How does a charity like Global Action Plan bring about change in the sector? Charlotte and Rachel discuss Global Action Plan's role as a charity, and what we mean when we talk about mobilising others.

"We Share Freely". The change we want to see in the world is bigger than we are. So, we're sharing our knowledge, resources and ideas to help more people and organisations take steps forward towards our vision of a green and thriving planet, where everyone can enjoy happy and healthy lives within the Earth's limits.

As part of this, we've launched our "5 Minute GAP" series, a collection of five minute conversations that will share how we work and what we're working on. We'll talk about what we're trying to achieve and why, how we function as an organisation, and the thinking behind our plans and strategy.

We'll be regularly sharing these conversations, which will feature different members of our team and trustee board, as well as external experts.

We hope you enjoy listening in to our chats, getting to know our team and finding out what makes us who we are. 

If you prefer to read rather than watch, the transcription is here:

Charlotte: So it's really exciting that we've kind of done all this work as a marcoms team, you and I and the rest of the team on really clarifying our role as a charity because charities are always very bad at being clear about what we do because we kind of want to say everything And we find it really, really difficult to pin ourselves down to being disciplined, even though we, you and I, probably spend all day telling other people in a comms capacity to be disciplined we're not very good about being disciplined about ourselves. 

So it's great to have got to a clear place, isn't it? 

Rachel: I think it is. And I think it's good to be thinking about who it is you're targeting and what we're aiming for and that we want to inspire others. And I think we've always been very good in Global Action Plan in the time I've been here, always been very good at making lots of connections and bringing different organisations together and bringing lots of like-minded organisations around the table, doing a real convening role of similar people and in similar aims and kind of inspiring our peer organisations, I think. And then I think like using their networks alongside ours to make great change happen. 

I think I've been really inspired seeing that happen with Clean Air Day starting in 2017 and all that's happened since then. I think that that inspired us when we aimed to set that up and we did it so well. And I think that it's helped us to grow that kind of process and approach of mobilising lots of people across the public, but actually really having in mind who it is we're talking to, like you say, for messaging and impact. I think if…we really play into remembering who you're talking to and what the most empowering message is to them. The most inspiring messages to them. 

Charlotte: Mm. And I think it in our efforts to kind of clarify our role and the way that we can help the sector best, it's been really useful to focus on those successes and see where that real value add has been. And that word mobilise is a word that we found that we were using more and more, weren’t we, to describe ourselves and our role and starting to get an understanding of when we say mobilise what we mean by mobilise. That we might not necessarily mean the placard waving end of mobilise, but there's some really important aspects of mobilise that we do very effectively and very efficiently as a smaller, very mobile convening organisation. 

And we've been looking at the way that we we're pretty good at kind of setting that path and making that strategic clarity really clear. And we're really good at setting that “why”, why it's important to act on things. And then the next stage of what we do as part of mobilisation is that provisioning people with the tools and the insights and the knowledge that we know they need in order to take action, and giving them the agency to take action. And seeing all that as part of a kind of cycle of change, that essentially what our mobilisation is, is giving people, giving organisations and giving decision makers the kind of public mandate for change. So proving to them that the public want the change and arming them with that sense of sort of public engagement and public interest so that they will then go further in systems change and policy change, which then shapes the behaviour change, which then allows us to mobilise. 

So we've started to get a real sense of where we sit on that kind of continuous cycle of change. And that's been really good for focusing our efforts, hasn't it, and our campaign? 

Rachel: I think so. I'm struck as well as we're talking about it, to think that it kind of reinforces that idea of us being united in compassion, that if somebody cares about an issue, then we pick up those issues. We do typically do like research around those issues and find out what the public think around those issues and that person who's got that cause can know and be reassured that they're not the only one that cares about it. And then we can, you know, step in with a bit of a framework and some tools and that kind of like, yeah, evidence of, of why action would make change and encouragement to do it and hopefully some kind of inspiration to make it a bit easier and to kind of break down a big goal that might seem unattainable into smaller steps that everybody could play their part, be on the journey with, and be united in compassion because many more people care about things than often is thought. Right? 

And that's that kind of I think it's interesting how various different bits of our work overlap in that way then come to think of it, that lens and but yeah, that mobilisation taking you from an individual, perhaps a more individual viewpoint to much more collective space. 

Charlotte: Yeah, that's so true. And that values piece is really interesting because along with that system change cycle, you get a kind of…a sort of cycle of belief change because the more people see, exactly as you're saying that other people feel like they do, the more they then come together and put that pressure to change the system. As the system changes, their behaviour changes, and that can then change their belief in what's possible and who cares about things and where their ambitions could lie. And that then accelerates the kind of next round of the change. 

So there is a real relationship between changing beliefs and changing systems, and you essentially need to do the two in parallel. And you're so right about that kind of united in compassion, that that positive belief that we have, that everybody by and large does care about these kind of things, it’s just giving them the voice or the vehicles to express that caring. And it's often much more significant than decision makers might believe. And it's up to us to capture it and use that caring, to provide that mandate for change for decision makers. That they're often looking for but not always given.