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Let's be friendsPeople & Planet Staff Profile - Silje Vold
Every month we will profile a different member of staff to give you a flavour of the work they are doing and what motivated them to work for People & Planet. This month we have Silje Vold, our Trade campaign intern...
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Name Silje Vold
Job title Trade Justice Campaign Intern
How long have you been working for P&P? Since September 2006
What made you want to work for P&P? My first People & Planet experience was Shared Planet in 2000, when I was a fresh-faced 16 year old going with a crew from Atlantic College. I was completely blown away by the workshops, the party and the people.
Somehow I managed to avoid becoming directly involved with People & Planet at university, as I was busy working on Socially Responsible Investment, setting up a STAR group and doing anti-war activism in the student activist network. But I was aware that P&P campaigners across the country were doing some really impressive work, so I thought it would be really interesting to work at the P&P office. Essentially, working for P&P is my dream job, as I can work full-time on what I’d otherwise try to squeeze into evenings and weekends!
Let us know the inside gritty details of your job I do the day-to-day running of the Trade campaign, which involves writing webpages, answering emails and phonecalls, and going to conferences and meetings with other organisations. I also do Trade workshops for university groups, and try to get an overview of the opinions and views in the network by reading and starting discussions on the online forum.
I had the opportunity to initiate and develop the cotton & clothing focus for Fairtrade Fortnight, which involved a lot of research, writing of campaign materials, meeting partner organisations, dealing with national media and doing workshops and talks around the country. Now that the Forum has decided to carry on with that campaign, I have to spend time on more resesarch, strategic planning meetings and writing and design of campaign materials.
My sixth form work involves travelling around the country on ridiculously early trains, and doing our introductory talks on climate change or trade to groups of sixth formers. I found it a bit intimidating at first, as the groups can be as large as 300 students, but meeting so many fantastic and inspiring sixth formers who are really clued up and engaged has made me absolutely love the talks.
I also do some skills workshops with sixth form groups, on how to run a good team, how to influence people and how to campaign strategically. Finally I try to keep in regular email-contact with about 15 groups to find out what they are up to and if they have any questions.
What has been your best experience whilst working for P&P? Oh that’s a difficult one, as I absolutely love most aspects of my job! I generally love doing workshops and talks, a rather unprepared 30 minutes talk I did in Leeds on exploitation in cotton & clothing production stands out as the best I’ve ever done. The Leeds Uni P&P group had organised a great speaker event, the audience was really engaged despite having listened for 1 1/2 hours already, and I just felt I was able to connect exceptionally well with them. It felt fantastic to present what I had been working so hard on for months to activists and see that they were inspired by it.
What do you think the most pressing issue in the UK is? There are so many important issues that it’s difficult to point out one. One that particularly interests me apart from the issues People & Planet are working on is the issue of refugees and asylum seekers and the appalling manner in which they are treated. There are such outrageous human rights violations going on in the UK, people escaping political violence and poverty just to be locked up and driven to suicide in UK high-security prisons (aka detention centres) run by private companies who make grand profits of it all. It’s plain embarrassing.
However the issue of refugees and asylum seekers is linked with poverty, global injustice and even climate change, so you guys should all join the FAN club so People & Planet can run 10 campaigns instead of 3!
What do you think P&P will be doing in 5 years time? I hope we’ll be bigger, better and more effective. We’ll have strong international links and have managed to branch out to more diverse groups of students by working in FE colleges. And of course every college, school and university will have Gone Green, have Fairtrade Status, and Invest Ethically. AIDS will still be a big issue, but by now the government will have been so impressed with our work that they have asked us to write their policies for them. Oil will actually be running out, so we will be campaigning on the next big thing: stopping big petro-multinationals buying all the land in the developing world in order to grow crops for biofuel.
If you are interested in applying for one of the People & Planet internships visit the career opportunity pages.
