Lizzie Jeans
Whilst Campaigns Consultant at End Child Poverty Lizzie is freelance campaigner. She was previously Campaigns Manager at Help the Aged and has worked for the Methodist Church, People & Planet and Christian Aid. Apart from your current organisation which other organisations that campaign do you admire? Shelter, Christian Aid, RNID and YWCA. Who is the […]
Meeting Wangari Maathai – environmental and social activist
The death of Wangari Maathai on 25th September 2011, took me back to the day I was fortunate to meet her. It was the same day as Live 8 Day in 2005. At the time, I was the Mayor of Islington and for my year in office, I had a theme – a small campaign […]
So what next?
I recently returned from Germany where I led an advocacy capacity building session for an NGO, and as I have often remarked in the past in a room full of different nationalities, there really is a common international language of advocacy campaigns. I was also struck at how the big challenges in this work are […]
Building capacity for advocacy campaigning
What is the best way to help train campaigners? Is it a week long course? A day course at regular intervals? Mentoring support? A peer group? There is clearly no one answer but it is one question that has been much on my mind recently. A year ago at the Refugee Council, we ran a […]
Charities should challenge politicians’ view of them
The article “Donors Will Reject Charities” refers to comments form a Canadian charity law expert. He spoke at a European-wide conference stating that donors in 10 years time will question whether charities are worth funding as they don’t solve social problems, but simply make things more tolerable. I think we need to note that his […]
Don’t lose the fire in your eyes
A while ago I led an advocacy campaigns training course about how to work with the UK Government and Parliament. As part of that course, the group went across to Parliament and met with a Conservative MP to hear directly from him about the role of the MP. One of the questions that the group […]
Developing your theory of change
A couple of months ago I was involved in running the residential weekend for the Sheila McKechnie Foundation award winners. We had gathered the award winners together and over the course of a long weekend attempted to cover some of the key points in campaigning – reflecting on both success and failure. I am always […]
Definitions
When I have run advocacy campaign training in the past, an early obstacle can be the issue of definitions. So when I was at a conference recently in Manchester, I was very taken by the definitions offered by Justin Nsengiyumva from Refugee Action who runs their TRIO project. Firstly he suggested that a policy is […]
The need for campaigning focus
Last month I had the opportunity to go over to Warsaw to run a two day training course over a weekend for Polish NGOs. The brief for the workshop was fairly clear: to run an introductory session on campaigning to inspire and motivate the NGOs. As ever with these international workshops, and as I have […]
Ray Mitchell
Whilst Senior Campaigns Manager at Age UK (Formerly Age Concern England) Apart from your current organisation which other organisations that campaign do you admire? It’s difficult to single out individual organisations as there are excellent examples of campaigning everywhere, but I regularly visit MoveOn.org and admire their creativity and how quickly they respond to events. […]