Evie Papada

Whilst Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty International Who is the campaigner you admire the most? The campaigner I admire the most is Sarah Duthie. She is a campaigner at Greenpeace. Apart from your current organisation which other organisation that campaigns do you currently admire? ‘War on Want’- They seem to campaign on very topical issues and […]

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 […]