Make it Happen

How to be an Activist

Amika George

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780008377601
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008377588
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

'Make It Happen reminds us that people of any age can create change in their communities. From finding allies to setting goals, everyone who wants to contribute to a better future can learn from Amika's book.' Malala Yousafzai

Now, more than ever, we know that the world needs to change.

And you can be the one to make it happen.

As a teenager, Amika George successfully launched a campaign that pushed the UK government to fund free period products in every school across England.

Featuring interviews with world-renowned activists, Make It Happen is her essential and inspirational guide to being an effective activist. From finding your crowd and creating allies to getting those in positions of power to listen, using social media to build a community and protecting your mental health while campaigning, Amika shows you how to create real and lasting change in your world.

Chapter 1

Choose Your Cause

Whatever kind of person you are, you can be an activist. I believe that activism comes in many forms. Refuse to be typecast as a do-gooder or hippie tree-hugger, and know that incredible change has been achieved by a whole range of people who couldn’t be more different from each other. I don’t believe you need to be the most outgoing person in your community, or the most eloquent speaker, or ultra-resilient and resourceful to do this. You can be any sort of person.

I’m not the loudest person in the room. Neither am I the most confident. If you’d told me four years ago I would be speaking in front of TV cameras, or that I’d be standing alone on an open stage holding a mic on the other side of the world, I wouldn’t have believed you. But the urge to act takes over, and you feel you just have to do it. That feeling comes from something which really, really matters to you. Whatever you want to change, whatever issue you feel is demanding to be heard, it can be you who makes it happen.

Our world is a scary place right now. As I write this, I’m reading about impending wars across nations, where diplomacy seems to be wearing thin, and political leaders tweet about solutions in the form of destruction and retaliation. I’m reading about the consequences and terror of a global pandemic killing thousands and plunging the world into collective despair. I’m reading that a worldwide economic downturn is looming, and that mass unemployment, deprivation, and even famine could cause so many more to suffer.

I’m reading about a climate crisis so severe that raging bushfires have forced thousands to flee their homes, and floods and storms are the biggest killer in countries already crippled by desperate levels of poverty. I despair that my future will be foreclosed by politicians who say we can’t afford to tackle the climate emergency. Politicians who are careless about our future because they may not live to see the consequences.

I’m reading about misogynistic, racist, and divisive comments made by world leaders, which no longer elicit widespread outrage and condemnation, purely because we’ve become inured to them. When there seems to be no hope for the world, it’s easy to become apathetic and, instead of feeling angry, find ourselves accepting.

But the world is full of people refusing to give in to despair, and against all odds are growing and cultivating seedlings of hope and change. We are getting bolder and bolder in seeking out spaces where we can make sure we are heard, and we’re using the internet and social media to expand our reach and connect with others who share our concerns and determination to change the status quo.

You may have been propelled to action because you’re directly affected, or you might have become aware of an injustice that’s staring you in the face and refusing to move away. Whatever the reason, remember you have power – and use it.

Listening to that feeling inside which nudges your conscience, asking you to do something, anything, is often the hardest part of getting going. That feeling is easy to ignore if you try hard enough, but don’t ignore it. Be open to it, and let it do its thing.

I’ve heard the negative, internal voice that tells us we are all insignificant, and nothing we can do will ever make a real difference. It says: ‘What do you think someone like you can do to change something so big?’ or ‘You’re going to look stupid if you have a go and it doesn’t work out.’ I’ve heard that voice tell me I’m not good enough, not brave enough, not old enough, not white enough, not the right kind of person to make a difference.

I’m glad I didn’t listen to that voice, because it was only when I started to act that it slowly but surely died away, until it was barely a whisper – and one I could ignore.

Similarly, when you’re confronted with injustice, hypocrisy, or blatant double standards, don’t ever let yourself feel that it’s just the way it has to be, because nothing is ever the way it has to be. No matter how rigid or entrenched something appears to be, I really do believe that things are always in a state of flux, and it’s for us to grab control of the wheel, start the debate, and steer the conversation in the direction we want it to go. Don’t squeeze yourself into the mould (wrong shape, wrong size) that society claims you need to fit in order to be worthy of attention. It suits some, but not all. Create your own and make it look exactly as you want it to look (the shape that fits you, the size that fits you).

Why should we let those in power, who don’t look like us, speak like us, or know what matters to us dictate how we ought to live? What the hell do they know about the issues that hit us hard? They don’t want you to challenge or disrupt. Why should they? I am so fed up of hearing young people being called Generation Snowflake, a flippant term created to diminish and undermine us. Apparently, we’re too busy pouting and editing our selfies to care about shaping our world.

