On Saturday 9th March, Birmingham Friends of the Earth decided to get out of our natural inner-city habitat and go on a trip to Waseley Hills Country Park, albeit to sit down in a meeting room and plan out the new ‘Let’s Get Moving’ campaign, facilitated by Jenny Thatcher from the activism team at national Friends of the Earth. Just as the Waseley Hills is a watershed between the Trent and Severn drainage basins, the group hoped our major brainstorming session would be a watershed moment for Let’s Get Moving.
The campaign was always intended to be a transport campaign, but BFoE decided pretty early on that it was important to make a link between air pollution and poor transport options by demonstrating the health and economic problems caused by the particularly poor quality of Birmingham’s air.
To make the campaign clearer and more focused, we tried to look back and run through exactly who to target with a transport campaign. We drew up a list of winners and losers, did a SWOT analysis (our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), and then tried to filter down our long list of objectives.
In the end, we decided that focusing on cycling and walking was the best option and our aim became: “To improve active transport provision in Birmingham in order to improve air quality.” Our primary goals are to putt a target into Birmingham’s cycle strategy, increase spending on cycling infrastructure in Birmingham, enforce bus & cycle lanes and promote cycling and walking as travel choices. As part of this we also aim to fund and promote a totemic cycling project.
