E.ON HQ Coventry
Last year seemed like an extremely busy / active year for our group, with the year ending with an influx of new members. One of the first questions we always get asked by people who are new to the group is what sort of things do we get up to. In fact I’m sure that by now we can all reel off a long list of the stuff we’ve done over the years so making a list of last years highlights shouldn’t be too hard.
We started the year off with the Airplot campaign spending a lot of time out on the streets of Birmingham signing people up. Then later in the year we were signing people up to the Big IF campaign.
Festivals are always a great place for campaigning and the chilled-out atmosphere makes it easier to talk to people and get them involved.
We did a fair few festivals last year:
Some of us went to Glastonbury (defiantly one of my highlights and always a great experience) and not long after we had our own stall at the Moseley Folk Festival.
One member of our group even got to go to a U2 concert and ended up on stage with Bono.
From music concerts to comedy gigs, we did some campaigning at two Alistair McGowan gigs (Birmingham Hippodrome and Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton) during his UK tour. Unfortunately the encore from the Wolverhampton gig was cut short due to the fire alarm going off.
We went down to Kingsnorth in Kent to take part in the Milli-Band event and joined the Wave demo in December. We were also representing Greenpeace as part of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition on a demonstration in Coventry which saw a funeral march with coffins (representing the fact that climate change kills). The demo ended outside the UK headquarters of E.ON.
I attended a climate change discussion with my MP which was an event for local people to discuss how to tackle climate change locally. We went to an EU election hustings event based on climate change at Birmingham Council House (not one of the highlights actually - boring, dry, very little participation allowed from the public and most candidates towing their party line). Still it was an experience I suppose.
We didn’t manage to plant any of our own apple trees but we did inspire another local group to do a bit of Guerrilla gardening and plant some in the local area.
We’ve also been involved in some non Greenpeace related climate events such as the G20 Meltdown / Climate Camp in the city, the summer Climate Camp in Blackheath and we also supported TANC (Telford Against New Coal) in their campaign to stop UK Coal getting permission to open up an open cast coal mine near the Wreakin (Which unfortunately has now been given the go ahead).
In between all of this there were street campaigning, an End of the Line screening, skill-shares and other training days.
I’m sure I’ve missed something out somewhere but these are the most memorable. Anyway that’s enough looking back, time to look forward to all the exciting campaigns we’ll be doing this year. Hopefully this time next year we’ll have managed to pack even more stuff into a single year.
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