Oxana Poberejnaia, Local Project Manager, City Centre

As an LPM, I support SUST Swap Shop Action Group and am setting up an Action Group at the Chinese Fo Guang Shan Temple. I am happy to help Action for Sustainable Living with its expansion to the University of . I help with establishing Sustainability and Environmental Group for Students. I am eager to give talks on sustainability to Student Societies, as I did at the meeting of Student Christian Movement. In addition, I plan to involve the residents of the City Centre blocks of flats into sustainable living. I also work on building links with the various communities, such as Chinese and Muslim.

I come from an old charming university city of Tomsk in the forest of Taiga, Russia. In Tomsk, we grow our own vegetables and berries on our allotments and then conserve them for winter. We have an excellent public transportation system, so it is easy to do without a car. It is a Russian habit to pass old clothes down generations in a family and also to give them to your friends with younger children. So, sustainability has been part of my life even before I came to in order to write a PhD Thesis on civic education and democratisation in Russia after finishing my first degree in Political Sciences from the Tomsk State University.

After completing my PhD, I organised three international debates ‘Russia and the West: Media, Democracy and Conflict’. Now that my Thesis is collecting dust on a shelf in the University of , I am happy to be a Local Project Manager for the City Centre with Action for Sustainable Living, at the same time volunteering with other organisations, such as Amnesty International.