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Each school day, children from the south Asian community in this Lancashire town would meet up before heading to school. It was the seventies, a period when extremist organizations were mobilising, and these youngsters were the sons and daughters of south Asian workers who had been invited to Britain in the previous decade to fill labour shortages.

One of these children was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the northern town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We traveled as one,” he recalls, “as there were risks to walk alone. Smaller kids in the middle, the bigger kids on the outside, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Things were no better at school. Students would make offensive gestures and hurl racial epithets at them. A few distributed the National Front newspaper without concealment at school. The black and brown pupils day after day, at break times, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked.”

“So I started talking to everybody,” he notes. Together, they chose to challenge the teachers who had failed to protect them by collectively refusing to attend. “declaring it was due to the schools were unsafe for us.” It was Rehman’s first taste of activism. Participating in broader anti-racist campaigns that were formed across the country, it defined his views on society.

“We started to protect our community helping me understand that abiding lesson which I've carried: collective action is stronger when we are a ‘we’ rather than individually. Groups are necessary to coordinate efforts along with a shared goal to hold you together.”

Recently, he took on the role of chief executive of the green organization Friends of the Earth. Over many years, the poster child of environmental crisis was the polar bear on melting ice. Now, to speak of environmental issues and not including systemic unfairness is now highly inappropriate. Rehman positioned himself at the forefront of this transformation.

“This role appealed to me given the enormous challenge out there,” he explained to reporters at a climate justice protest in central London weeks ago. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, social injustice, of capitalist models that have been rigged the wealthy. Essentially an equity issue.

“Just one group has consistently focused on justice – ecological equity and climate justice – namely this charity.”

Having a quarter-million members plus hundreds of local branches, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (with an independent Scottish branch) is the UK’s biggest conservation movement. In the year to summer 2024, it allocated more than £10m on campaigns from courtroom challenges against state decisions community initiatives opposing chemical use across urban areas.

Yet it – possibly mistakenly – been perceived as relatively moderate versus other groups. More bake sales and petitions instead of confrontational tactics.

The selection of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner such as him might signal a strategic move to change perceptions.

This isn't the beginning he collaborated with the network.

Following university, Rehman continued fighting discrimination, collaborating with a community organization in the era when the far right was still a force in east London.

“It was running campaigns, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he says. “This taught me grassroots activism.”

But not content than just responding to public discrimination and government policies collaborating with activists, aimed to elevate the fight against racism as a fundamental right. That brought him to the advocacy group, for a long period he partnered with global south activists to demand a fundamental shift in the understanding of freedoms. “Previously, Amnesty didn’t campaign on financial and community issues. their work was limited to political freedoms,” he states.

By the end of the nineties, Rehman’s work with Amnesty connected him with multiple global equity groups. During that period they had coalesced in opposition to neoliberalism against neoliberalism. What he was to learn through this experience would affect the rest of his career.

“I traveled meeting campaigners, and each person discussed the climate crisis, agricultural challenges, how it was displacing people,” he explains. “And I was like! Every gain and secured is going to be unravelled because of environmental collapse. And this thing we're facing, it’s called climate – and yet few addressed it in those terms.”

That guided him to his first job within the organization in 2006. Back then, the majority of green groups discussed climate change as a distant threat.

“Friends of the Earth represented the unique activist body that then officially broke from other green organizations. and was one of the founders creating climate equity activism,” he declares.

Rehman worked to bring the voices of the developing world to the table. This approach wasn't earn him friends. On one occasion, he recalls, following discussions between UK government representatives and environmental NGOs, a politician called his chief executive demanding he call off his strong advocacy. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“Many believed: ‘Why does he who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ Understand, green issues are important, discussion is possible. [But] For me it represented a fight against racism, a fight for human rights … a deeply political fight.”

Justice narratives found acceptance in climate and environmental campaigning. However, the opposite occurred. rights-based campaigns starting to address climate and environmental issues.

And so it was the charity supported by unions {