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Day after day, youngsters from the local Asian population in Burnley would meet up prior to going to school. It was the seventies, a time when the National Front were mobilising, and these youngsters were the offspring of south Asian workers who had been invited to Britain in the previous decade to fill labour shortages.

Included in this group was Asad Rehman, who had relocated to the community with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We traveled as one,” he remembers, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. Smaller kids at the center, teenagers around the edge, as there was a threat of violence on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Students would perform Nazi salutes and hurl racial epithets at them. A few distributed Bulldog openly in the halls. Minority children day after day, at break times, we secured ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” he notes. As a group, they chose to challenge the teachers who had failed to protect them by as a group declining to attend. “and we will say that the reason was the schools didn't provide security for us.” It was Rehman’s initial experience of activism. When he became part of national equality efforts that were formed across the country, it shaped his activist perspective.

“We began defending our community helping me understand that lasting principle remaining with me: our strength multiplies acting together compared to acting alone. You need organisations to organise you along with a shared goal to maintain unity.”

In the past few months, Rehman was appointed CEO of the green organization this major campaigning network. For decades, the symbolic image of environmental crisis was the iconic bear on melting ice. Currently, discussing the climate crisis while ignoring inequality and discrimination is now almost impossible. Rehman positioned himself in the vanguard of this evolution.

“I took this job because of the severity of the situation out there,” he explained to the media on the sidelines a climate justice protest in central London weeks ago. “These issues are linked of climate, social injustice, of capitalist models designed to favor elite interests. At its core about fairness.

“And there is only one organisation that has always centred fairness – green rights and climate justice – namely this charity.”

Having numerous backers plus hundreds of local branches, The organization (operates separately in Scotland) is the most extensive green activist community. Recently, it allocated over ten million pounds on activism ranging from judicial reviews on official regulations to local campaigns against councils’ use of pesticides in park playgrounds.

Yet it – albeit undeservedly – earned a reputation as not extremely activist versus other groups. More bake sales and petitions rather than direct action.

The appointment of someone focused on inequality with his background may represent an effort to redefine itself.

And it is not the beginning he has worked there with the network.

After graduating, Rehman continued advocating for equality, collaborating with an anti-racism group during a period as nationalist movements had influence locally.

“There were initiatives, handling individual cases, based in neighborhoods,” he explains. “This taught me grassroots activism.”

Yet seeking more beyond addressing public discrimination and institutional bias together with peers, worked to frame equality work on a human rights level. This led him to the advocacy group, during ten years he partnered with global south activists to advocate for a fundamental shift in the understanding of human rights. “At that time, Amnesty didn’t campaign on inequality matters. their work was limited to on civil and political rights,” he notes.

By the end of that decade, his activism with Amnesty introduced him with a range of global equity groups. Then they united in opposition to neoliberalism against neoliberalism. The knowledge he acquired from them influenced his ongoing activism.

“I traveled meeting campaigners, and everybody you spoke to mentioned how bad climate was, agricultural challenges, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “I thought! All our achievements through activism might be lost because of environmental collapse. This issue that is happening, known as global warming – and yet few addressed it in those terms.”

That guided him to his first job with Friends of the Earth years ago. At the time, the majority of green groups were talking about climate change as a problem for the future.

“Friends of the Earth was the only mainstream environmental organisation that then officially broke away from typical conservation groups. pioneering of what we now call the climate justice movement,” he says.

Rehman worked to include perspectives from global south nations during negotiations. These efforts rarely make him popular. Once, he remembers, post-negotiations involving ministers with activist organizations, a minister contacted his boss demanding he call off his “climate Taliban”. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“People just felt: ‘What gives him authority who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ Consider, the environment is a nice thing, we can all agree and talk. [But] I viewed it as a fight against racism, defending rights … about power structures.”

Equity frameworks gained traction within green movements. Simultaneously occurred. rights-based campaigns starting to address sustainability concerns.

And so it was the charity supported by unions {