It’s far easier for people in power if everybody tows the line, eyes down, lips pursed, and hands behind backs. Everything – from books to advertising, films and TV – informs us that power looks, sounds, and feels a certain way. We’ve bought into that for generations, haven’t we? But as Wael Ghomin, the activist who helped spark the 2011 Egypt uprisings, affirms in his book Revolution 2.0, ‘the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power’. And we, as ordinary people, hold more power than we fully understand.

Think about the kind of society you want to live in. Is it one where everything is predetermined and prescribed, where we wait patiently in line for our paltry slice of the pie, and then find out it tastes pretty horrible when we get it, wait in line again and go back for more? No. So think about the situation and consider how many people a particular issue affects, aside from you (if it’s one that affects you directly), and whether anything is likely to change if you make the decision to ignore it.

Caroline Criado Perez is a true heroine – a proper, indomitable, feminist powerhouse. She waged a brilliant and inspiring campaign to force the Bank of England to put a woman on an English banknote, and also fought for a statue of suffragette Millicent Fawcett to be erected in Parliament Square in London. She’s unstoppable and fearless. I asked her what advice she has for someone who’s itching to do something impactful but doesn’t know where to start. She told me:

Choose something you can’t help campaigning on. Campaigning is tough. It’s exhausting, it takes over your life, it’s often thankless, and there is no set endpoint. You keep going till you win. That could take weeks, months, or years: many suffragists fought their entire lives for women to have the right to vote. Many of them died without seeing success. So you have to make sure that you can keep going. And the only way to make sure you can keep going is if you literally can’t stop yourself. That’s how you know you have the right campaign on your hands.

Caroline didn’t consider herself a feminist at all growing up. She admitted to being a teenager who looked down on women, and thought men were better.

Then suddenly, in my mid-twenties, I had my mind changed by a book called Feminism and Linguistic Theory. In particular, a section on the use of the generic male in grammar – so ‘he’ to mean ‘he or she’, ‘man’ to mean ‘humankind’. Like a lot of people who don’t know much about feminism, I’d heard that feminists object to this usage – and, like a lot of people who don’t know much about feminism, I had been used to rolling my eyes at it. Here was a perfect example of how ridiculous feminism was – and a perfect opportunity to show how much more logical I was than other women. Because, unlike those irrational creatures, I understood that ‘he’ meant ‘he or she’ and that everyone knew that. ‘Who cares?’ I thought. These petty trivialities don’t concern me.

But then I read the next sentence. The author cited studies that show that when women read or hear these words, they picture a man. And that made me pause. In fact, it blew my mind. Because I realised, for the first time, that I was picturing men when I heard these words. And I just couldn’t believe that I had never noticed it before. After all, as a woman, shouldn’t I be picturing women for these supposedly gender-neutral words – at least 50 per cent of the time? How had it taken so long – and having it pointed out to me – for me to notice?

Caroline started to realise just how filled with men her unconscious mind was. Because it wasn’t just these generic male words that conjured up men in her head. It was also words that had a far greater claim to gender neutrality: words like lawyer, doctor, professor, writer, journalist, scientist. All of these words conjured up an image of a man.

I couldn’t help connecting this preponderance of men in my head with the extremely low opinion I had always had of women. After all, what did I really know about women? I know now how much women have been written out of our history. I know about the art, the literature, the scientific discoveries made by women and attributed to men: their husbands, their supervisors. But back then? My history lessons had been full of men. The ‘great’ literature I was told to read was almost exclusively by and about men. Scientific progress was presented to me as the work of men. Was it any wonder I saw my sex as an obstacle to be overcome in my quest to be seen as fully human?

She admits:

I started to get really angry at how my sex had been misrepresented to me – and the impact that had had on me growing up. All this pressure I felt to show I wasn’t ‘like other girls’, just so I had half a chance of being treated like a human being. The impact it had had on my self-confidence. I felt it wasn’t right that this carried on happening to girls. And so when I came across examples of how we represent the world as almost exclusively male, of how the people we celebrate in history are almost exclusively male, I felt I had to challenge it. Because I knew from personal experience the impact that can have.

Also, more practically, this is the kind of change a person on her own can effect. There are huge and far more intractable injustices that require years and whole organisations working on them to solve. But a banknote? Yeah, I could do that.

