How To Campaign

OK You've just discovered the council have given the US Airforce permission to build a missile silo in the children's sand pit at your local park and you wanna do something about it. But what-and how?

Up until five years ago people in this country pretty much thought "Who's gonna listen to me, I'm just one person". But then 'a motley band of straggly-haired hippies' (Media description at the time) invaded the site of a new motorway at Twyford Down, they came back the next day and the next and the next...

Suddenly there was a new way to register your vote. Now, (thanks to some great media sensationalism), everybody's doing it, from road protesters and civil rights campaigners to local mothers and pensioners bouncing cars off of blocked pavements, ordinary people are discovering how to bend the government's ear.
What follows isn't a definitive guide to setting up a campaign: every campaign is different, so are the attitudes of the council/company/polluter you are going to be dealing with, even the people within a campaign will vary. This is basically a checklist of the needs common to all campaigns. OK, so you think your the only one who gives a damn about the sand pit - wrong. Start sounding out the people you know, friends, your own family, talk to the parents whose kids use the pit.

Think about who else would have an interest, maybe the local primary school teachers? Take the phone nos. of anyone who shows an interest; even someone who doesn't seem too bothered but does say, "It shouldn't be allowed" might change their mind once they find their neighbours are doing something, tell them all you're organising a meeting, get them to tell anyone they think might be interested. It's going to help a lot at this stage if you can give them a leaflet explaining what's going on. You don't have to spend a lot of money or be a great artist. You only need to put down the title of the campaign, why it's bad, whose being bad and a contact no. You can type it or just hand write it. Most cornershops do photocopying for about 5p and you should be able to get up to 12 flyers out of an A4 sheet of paper.

You might only have got ten people's nos. but by the time you do hold the meeting they might have told another 20 people or 30 or 50...

Next step is to find a place to talk to these thousands of angry mums and before you hold your meeting to do some research. Most pubs have function rooms upstairs and most will let you use it for free; if a pub isn't suitable for your campaign there's school halls; church halls, even your front room. A well known and easy to get to venue is the best but even if your first place isn't quite right there's always somewhere else for your next meeting. Get in touch with other groups who know about the subject you are tackling. OK, perhaps a sandpit isn't a good example at this point, there probably aren't that many experts on sand around, but say your campaign was about an incinerator, find an expert on pollution from incinerators or global warming who will come and talk at the meeting. A lot of the groups in the contacts list at the back of this book can provide you with a speaker or if they don't they 'know a man that can'. Don't forget your local Green Party or Friends of the Earth; the library have lists of all sorts of groups as well.

Make sure it is well publicised. At this stage unless your distant auntie's left you a bit of dosh you can't do much more than put up say 10 A4 posters around the area. Contact the local radio and newspaper, they might come depending on how sexy you can make it sound - generally local news is quite boring and journos are always looking for something juicy. This is where your skills at bullshitting come in handy: you need to talk the meeting up big time, tell them how angry people feel, without actually saying so give them the impression that people are mobilising and could even be prepared to do something drastic if the council won't listen, tell them you have the best expert on the subject coming, blah, blah, blah.

Right, so now you've got 20,000 supporters, you've hired the opera house, you've got the national press to actually turn up and you got the world's leading expert to speak. What do you do now? Start by introducing yourself and how you feel, why you've called this meeting, explain how by all getting together you can begin to do something then let your expert do his/her stuff, it's good if this can be a mixture of facts and a question and answer session. If anyone's still awake when it's over now's the time to start organising! You need to get people to take on roles within the campaign. Find out who has any experience at organising/facilitating meetings, who can take the minutes and type them up, who would make a good treasurer, who's good at artwork, publicity, letter-writing, talking to people, who's prepared to hand out leaflets etc. It's important to try to involve everyone at this first meeting in some way realistically as there probably won't be more than 10 or 20 people. Ask for a whipr6und for posters, photocopy's of the minutes. At the end of the evening announce the date of the next meeting.

The following advice came from GEN an anti genetic food campaign but by changing the subject to your own, the rules are the same.
Try to make the group (and venue) as accessible to a wide range of people-experience has shown that issues draw individuals together from all sorts of backgrounds and social perspectives. Empowerment and involvement can mean writing letters for one person and pulling up modified plants to another. Everyone has a limit to what they are able or prepared to put into a campaign. We need to respect all these roles and levels of involvement.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead (1906-l978) For more information contact Genetics at genetics@gn.apc.org Subscribe to 'Splice' or 'Genethics News' as both these publications will keep you abreast of the latest developments in the GE world. They go into more depth than Genetix Update-and the print is bigger!