Last Saturday was a very interesting day for me as I was invited to attend a training course about political lobbying by Greenpeace. This was only my second visit to the Greenpeace Head Office in Islington and I was very excited to take part.
As you can imagine, I was quite nervous to start with as I was concerned that I would not know enough about politics or even the campaigns to do a good job. But many members from my network (the West London Group) have done the training course and encouraged me to give it a try.
The course started at 10.30 in the morning and we were a group of 14 highly motivated volunteers (considering the time of day). Our two lovely teachers were Julia and Andy and they started off by introducing Greenpeace’s core values and showing us one of the very inspiring Greenpeace short films. As this was a course about lobbying MPs we all knew that there would be some dreaded role playing! And of course we were asked to take it in turns to be constituents and MPs and get as angry at each other as possible, which actually turned out to be a very good ice breaker and much more fun than expected.
Afterwards we had the great honour to be joined by real-life politician Paddy Tipping, former-MP for Sherwood. His job was to demystify MPs and tell us what a typical meeting with an MP would look like. Listening to Paddy’s experience and stories made me feel much more comfortable with the idea of meeting my MP, who, after all, is Malcolm Rifkind, a former defence and foreign secretary.
After this eventful morning I was looking forward to lunch! Like everybody who has been to Head Office before knows that this is a highlight of every training course. We had vegan chickpea and butternut tagine, pilaf with pine nuts and a leafy green salad and we all snuck back for seconds and even thirds (ok, that was just me).
We were then joined by Laura who was invited to share her experience of lobbying for Greenpeace and she told us the (very funny) story of her first meeting with her MP. Knowing that all the other first-time lobbyists were just as nervous as me before their first meeting with their MP was very reassuring.
Tips on letter writing followed as did more role playing and even a card game and after this full programme I can honestly say that I am now actually looking forward to meeting my MP, hopefully it will be soon!
Confident and happy we all went on to the New Rose pub in Islington for a well-deserved pint!
A big thank you to Julia, Andy, Paddy and Laura and to Richard Martin from Greenpeace for another great training day at head office!
If you have any stories about lobbying your MP please comment below!
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Lovely to meet everybody - I had a really fun ( if exhausting) day and learnt a lot. And yes, the lunch was delicious. I was only sorry I couldn't make it to the pub!
I found the above post (Learning to lobby my MP) interesting, it was very clear and concise to read, and it more or less covered this issue in a clear and concise way. The best thing about this post is simple. It's straight to the point, and the post was written in a manner which gives people a confidence-boost.
I have just read your blog on lobbyist training which i found useful . I am will be going on the same course myself in march down in Falmouth , i now know what to expect as you have given me a little insight as to how the course runs , so thank you Jenny for your blog , and good luck for the future lobbying . Thanks Derek .