People Power: three years and counting

We are proud and delighted to reflect on another successful and inspiring year of People Power and are delighted to share some of the wonderful content from the day with you. We have interviews with our all-star line-up of speakers, including Salil Shetty, the original Make Poverty History team, Vivienne Westwood and more.

Run in partnership with the Sheila McKechnie Foundation and now in it’s third year, the conference hosted over 100 campaigners from charities and grassroots movements to discuss the latest trends and hot topics in campaigning.

Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, opened the day as Keynote speaker and discussed the issues facing the sector. From there delegates were invited to join one of two sessions where we put some of the brightest minds in campaigning ‘in conversation’ together to debate their causes.

John Sauven, Executive Director, Greenpeace UK and John Stewart, HACAN CleanSkies discussed lessons learnt from the No Third Runway campaign in a session chaired by journalist Juliette Jowit.

Simultaneously, Paul Hilder, Vice President of Global Campaigns at change.org was in conversation with Naomi Colvin from Occupy London. Their session was deftly chaired by journalist and author Bibi van der Zee.

The afternoon brought smaller workshops offering our delegates practical advice and hands on tips to move their campaigning forward. Among others, we were joined by Maurice Frankel, Campaign for Freedom of Information, Matthew Smerdon, Baring Foundation, Duane Raymond, FairSay and Justine Pannett, RSPCA who hosted insightful sessions on a range of topics – from the independence of the voluntary sector to useful trends in e-campaigning.

As the day built to a crescendo, we reunited the key members of the Make Poverty History team for the first time in 7 years to debate the campaign successes and failures. Ruchi Tripathi, Resilliant Livlihoods, chaired this panel session with Kirsty McNeil, Themba Consultancy, Adrian Lovett, ONE, Glen Tarman, BOND and Deborah Doanne, World Development Movement.

Ending on a high, Vivienne Westwood closed the day as our Inspirational Speaker. She delighted delegates with the inspiration and motivation behind her recent pledge to end climate change.

Take a look at all our video content from the day or indeed our selection of photographs.

Campaigning | Charity | Events | People Power | SMK