2025 was truly a bumper year for our small but mighty charity, one that has created powerful ripples of positive change across East and West Sussex. Guided by our three pillars – conserving resources, making food sustainable and restoring biodiversity – we’ve shown what a dedicated community can achieve with passion, collaboration and a shared vision for a greener future.

At the heart of our work is a highly effective team: seven willing trustees, several environmental educators, the equivalent of two full-time employees and a grant writer (not in a pear tree!) This brilliant team is strengthened by an incredible network of volunteers who bring our mission to life in towns, villages, schools and public spaces across Sussex.

One standout achievement this year has been our work on recycling. Our Sussex Green Living (SGL) Horsham District ‘Wombles’ now operate across 20 public drop-off locations in 15 villages and towns. Together, they diverted an impressive 4,225kg of hard-to-recycle plastics into specialist recycling schemes – material that would otherwise have gone to landfill or incineration. Through the year, we hosted 11 Sussex Green Hubs, a vibrant community spaces, which includes the Horsham Repair Café, a recycling education station, refill shop, Horsham Community Fridge, Horsham Eco Churches and Transition Horsham. It’s the last Saturday each month, and there’s a cuppa and cake for all. Each month we also include arty activities for kids and on 31^st January we will be launching a Growing Hub.

Practical action sits at the core of all these hubs. In 2025, almost a thousand plastic bottles were refilled with personal and household cleaning products, and hundreds of household items were repaired by our Repair Café volunteers, saving money, reducing waste and sharing valuable skills across the county.

Sustainable food and biodiversity work also flourished. Thanks to a generous donation, we ran our first Plant to Plate foodie festival across Horsham town, attracting over 800 visitors for a delicious day of talks, demos, games, music and inspiration. This festival, and the pollination project enabled us to work with many new companies and sponsors who enabled us to install new ‘Pollination Education Stations’ right across East and West Sussex. These bee-hotel-planters support living insects and inform the public about what they can do too.

Education remains central to our mission. We attended 40 community events, often with our much-loved mobile classroom – a vintage milk float that never fails to spark conversation! We also engaged thousands of pupils across 44 schools, helping young people understand climate action, biodiversity and the importance of conserving all our precious resources (not ‘rubbish’!).

Behind the scenes, our trustees and one-day-a-week grant writer secured funding from an impressive 21 trusts, foundations and councils, ensuring our work is supported.

We shared our message widely, publishing monthly email newsletters, weekly WSCT newspaper columns and hundreds of articles for village magazines, reaching over half a million homes!

It’s great to feel that we’re punching above our weight and are delighted to have published our first Purpose and Impact Report, outlining our 2025 achievements and our exciting plans for 2026 and beyond.

As we look ahead, we’re keen to continue welcoming new volunteers, particularly in public engagement and education, and we’d love a lead volunteer for our new Sussex Laundry Care campaign to tackle microplastic pollution.

We’re also seeking an external auditor to support our growing charity.

Thank you to every trust, foundation, corporate sponsor, trustee, volunteer and supporter who has helped us create happier, more connected and caring communities across Sussex. Together, we’re proving that small really can be mighty.

Read our Purpose and Impact Report here www.sussexgreenliving.org.uk