"So I started talking to everybody, says Rehman. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had failed to protect them by collectively refusing to attend, and we will say this is because the schools aren't safe for us. It was Rehman's first taste of organising, and as he joined wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it shaped his political outlook."
"We started to protect our community and I started to realise that abiding lesson that has stayed with me: we are much more powerful when we are a we' than when we're individual. You need organisations to organise you and you need a vision to hold you together. This summer, Rehman was appointed chief executive of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. For decades, the poster child of climate breakdown was the polar bear drifting on an ice floe in a warming ocean."
Asad Rehman moved from Pakistan to Burnley at age four and grew up amid National Front mobilization and targeted violence against south Asian children. Walks to school were guarded, younger children sheltered by older peers, and pupils endured Nazi salutes, racial epithets and physical attacks at school. Rehman and peers organized collective school absences to protest unsafe conditions and joined wider antiracism movements, learning the power of collective organisation and shared vision. Rehman later became chief executive of Friends of the Earth and has worked to center social, racial and economic justice within environmental campaigning.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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