A barrel of fun: Southampton Green Action get creative to Ditch Dirty Development
Campaigners in Southampton University collected over 170 signatures on an old oil drum to demand that the Department for International Development stops supporting oil and gas extraction projects.
A work of art - all 170+ signatures fill up the barrel and mount the pressure on DFID.
Simon Nash
Green Action campaigner Simon Nash reports:
Our Green Action Society only started at the beginning of the year. Having spent three years in Southampton University without a political environmental society, the time was right to create one.
We decided to campaign on Ditch Dirty Development - People & Planet kindly sent us the resources to run the campaign.
Our first stall was not so successful. It was windy, and we lost 15 signed cards!
Southampton Green Action group fill an oil barrel with signatures to send to Hilary Benn
Simon Nash
But the creative petition ideas in the Ditch Dirty Development Action Guide inspired us. Rather than making an oil pipeline, we thought, why not use an oil drum? We found an old empty one on a building site. I asked the workman, who told us it used to hold cement, and we would save them work if we took it.
The night before the stall, I got some old paint from the cupboard under the stairs and, with memories of nursery school art classes, we used an old washing-up sponge to paint the barrel! It worked surprisingly well. We printed on the Green Action society’s logo and the People & Planet logo, along with information from the Ditch Dirty Development campaign so people knew what they were signing.
We did four stalls all in all - two in the Students’ Union building and two in nightclubs. In total we got over 170 signatures for People & Planet. A storming success!
Next thing, we’ll find a creative way to deliver our barrel to the Department for International Development - to demand that they Ditch Dirty Development now!
Southampton campaigners draw in the punters.
Simon Nash