Join us for a day of community, climate-friendly food and creativity!
Bring your appetite and your ideas for a climate-friendly Reading - we'll do the rest! Also - pleasereserve a spot to avoid food waste and so we can update you if anything changes. This Reading Climate Festival event is brought to by ReadingCAN and sponsored by REDA and Reading Borough Council.
💚PROGRAMME OVERVIEW: What's on in the park?💚
FOOD -- £8* today only (usually +£12): We've invited two popular local restaurants to set up in the park: * Vegivores (selling delicious climate-friendly burgers and burritos) and * Tutu's Ethiopian Table (selling their famous misr wot and vegetables). *This special festival price was made possible by sponsorship from REDA and Reading Borough Council. The park cafe will be open as usual for ice creams, tea and coffee. All activities in the park are free.
ACTIVITIES: * Incredible Edible Reading: Food growing demonstrations & free growing kits * Commando Jugendstil and Imagine Ecotopia: Kids and adults can add their ideas to a hopeful, shared vision for Reading * Kids can make shakers and join a samba parade with Beatroots (please bring two clean empty cans!) * Learn how to make paint from fruits and vegetables * Local creatives can join a Solarpunk Imagine Ecotopia Workshop (booking essential) * Add to a Storytelling Tree, Future of Reading Wall and Intergalactic Postbox * Or just come and hang out in the park and enjoy a picnic and a mellow afternoon!
See you there!
ONE :🌱Grow Where You Are! with Incredible Edible Reading 🌱
Do you have a pot, balcony or garden? Are you keen to grow some of your own food but don't know where to start? If you are already growing, do have questions, or do you want to swap seeds? Incredible Edible Reading is here to help with:
🌱Growing demonstrations – Simple, climate-friendly techniques for growing your own food, with tips for beginners and seasoned growers alike
🌿Growing kits & seed swap – Pick up a free pre-made kit to get you started, plus successful seedlings to inspire you. You can also participate in the RFGN seed swap here!
🌳Storytelling tree – Share your food-growing stories, memories, and experiences. (Part of IER's Grow Where You Are campaign.)
💚 Tips & advice – Take-away guidance whether you're ready to start growing or still exploring the idea
💫 What would Reading be like if we truly served all people equally and functioned in harmony with nature?
🎨 Help bring this story of abundance to life! Envision what a good life means in practice, through art, writing and spoken word. Then explore the concrete, collective steps it will take to get there together.
🎬If you have already seen the People's Emergency Briefing film, this activity may help you process that information in a creative, hopeful way. But you don’t have to have watched the screening to take part.
🌈The following events are part of theImagine Reading: Positive Futures Programme curated by Cinergy Studios and supported by REDA.
Imagine Ecotopia Workshop for Children and Families: Children and families are invited to explore hopeful futures through 🎨 drawing and painting🌱 ecological imagination activities📮 future messages and storytelling🌿 collaborative art-making and✨ playful creative prompts. Participants will help build the Future of Reading Wall — a growing public artwork filled with drawings, paintings, poems and messages imagining a kinder, greener and more connected future for Reading. More info about these activities here.
Launch of the Intergalactic Post Box: This participatory artwork acts as a creative data-gathering tool, inviting the public to submit messages to and from the future and capturing local people's hopes, fears and aspirations for Reading
Your 2050 Ecotopia Workshop for Creatives: Please register for this event separately here as space is very limited. The workshop invites filmmakers, artists, writers and other creative people to collectively imagine hopeful, sustainable and creative futures for Reading through the lens of Solar Punk — a movement that envisions futures where nature, technology and community exist in harmony.
FOUR: 🎨Colours from the Kitchen Painting Workshop🎨
Join Petals of the Earth together with Green Tracks Travel for a free, creative, hands-on painting workshop for children and adults with curious minds.
Explore a palette of beautiful natural paints made from everyday kitchen scraps such as vegetable peels, spices, and other food waste.
FIVE: 🤩Kids shaker-making and samba parade with Beatroots 🤩
Kids can get some help making a shaker at 11:45am and then join a joyous parade with Beatroots around Forbury Gardens at 12:15. (You'll need to bring two clean cans to make a shaker - we'll provide the rest.)
Please remember to reserve you spot to help us plan, thank you!
🎪Calling sponsors and partners🎪
LET'S KEEP CREATING THE TOWN WE WANT TO LIVE IN
Last year, 450+ local people participated in a ReadingCAN project to reimagine Reading as a happier, healthier, more climate-friendly place to live.
Wouldn't it be great to create a regular, monthly space like this community lunch to start living the future we want to see? Get in touch if you'd like to help bring Reimagine Reading to life, as a sponsor, partner, entrepreneur or imagination partner.
ReimagineReading (noun/verb)To reclaim the future of Reading through imagination and creative collaboration; A culture of continuous, place-based innovation; To prioritise human and ecological wellbeing even if markets don't; To cultivate optimism, agency and collective possibility; To start living the future we know is possible
