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Each school day, students from Asian families in this Lancashire town would gather before heading to school. This was the seventies, a time when the National Front were mobilising, and these children were the sons and daughters of Asian migrants who had moved to Britain a decade earlier to address employment gaps.

One of these children was Asad Rehman, who had come to the northern town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We walked in groups,” he explains, “as there were risks to walk alone. The little ones at the center, the bigger kids on the outside, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

The situation was equally bad at school. Pupils would make offensive gestures and yell abusive language at them. A few distributed extremist publications publicly in corridors. Students of color regularly, at break times, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“So I started talking to everybody,” Rehman states. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by collectively refusing to attend. “and we will say that the reason was the schools were unsafe for us.” It was Rehman’s early introduction of mobilizing. Participating in wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it shaped his views on society.

“We started to protect our community and I started to realise that lasting principle that has stayed with me: we are much more powerful as a united group compared to acting alone. You need organisations to organise you and a common purpose to hold you together.”

This summer, Rehman was appointed CEO of the green organization the well-known activist organization. For decades, the symbolic image of climate breakdown was arctic wildlife on melting ice. Currently, to speak of environmental issues without mentioning inequality and discrimination is widely considered all but unthinkable. He has stood at the forefront of this transformation.

“I took this job because of the severity of the situation out there,” he told journalists during a climate justice protest in central London last month. “We face multiple connected challenges of climate, social injustice, of capitalist models which are biased against ordinary people. At its core an equity issue.

“A single organization prioritizing justice – ecological equity and climate justice – namely this charity.”

With more than a quarter-million members and community teams, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (operates separately in Scotland) is the UK’s biggest environmental campaigning network. In the year to summer 2024, it invested significant funds on campaigns ranging from legal actions on official regulations grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in park playgrounds.

But it has – perhaps unfairly – earned a reputation as not extremely activist compared with its peers. More bake sales and petitions rather than direct action.

The appointment of an advocate for economic justice with his background may represent an effort to shed that image.

And it is not his initial stint he has worked there with the network.

Post-education, Rehman continued advocating for equality, engaged with the Newham Monitoring Project at a time as nationalist movements remained active in the capital.

“There were initiatives, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he explains. “I gained experience in being a community organiser.”

But not content than just responding to public discrimination and from the state he, along with many others, sought to place antiracism on a human rights level. Which guided him to the human rights organization, during ten years he collaborated alongside developing world advocates to demand a new approach regarding the interpretation of freedoms. “At that time, the organization didn't focus on inequality matters. they concentrated solely on on civil and political rights,” he states.

As the conclusion of the nineties, Rehman’s work at the organization had brought him into contact with multiple worldwide activist networks. Then they came together as anti-globalization activists challenging free-market policies. The knowledge he acquired from them would affect his ongoing activism.

“I was going and working with these people, and everybody you spoke to discussed the severity of environmental issues, agricultural challenges, creating refugees,” he says. “And I was like! Everything we have fought for through activism could be undone because of environmental collapse. This challenge we're facing, it’s called climate – and yet few addressed it in those terms.”

That guided him to his first job at the environmental charity in 2006. At the time, the majority of green groups framed climate change as tomorrow's challenge.

“This network stood out as the sole green group that then officially broke with what I’d call the rest of the environment movement. helping establish creating environmental justice campaigning,” he states.

He focused to amplify concerns from global south nations to the table. These efforts rarely make him popular. Once, he shares, after a meeting with officials and environmental NGOs, a minister contacted his boss demanding he call off his assertive tactics. He would not be drawn the individual's identity.

“People just felt: ‘Why does he who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ Consider, ecology matters, discussion is possible. [But] I saw it as combating discrimination, a fight for human rights … fundamentally political.”

Equity frameworks were increasingly becoming accepted within green movements. But the converse occurred. with justice-oriented groups engaging with sustainability concerns.

And so it was that War On Want the trade union-backed {