Former P&P Campaigner: Lucy Russell
People & Planet has been around for over 35 years in one form or another and to celebrate this, we will be profiling former members of P&P or Third World First groups to see what they've been up to since leaving the network.
Lucy (centre) ‘blowing the whistle’ on violence against women
Name: Lucy Russell
When were you involved in People & Planet/ Third World First? I joined the P&P group at my Freshers Fair in my first week at Hull Uni. After three years of getting covered in paint and blu tack as a group camapigner I got a job at the support office as an intern. I’m now on the board of Trustees for the P&P trust.
What are you doing now? How did you get there? I’m now Policy Development Officer for YWCA England and Wales. I look at what matters for young women facing poverty, discrimination or abuse and work with them to find policy solutions. My degree was in gender studies and anthropology giving me a good grounding for equality and diversity work. P&P gave me a really broad understanding of campaigning and making change happen so I was lucky enough to be able to combine that with gender knowledge and make a job out of it.
What inspired you to start campaigning? There’s so much - but being quite young and seeing the Tiannamen Square massacre made me realise that things have to change. Those young people were willing to risk everything for their rights and they way they were treated was horrific. It made me get off my bum and do something about the things I cared about.
Describe your most memorable P&P experience: Most of it! Sitting round a campfire at my first Shared Planet singing amazing songs about the world - made me realise how happy and connected I felt to such an amazing group of camapigners. I knew then that I wanted to be more invovled in campaigning. But also building a sandbag dyke round the Hague as a climate change protest, joining tens of thousands of protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa, dressing in orange and dancing with a fat cat for Trade Justice, forming a human chain round the G8 in Birmingham, sneaking out of our Uni’s nightclub to put ‘Cancel the debt’ chains all round our in-house banks at 2am and hearing that one of the groups I supported had just pulled a tank up outside their Vice Chancellors office to protest againt arms trading - I was so proud!!! Basically, being part of an amazing vibrant network and seeing it grow and develop.
With many commentators suggesting that apathy is rife amongst young people, what can be done to engage young people in the campaign for social justice? I don’t come across many young people who don’t care about the issues, but I do come across a lot who have too much on their plate to be able to look at the bigger picture. Campaigning takes confidence and a lot of young people lack the confidence in their beliefs and their knowledge about the issues to speak up. Politics today is still designed for a certain elite group and it is a struggle to comprehend it. That’s why its so important to have groups like P&P who make the issues and the means for change easy to grasp. We need to make sure we are appealing to a very diverse range of young people and that campaigning is always enjoyable and accessible, not something that’s just for white men in suits or hardcore ‘swampys’.
What do you think is the most pressing issue in the UK today? Tricky - Poverty and of course the underlying issue of trade and trade rules. But also just basic human rights, especially for women. In this country and worldwide people’s rights are violated everyday and weirdly it’s never the big institutions that stand up for rights - it’s people like us.
What was the last album you listened to? Editors - really good!
Where would you most like to visit? Slovenia - I have wanderlust at the moment - will try to go this summer.
What are your ambitions for the future? I guess being rich and successful are politically incorrect? I want to go on a husky sleigh ride in the snow. On a serious note, I’m working with a lot of Gypsies and Travellers at the moment and I want to see real change happening for them in the UK and Europe. So my ambition is just to get my part of the work right - sounds simple eh?