How Labour’s Volunteer Task Force is empowering people in the Midlands

By Claire Spencer / @thedancingflea

While 20,000 individuals stood together in London for The Wave, a group of about 30 local people – Labour supporters, an MP and a Lord – had a rather less high-profile gathering inside a cosy scout hut in rainy Halesowen. They were there to talk about the local response to climate change, and I attended as part of Labour’s Volunteer Task Force, which helped to organise the event and facilitate the ensuing discussions.

The event had three main aims: to engage with local residents, giving them the opportunity to have their say on climate change; to identify future climate change-related campaigns; and to identify individuals that would be willing to help Sylvia Heal (MP for Halesowen & Rowley Regis) on such campaigns.

After an introduction from Sylvia and energy minister Lord Hunt, we broke off into smaller groups of about seven, to encourage people to speak up. At my table, it quickly became apparent that people really wanted to do something, but either didn’t know where to start, didn’t think they could commit the time or were afraid that a local campaign would never get off the ground because of those factors.

These are perennial issues in local volunteer groups – I work as part of the Moseley Forum and Sustainable Moseley groups in Birmingham, and time is our most valuable commodity. You see people’s faces, screwed up with guilt, because, for example, they can’t spare six hours on a Saturday to promote a local initiative – but that’s OK, and they need to know it. And this came across: straightaway, another man piped up with “do you work on a computer? Then you can help”. This is a really important point – potential activists need to know small actions aren’t meaningless, even though they need a framework to amplify those actions.

I think that if I had to pick just one thing, that is the key to local action of all types, it’s that people need to know that they are part of something, that there are others pulling in the same direction. Some will want to lead, some to support when they can – but all, at one stage or another, will require others to take up the slack.

Rather excellently – most areas already have this. In Halesowen, people go to church together, their children go to school together, they shop together. They already have community, they already have that infrastructure – they just need to organise and tap into it. By the end of the meeting, phone numbers and e-mail addresses had been exchanged and the residents were keen to get in touch with the local council to tackle the issue of recycling: too few recycling points service the Halesowen area, and too few materials are picked up as part of the fortnightly collection. The fact that we could in any way help to facilitate the transfer of that information from constituents to MP is a good thing, and Sylvia can now act to support them in their campaign.

This is just a beginning – getting to the stage when a community can, for example, take ownership of part of their energy supply by installing and maintaining renewables, will take a lot more work and organisation. Some people will have to give up a lot of their free time, others may be willing to part with money or other resources. But in my experience, people will do this – and if Labour’s Volunteer Task Force can do anything, it can get people excited about politics, and empower them to act.