Hello everyone! Today, it’s the staff team writing this blog post… We’re excited to bring you some details on a very important thing that’s currently happening at People & Planet: the democracy process for our climate campaigns.
As some of you might know, our campaigns are decided by our student network at Power Shift, and they run on a 6 years cycle. Every 3 years, students come together for a review of the campaign, where they assess its effectiveness and make changes/new introductions if they feel those are needed. Fossil Free, our campaign to get UK universities to stop investing in fossil fuel companies, was launched 6 years ago (yes, we can’t believe it either!), and at its third year review, Divest Barclays was introduced. While taking stock of all our victories, it’s now time to decide on where and how to move next with our climate campaigns, considering a wide range of options.
In the final months of 2019, we started a consultation process with students to get a sense of where People & Planet’s climate justice campaigning should go next. We spoke with the groups in our network to ask students to join a steering group, whose role would be to lead the democracy process and make sure campaign proposals are ready to be discussed at Power Shift. Together, we developed a consultation workshop that we run in three locations: at the North & Midlands Regional Event, at the Scottish Regional Event, and at Manchester University.
Then the pandemic crisis hit, and put a spanner in the works. The staff team had to move all P&P operations online, and students moved home, and/or had to figure out how studying and exams looked in the new context. The democracy process, unfortunately, took a bit of a backseat.
But WE’RE BACK! In the past couple of weeks, we’ve reconvened the steering group, and together we’ve devised a plan to move forward with the process, making sure a new climate justice campaign will be decided at this year’s Power Shift.
If you’re on our mailing list, you should be receiving a form through which you can submit a campaign proposal. Do you have ideas about what P&P should be campaigning on next? Please let us know! If you haven’t received the email but you want to submit a proposal, please email us: fossilfree@peopleandplanet.org . We’ll send you more details on how to do it! Deadline for submission is the 8th June.
Once all proposals are received, the steering group will work through them - making sure there’s no repetitions, as well as checking that they abide by our principles. They will also be in touch with those who submitted proposals, to develop them further. There will then be a second, network-wide consultation where students can comment more on specific proposals. These comments will be fed to the discussion at Power Shift.
During the session at Power Shift, attendees will come together to further discuss the proposals, and finally vote on the future of our climate justice campaigns. If you want to be part of this group, make sure you sign up to digital Power Shift!
We hope you’re as excited as we are! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any further questions/comments: fossilfree@peopleandplanet.org . We hope you’re all well, and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the next steps for our climate campaigns!