Starting small

When I was just months into starting my campaign, Catherine who, like me, was 17, got in touch. She told me that she’d been feeling really low and sometimes guilty about the state of our world and all the injustices in it. She felt powerless to make change and asked me whether my activism gave me some form of reprieve, a feeling of empowerment in a world that seemed to have lost its way and was moving further and further away from her.

Catherine and I began chatting over email, and she told me that she’d suffered from mental health issues and had just moved out of her family home. She felt she needed a cause to fight for, to give her some hope and purpose, to bring her back.

I know things weren’t easy for Catherine. She had everything working against her, telling her not to try. But she resisted that pull to sit back. She started campaigning for better training for GPs at her surgery on mental health issues. She found her spirit and drive and this, in turn, gave her a feeling of optimism about her future, a hope that things could be better.

She was incredible in helping me raise awareness about period poverty and, at the time of the Free Periods protest, even though she wasn’t able to afford the journey to London, she worked hard, tweeting and posting about the protest, asking everyone to share and be there. Activism found Catherine, and it’s stayed with her.

I know how easy it is to think that issues are too big to tackle, to stand back and look at an issue that’s hitting you hard and feel turmoil, that it’s much bigger than you. To believe this is just the way things are. That can put you in a place of despair and powerlessness, which is hard to rise above. It’s easy to think that you can’t be the one to change things, either. Not when you feel like everything is already a struggle.

Catherine started small. She approached her own GP practice, asking what she could do to get the help she needed, and started questioning the current systems in place. She tells me:

The biggest thing I get from activism is a sense of connection and belonging with people and the world around me. As someone who feels isolated, it helps a lot that I can talk to other people who feel the same as I do about an issue and figure out a way to do something about it together. It’s definitely empowering. No one else is going to do it for us. It’s still hard for me, and other people my age, to feel like we deserve a voice because a lot of the time people don’t listen to us. That’s why we need to listen to and lift each other up. We need to take control because there are people in positions of power that are making decisions about our future without asking us, but it will, ultimately, fall on us to deal with the consequences.

Catherine’s journey into activism, fighting to address issues that affected her directly at a micro level, show that absolutely anyone can fix systems that are broken, and that sitting up and demanding something is done is the very first step to change. There is no one demographic that holds the key to creating change. For Catherine, it was about resolving her own frustrations with the system, but in doing that, coming to the realisation that her life could have a wider impact and benefit other people, giving her purpose. She drew strength from knowing that she was making things better for everyone; caring for others and showing empathy for them can liberate us.

I met Shiden Tekle at a photoshoot to celebrate youth activism. Shiden and his friends became so frustrated at the lack of Black actors in TV and film that they began to recreate iconic film posters, such as Titanic, the Harry Potter franchise, and Skyfall, with Black actors shown in the lead roles instead.

Shiden was angry that Black faces were often just token additions in mainly all-white castings. He tells me:

I’ve been racially abused since I was 12. We are always looking at the media and never seeing any positive representations of Black people. In big films, Black characters are often playing criminals and drug dealers, and that quickly conditions people to believe that all Black people are like that. So, we decided to put Black faces in the big movies, and challenge people’s perceptions and assumptions.

Shiden and his friends had created the posters, featuring their friends and family, for their own bedrooms and social media accounts, but their posters hit the headlines across the UK and were soon splashed across billboards in his local area. And a movement, Legally Black, was started, which drove debate and discussion around the issue of racial misrepresentation in the media.

I didn’t ever think it was going to get as much coverage as it did. But once we got that coverage, we were able to push for the things we wanted to achieve, such as initiating the discussion about anti-Blackness in the media with commissioners from UK broadcasting companies and the impact of negative depictions of Black people, especially on young people. Changing things in the media is difficult, but it can be accomplished and I have learnt a lot about who has the power and how to use traction gained from campaigns to accomplish future goals.

As a campaign group, we have always said that we do not advocate for the removal of white characters and the insertion of Black characters. We say Black people should be given agency and control of their narratives. This is happening a lot more now, but racial stereotyping is still a prominent issue throughout the media, both on screen and off. We also try to be inclusive in the language we use by addressing how the media affects other racial communities too. However, we choose not to speak on behalf of other communities because we can only speak to our own experiences.

I ask Shiden about how someone gets started in their mission to change something they care about:

You don’t need a complex, well thought-out plan of how you’ll defeat structural injustice to make a difference and become an activist. It can be as simple as coming together with a bunch of friends and deciding to do one act around a cause, such as, for example, using art to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Choose Your Cause
• 2. Find Your Crowd
• 3. Spread the Word
• 4. Marching Matters
• 5. Prioritise You
• Endnote
• Timeline
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher