People & Planet Grassroots Blog

People & Planet Leeds and the Quest For Fossil Free Finance

Photograph of four students at a table with signs reading "sign our petition", "bankrupt climate change" etc.

Our biggest achievement this year was at Leeds University Union’s May Forum, where we put forward a motion asking the union to lobby the University of Leeds to cut ties with Barclays until it stops funding the climate breakdown. Having achieved a huge victory at the start of the academic year, with the University divesting £3.6 million of its shares in Shell, BP and Total, we wanted to keep up the momentum and pressure the University to examine its secondary links to the fossil fuel industry. 

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How to run successful campaign handovers

For any campaign to be sustainable over time, campaigners must be able to transfer knowledge from older or more ‘experienced’ members to newer and incoming members. As campaign members frequently shift and change, important knowledge and strategies can fade out if they are not passed on. Universities rely on a high turnover of students within campaigns, making institutional knowledge and longer-term bargaining harder to achieve.

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Setting the Record Straight: Time for Southern Universities to go Sweatshop Free

Earlier this month the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) co-signed an open letter with Electronics Watch (EW) clarifying the nature of SUPCS’ affiliation. Electronics Watch is a worker-driven monitoring organisation which audits supply chains within the global electronics industry, an industry which has been identified as high risk for modern slavery as well as a raft of other workers rights abuses.

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Sweatshop Free and the Activist Campaigning Module at UEA

Graphic image of UEA campus with Sweatshop Free logo overlaid

Before the Sweatshop Free campaign, admittedly, I had never considered the possibility that the electronics that universities purchase could be made in sweatshops, which shows my own ignorance on such an intricate issue. At University of East Anglia (UEA), I chose a module titled ‘Activist Campaigning’ as it wasn’t a typical essay-based module about political theorists; it was going to be practical and engaging and I was grateful to have it offered to me.

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How one Students’ Union won a big victory for sweatshop workers

Image of University of Reading campus overlain with text stating "The University of Reading goes #SweatshopFree"

Reading University affiliates to Electronics Watch!

“If we expect our students to care more about sustainability we should be setting an example to our community and Electronics Watch does exactly that. We are embedding sustainability within University procurement processes and demonstrating our commitment to tackle issues that are at the heart of the University.”

We chat to Molli Cleaver, RUSU President, about the journey her and her fellow Officers have been on to lobby the university to affiliate to Electronics Watch.

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