Me and politics

 

I became increasingly involved with local politics in Cambridge from about 2012 onwards as a non-partisan activist on a number of issues. I was involved in organising a number of hustings in Cambridge in the run up to the 2015 election. Following the election I set up a series of meetings with MP Daniel Zeichner and local experts to discuss Cambridge's approach to addressing climate change. I was also involved in setting up Fossil Free Cambridgeshire, a citizen-led campaign to get the local councils to divest from fossil fuels.

 

Alongside Cambridge activism I've worked with a couple of projects aiming to develop political will to address climate change at national level. Most recently I helped the Low Carbon Communities Network relaunch as Climate Action England with a renewed focus on political lobbying.

 

I'm looking for opportunities to share the experience of discovering political agency. I feel the experience I've gained can be useful to a wide range of groups/individuals on a wide range of issues/campaigns.

 

Workshops

 

I started to think about running a series of workshops around the time of the 2015 election. I ran a small pilot in June 2015 focusing on mapping existing campaigns and appropriate elected representatives to work with on a range of issues. The aim was to create a friendly, supportive space to help participants to (re)discover and exercise political agency.

 

Between then and now I've become aware of a number of projects with similar aims including -

 

- Tassos Stevens' A Better Conversation is "about how to duck the barriers which make participating in politics difficult, how to articulate an open progressive vision without political baggage, how to make connections with people of different views beyond our echo chambers, and how we might best change minds."

 

- Lucy Ellinson's One Minute Manifesto project is about creating opportunities for participants to discover/exercise their political voice.

 

I've also been reading Andy Williamson and Martin Sande's book From arrogance to intimacy – a handbook for active democracies which provides a great overview of the problems with our current democracy, a vision of a healthier democracy and a road map of how to get from here to there.

 

I'm looking for opportunities to run more workshops. Especially outside Cambridge. Look at a map of the 2015 election results -