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Day after day, students from the local Asian population in Burnley would assemble prior to going to school. It was the 1970s, a period when extremist organizations were mobilising, and they were the sons and daughters of Asian migrants who had been invited to Britain in the previous decade to address employment gaps.

Included in this group was Asad Rehman, who had come to the community with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We walked in groups,” he recalls, “as there were risks to walk alone. Smaller kids in the middle, teenagers forming a perimeter, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

The situation was equally bad at school. Other children would give fascist salutes and shout racist insults at them. They shared Bulldog without concealment at school. Minority children “every day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we secured ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“So I started talking to everybody,” Rehman states. Collectively, they resolved to oppose the teachers who had ignored their safety by collectively refusing to attend. “and we will say that the reason was the schools didn't provide security for us.” This became Rehman’s early introduction of organising. When he became part of wider antiracism movements emerging across the country, it influenced his political outlook.

“We took steps to safeguard our community which taught me that abiding lesson that has stayed with me: our strength multiplies when we are a ‘we’ than when we’re individual. You need organisations to coordinate efforts and a common purpose that binds you.”

This summer, Rehman became CEO of the green organization this major campaigning network. Historically, the symbolic image of environmental crisis was the polar bear in a thawing landscape. Today, discussing environmental issues and not including social, racial and economic injustice is widely considered almost impossible. And Rehman has been at the forefront of this shift.

“I took this job given the severity of the situation out there,” he told reporters on the sidelines a Make Them Pay protest outside Downing Street last month. “These issues are linked of climate, [of] inequality, of financial structures designed to favor elite interests. At its core a crisis of justice.

“A single organization prioritizing justice – environmental justice and environmental equality – this particular network.”

With more than numerous backers and community teams, The organization (with an independent Scottish branch) represents Britain's largest green activist community. Recently, it invested significant funds on campaigns including courtroom challenges to government policy grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in park playgrounds.

But it has – possibly mistakenly – gained a profile as relatively moderate compared with its peers. More bake sales and petitions than road blockades and occupations.

The appointment of someone focused on inequality with his background may represent a strategic move to redefine itself.

It's not the first time he has worked there with the organization.

Post-education, he persisted campaigning for racial justice, working with a community organization in the era when the far right remained active in the capital.

“It was running campaigns, supporting victims, based in neighborhoods,” he says. “I gained experience in local mobilization.”

Yet seeking more with simply reactively countering everyday prejudice and government policies he, along with many others, sought to place antiracism as a fundamental right. This led him to the advocacy group, for a long period he worked with international campaigners to push for a fundamental shift regarding the interpretation of basic rights. “Previously, Amnesty didn’t campaign on inequality matters. their work was limited to individual liberties,” he states.

As the conclusion of the 1990s, his efforts at the organization introduced him to various worldwide activist networks. Then they united into the counter-globalisation movement challenging free-market policies. The knowledge he acquired from these connections would affect his future work.

“I traveled and working with these people, all those was saying how bad climate was, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he explains. “It struck me! Everything we have fought for through activism is going to be unravelled due to climate change. And this thing occurring, termed environmental crisis – and yet it wasn't being discussed in those terms.”

Which directed him to his first job at the environmental charity during the mid-2000s. Then, many activists framed global warming as a problem for the future.

“This network was the only mainstream green group that then officially broke away from typical conservation groups. and was one of the founders creating environmental justice campaigning,” he declares.

Rehman worked to amplify concerns from global south nations into discussions. This approach wasn't gain widespread approval. Once, he remembers, following discussions between UK government representatives and green groups, a politician called his chief executive requesting he control his “climate Taliban”. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“People just felt: ‘Why does he operate differently?’ You know, ecology matters, we can all agree and talk. [But] I saw it as combating discrimination, advocating for freedoms … fundamentally political.”

Fairness perspectives were increasingly becoming accepted in climate and environmental campaigning. Simultaneously took place. with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling sustainability concerns.

And so it was that War On Want supported by unions {