Experiences of a Campaign Advocate
Monday,7 September 2009 by nick.chan
On the to do list: call the press, paint the banner, check up on legal stuff, scout out the area, fire off the call-out facebook reminders, assemble the costumes, prepare the spiel – all in a day’s work for the RBS AGM action in London in April this year. These are the kind of things that set one’s campaigning pulse racing, heightened by the excitement of taking a major step forward in P&P’s campaign to transform RBS into a paragon of environmentally sustainable finance.
I didn’t try and take this all on this myself, of course (that would be slightly mad). I had the thrill of assembling this list with P&Pers from around the country, and we all brought our different experiences to bear on how to pull off the best possible campaign action. But volunteering as a Campaign Advocate for the Ditch Dirty Development campaign meant being prepared to go the extra mile (in this case, it involved more than a few miles – taking the train to Reading to collect some props!) and to spend a couple of full days to really tick and double-tick all the boxes to ensure that the action would meet our campaign goals. It meant keeping in touch with the group plotting a parallel action in Edinburgh, and it meant constantly asking ourselves the question of how this action did indeed fit into our bigger, strategic picture.
Over the past two years in this volunteer role I’ve had the opportunity to meet other P&P campaigners from across the country and offer advice, facilitate campaign planning workshops, chip into the development of national campaign strategy and tactics, help out with galvanizing interest at Shared Planet. The wonk in me took an unhealthy interest in which MPs have signed up to our Early Day Motion in Parliament, and more importantly, provoked the question of which MPs should have signed up to our EDM, and how we could soothe the political currents to flow in our direction. And working closely with P&P staff has offered me a window of insight into the nitty gritty things that go into working behind the scenes to give a national campaign wings – the intricacies of working with other campaign groups, the constant challenge of how best to provide support to P&P groups, the reminders of the long-term view and where the opportunities and obstacles would lie throughout the year.
All this, of course, got to be fitted around my own coursework and deadlines, necessitating the occasional reminder that I did have a degree to finish, after all. Campaign advocating was, at the end of the day, as much or as little as I made of it, with no shortage of things to do and opportunities to contribute. Some I had to decline. But I’ve been incredibly lucky to have this chance and what I’ve learned will stay with me for the rest of my life. The prospect of change can, and will often seem rather daunting, perhaps even improbable. But the vision of achieving the improbable is what drives us on, and gets us out of our chairs to trigger a cascade of small steps that culminates in that vision. And, in case you were wondering, the process of doing so has been an exhilarating one.
So this is my pitch for you to think about volunteering as a Campaign Advocate for P&P’s campaigns - find out more!
Tags: Campaign Advocate, campaigning, ditchdirtydevelopment, RBS, Volunteer