Young FOE is born....

So, it's been a manic week since Shared Planet last weekend.  Needless to say it was awesome!  I think there were about 850 people there altogether and every single session I attended was inspiring, thought-provoking and I learnt something new.

I ended going to:

- a discussion on Corporate Power - a new campaign P&P will be running over the next 5 - 6 years.  We heard from different NGOs campaigning on corporate power, from World Development Movement through to CAAT and Friends of the Earth, about their own approaches.  The idea was to get the P&P network thinking about what the focus of the campaign should be - there are so many options out there, from tackling tax havens (which mean billions of pounds are not being collected every year for public works such as building a renewable energy industry) to targetting specific corporations such as Natwest/RBS.

- a Go Green workshop.   This was the campaign I ran when I was an intern at People & Planet, and I wanted to see how it had moved on since 2006.  I had to squeeze my way into the seminar room because there were so many students there!! The campaign still has the same resonance as it did, and there was a real buzz among the students about all they could achieve within their own universities.  The session was a skillshare, and it was great to hear people talking about the Green League as a fantastic campaigning tool (it's a league table which ranks unis on their environmental credentials every year).  It made me feel proud and I wanted to stand up in the workshop and say 'That was my baby!', but I didn't...

- A talk and Q&A with Caroline Lucas MEP about the Green New Deal report she's written along with other leading environmental thinkers.   Here's a brief summary of what it's about:

"The global economy is facing a ‘triple crunch’: a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by encroaching peak oil. It is increasingly clear that these three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since the Great Depression, with potentially devastating consequences.

The Green New Deal Group, drawing inspiration from the tone of President Roosevelt’s comprehensive response to the Great Depression, propose a modernised version, a ‘Green New Deal’ designed to power a renewables revolution, create thousands of green-collar jobs and rein in the distorting power of the finance sector while making more low-cost capital available for pressing priorities."

I definitely think they are on the right track - indeed, this is precisely what Friends of the Earth is proposing through its various campaigns.  Going green is going to be the easiest and most sustainable way to get 'out of the red', both for Britain and the rest of the world. 

I went to lots of other sessions, plenaries and debates too, and I ran a stall in between these sessions to promote Friends of the Earth and our new campaign on Renewable energy.  But the most exciting part of the weekend for me was that we finally managed to set up our Young Friends of the Earth group officially.

We scraped an hour out of the programme over Sunday lunchtime to meet up and formally adopt a constitution and sign our registration papers.  We elected interim officers, I'll be the Network Coordinator until we can hold an AGM and actually elect someone 'young', and Becky offered to become the group's treasurer.  We didn't really have enough time to properly start planning all our activities for next year, but we agreed 4 key aims for the network:

1. To provide young members of Friends of the Earth local groups with a forum for sharing ideas, planning joint actions and events and supporting each other in our own local groups.
   
2. To take part jointly in the events and actions of Young Friends of the Earth Europe and represent England, Wales and Northern Ireland in this vibrant European environmental youth movement.
   
3. To help engage more young people in Friends of the Earth local groups and campaigns
   
4. To bring young people together to campaign creatively on Friends of the Earth's local, national and international campaigns, contributing our unique youth perspective through an injection of new energy, ideas, and enthusiasm.
   

To kickstart all this action - we decided to meet up in London next weekend for the International Climate Action Day on 6th December.   There will be a huge Climate March through London and our first action as a Young FOE network is going to be a March of the Homeless Penguins.   That's pretty soon, so actually I'd better go and get on with sending round instructions on how to make a penguin costume, and promoting the march, otherwise it'll just be me and Juliet in our penguin costumes looking a little bit out of place!!! 

Laters...