What an evening! Last night the West London Greenpeace group celebrated 40 years of Making Waves in the George IV pub in Chiswick. We had invited local people and all our West London supporters, friends and family and many of them came along to celebrate this big anniversary with us.
Becky our hostess (with the mostest) kicked off the night with showing one of the many inspiring Greenpeace films, “A time comes” about the Kingsnorth campaign.
This was followed by our very special “headline act”, the truly amazing Emily Hall!
Emily was one of the activists who in 2007 closed down Kingsnorth power station in Kent by climbing up the over 200m high chimney! She shared with us her personal story of how she became interested in the environment as a young kid in New Zealand and about her path with Greenpeace that took her to her current job in the actions unit at Greenpeace UK. After her presentation she patiently answered all the curious questions about the 9 (!) hour long climb up the tower at Kingsnorth and her experiences with Greenpeace since then.
If you are reading this, thank you so much Emily for volunteering your time and for sharing your amazing story!
We were lucky to have our own technically gifted orang-utan to help with the audio and visuals (thanks Rollo) so the evening continued with the screening of some short films, including one of the many VW films that was submitted to the competition.
Becky told our guests about our VW campaign and showed a short film of the launch of the new Rainbow Warrior last year. I introduced our most recent campaign, Save the Arctic and encouraged our guests to sign the petition online to stop Shell from their crazy arctic oil drilling plans.
We ended the night with some homemade birthday cake and cookies and a fabulous raffle! All our active members were kind enough to bring along some great raffle prizes, we had chocolates, champagne, books and Rainbow Warrior Beer from Head Office (thank you Rachael), theatre tickets for Wicked, fluffy toys and many, many t-shirts ranging from Sesame Street to Inspector Gadget (thank you soo much Becky)! As everybody had bought plenty of raffle tickets I think it’s safe to say that almost everybody was a lucky winner.
I would like to thank everybody who was involved in making this evening happen ( a special thanks to Duncan who was our brave Stormtrooper and Rollo in the freshly febreezed orang-utan outfit) and also the staff of the George IV pub who were very friendly and helpful! And of course thank you everybody who came along to celebrate this special occasion with us and to find out what Greenpeace is all about! Hopefully see you again soon!
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