, friends and families joined us through the morning for free fun, food, inspiring talks and eco-friendly crafts and games for all ages. We welcomed everyone with a ‘What’s on’ guide and an activity ‘bingo' sheet with prizes for younger visitors to encourage them to visit different stalls.
Friendly local traders joined us selling refills of home products, sustainable gifts, organic fruit/veg boxes and skincare. We organised the space around craft, games, wellbeing, travel, food, home and speaker zones, each with different activities, including:
Crafting a bird box or feeder
Mixing eco-friendly cleaning products
Making wild seed bombs
Enjoying face painting and live storytelling
Discovering how to make butter at home in minutes
Learning about electric cars and air source heat pumps through demos and talks
Tasting delicious homemade soups made from end-of-life produce
Praying for anyone needing healing in their lives
It was a fun morning and everyone left with at least one thing they could do help care for creation. Event organisers Clare Warburton, Jane Higginbottom and Kate Pigott reflected ‘This was a huge team effort and there was a real buzz in the air! It felt like we were able to inspire change, rather than force it. People were starting to realise there were small and big things they could do make a real difference for the planet. We’d thoroughly recommend others give something like this a go!’
Top tips for planning a Green Day:
Start planning early - we started in February, when the outline details were agreed at PCC. Funding came mainly from the PCC with some from a local eco-grant.
Come up with lots if ideas and then hone it down depending on how much help you have.
Think about how to organise the space. We divided the church hall indoor and outdoor space into 7 zones and agreed what activities we would do in each. Have a risk assessment.
Talk to people in the church who have different gifts and ask if they would be willing to help with an activity - we gathered small groups of volunteers to help plan each zone. On the day, we were supported by around 30 volunteers, including our youth group, who got involved and ran many of the games and crafts.
Visit local markets and invite sustainable traders to join the fun! We invited traders along at no charge. Make sure you have enough gazebos for outdoor stalls in case of rain.
Visit local schools and invite them to be involved. We asked schools to design a poster for our churchyard wild flower areas and local councillors came on the day to judge the posters and award prizes.
Think about ways to engage every age group. We welcomed everyone with an eco-activity bingo sheet, which encouraged younger visitors to do different activities and win sustainable prizes. Older people particularly enjoyed the talks and demonstrations.
Plan a communication countdown. We advertised the event on social media about 2 weeks before the event and added a new post each day.