About Me
I’m a campaigner who’s interested in the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together.
Over two decades, I’ve campaigned to shut down tax havens and stop banks fuelling corruption and ecological destruction. I launched an award-winning campaign for transparency over who owns companies, which was taken up by many other organisations and has resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries. I worked on the successful campaigns for an Arms Trade Treaty, and for the international ban on cluster bombs. I’ve worked for Global Witness, Amnesty International, and many other campaign groups. I’ve dug up Parliament Square in guerilla gardening efforts, and was arrested with Extinction Rebellion. I’m still trying to get a safe pedestrian crossing over the end of my old road.
In my writing I explore what we can learn from how we do campaigning: how our inner lives are entangled in our work to change the world. I’ve been exploring this as an associate at Perspectiva, and in my book The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master's tools, to be published in spring 2021.
I’m interested, too, in the limits of campaigning in a time of breakdown, which I’ve been exploring through editing at the Dark Mountain Project.
After studying history at Cambridge, I trained as a journalist at City University and at The Times in London, where I worked as a news reporter in my mid-twenties. My first front page story was about activism: protests by pro-Tibet campaigners were being shielded by the Met police from the view of the visiting Chinese premier in 1999. When the anti-globalisation protests began the same year, I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo and started to see how the colonialism that I’d studied in my history degree was still alive in economic relations between rich and poor nations. I realised that I wanted to be a full time campaigner for a more just world, and took my journalism skills to investigative and campaigning NGOs.
I like swimming in rivers, climbing mountains or trees, good conversation and hanging out with my kids.
Photo by Hana Wolf