I found a pair of shoes recently. They were large yet inviting, left by their previous owner, clean and polished ready for their next one. They looked too big for me, but nevertheless I tried them on anyway. Not surprisingly, they didn’t particularly fit well. After getting some help tying the laces, I ran about for a bit, played some games, had a few stumbles, until a man came with quite large feet asking for his shoes. I took the shoes off, noticed they had accumulated quite a bit of dirt so gave them a quick spit shine and gave them to their new owner.
If you don’t know and are slightly confused, our Campaign Support Worker Joe Peacock, after years of great service, has left to join the Wildlife Trust. We’re sad to see Joe go, but we are excited to have Julien Pritchard joining us and to see what ideas he has to move the group forward.
Climate Change & Energy
The ‘CBE’ campaign is beginning to come into a new stage. There has been a variety of successes so far, including thousands of signatures collected both digitally and through signing of postcards, sending a message to the government to encourage them to switch to Clean British Energy thus earning the country a CBE. The next stage is for us to start pushing politicians to take renewable energy seriously when they write the new energy bill in the upcoming months. This is a rare opportunity for the government to create a greener, cleaner and fairer electricity market in the UK, and we all have to make sure they do it right. We have lots of stunts coming up and it’s a good time to be a campaigner with us.
Biodiversity
The bee cause is still running strong and comes to a climax for the year with our comedy gig at the Glee Club ‘there’s something funny in the honey’. The money raised through this event will fund the activities and projects for when the bee cause comes back next Spring. We have already held events raising awareness of the UK’s struggling bee population, with one at Martineau gardens being a real highlight, so we can’t wait to see how far we can go with this.
Waste
Lead campaigner John Newson is still going strong with his one bin bag a year quest and, due to the Council looking to start using wheelie-bins, John is starting to get some great press coverage. This is leading us into some promising avenues to get our views across. Adding to this is a new national campaign – all we can say is watch this space.
Transport
Bad news for Birmingham on the transport front. Recently, it’s been announced (to no big surprise to most of us) that Birmingham is ranked one of the worst cities in the UK to be a cyclist or a pedestrian. Sadly, we haven’t been able to do any big events on this topic due to the changes we are going through, but this campaign is all to do with individuals, and with the in-town-without-a-car day coming up, this is an opportunity for more of us to get on our bikes and show the Council we want improvement in the infrastructure of our city.
Planning
Not much going on in the planning front. Behind the scenes in the Council, things are stirring, so we have for now got our ears very much on the ground, waiting.
