An artist is combing art with environmental issues through a series of workshops for young people.
Jade Mitchell, 25, has set up an organisation called Creative Landscapes, which runs projects for children in Borough and Elephant and Castle. Projects it has run have included scrap craft workshops for children, a festival called Art Cycle, foraging for wild foods and composing and photo workshops. She also organised the creation of a graffiti mural using leftover paint, in an aim to avoid the paint being thrown away and damaging the environment.
The organisation’s next project will be to get children collecting discarded plastic, which will then be turned into a huge sculpture.
Miss Mitchell set up the organisation after working for a charity in Nepal.
She said: ““I was living in a really poor village in Nepal. There’s no electricity there for most of the day.
“I realised that people really didn’t waste anything there, because they couldn’t afford to.
It really put things into perspective and made me realise how wasteful we are. So I started coming up with different projects to do with art and the environment.”
She is hoping her organisation will eventually run community events and help more young people.
She added: “We can offer new experiences, outside their scope of familiarity. Some come back and they’re really into it, but others hold back because they think they’re not creative, which is a shame.”
Miss Mitchell has been nominated for an Our Heroes Award as part of a campaign by the South London Press to recognise the achievements of South Londoners.
Judges will choose the winners later in the year and an awards ceremony will take place in November.
Four clubs and shields made by Aborigines in the 1830s have been borrowed by the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
The objects were given to the museum by 19th century surveyor John Helder Wedge.