Activism Today, With Climate Action Network West Midlands
(Based on a conversation with members of Climate Action Network West Midlands)
There is a particular energy that lingers in any room where activists gather. It is not optimism exactly, nor naïve hopefulness. It is a kind of stubborn clarity: the understanding that change is not inevitable, but possible if enough people refuse to step aside. Climate Action Network West Midlands (CANWM), founded in 2015, is one local expression of that commitment. Created to connect campaigns, neighbourhood groups, climate action projects, youth movements, charities, and individuals, CANWM works less as a single organisation and more as a bridge. Their aim is to make climate action collective, accessible, and rooted in community rather than distant institutions.
By linking groups and individuals across Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and surrounding areas, CANWM tries to rebuild something many activists feel has slowly eroded: a shared sense of public space and public purpose. The network is not just about action, but connection.
“Anything and everything you do is valid,” says member Jules Todd. It is a deceptively simple definition of activism in the present day. His point is that the barrier to entry should never be guilt or perfection. A conversation can be activism. Helping a neighbour organise their recycling hub can be activism. Turning up to a meeting, writing to an MP, running a workshop, or simply refusing to stay silent: all of it holds power. “Never underestimate the power of a short conversation,” he adds.
Activism Changes, But Its Purpose Does not
Activism today does not look like activism fifty years ago. And that matters. As Todd put it, “What worked yesterday may not work today.” Movements must adapt to the world they are trying to change. Yet the fundamental lesson remains persistence. Activism is the long push.
Simbi Folarin, another founder of CANWM, reflects on the way history teaches us persistence: looking at the suffragette movement, at civil rights activism, at campaigns for LGBTQ+ equality. These movements did not win because they were convenient. They won because people refused to stop.
She mentions the suffragettes, not as a nostalgic symbol, but as a reminder that courage rarely feels heroic while it is happening. Their wins came through decades of pressure, sacrifice, and refusal to disappear.
Todd uses an image that many activists know well: pushing a boulder uphill. If you let go too early, it rolls right back down — sometimes even further than where you began.
This is the emotional reality of activism: change is slow, fragile, and deeply human. Yet that does not make it hopeless. It makes it deliberate.
The Digital Age: Amplification and its Shadows
Social media has reshaped activism more radically than almost any other factor in the 21st century. It connects like-minded people instantly, lets movements grow faster, and makes global issues visible at the scale of human attention. But visibility is not impact.
“It’s great for connecting, but if it’s all you do, it won’t work by itself,” Todd notes. Digital activism risks becoming performance rather than pressure, a flood of statements rather than sustained effort. It is easier to share a post than to sit in a meeting where disagreements must be resolved, or to knock on doors, or to speak to someone who disagrees with you.
Simbi points out what has been lost: the physical spaces where people used to gather — community centres, youth clubs, local halls — many have been closed. And with their closures, conversation has closed too. “It’s more nourishing to be in person together,” she says. Digital threads connect us, but shared rooms bind us.
Sustaining Activism When Progress Feels Slow
Activism requires endurance. It also requires honesty about burnout and exhaustion.
“Doing something is empowering,” Simbi says. Acting is often the most effective remedy against despair. But she is equally clear about the need to pause and recalibrate: “It is important to slow down and reevaluate.” Hope can feel fragile, but even hopelessness has its place — “hopelessness can be useful sometimes,” she adds, because it forces us to respond rather than numb ourselves.
The reality is stark: there is no alternative. The climate crisis is not something one can simply opt out of. “Not much of an alternative,” Simbi says quietly. And she is right.
Local Action, Global Movement
Local activism is often dismissed as small-scale, but CANWM argues the opposite: it is the root system through which movements draw strength. Local groups are where relationships form, where strategies are tested, where people feel seen rather than spoken at.
“Local is important, but it needs to connect globally,” Simbi explains. The climate crisis does not respect borders; nor should resistance to it. But global solidarity only works when it is grounded in neighbourhoods, in friendships, in shared kitchens and community halls.
Local groups allow people to ask the most important organising question: “What can I offer?” Not everybody speaks in protests. Some cook. Some do research. Some translate documents. Some watch children during meetings. Movements survive because people contribute differently, not identically.
CANWM promotes the role of “champions” — individuals who act as connectors in their communities — so people know who to go to, where to start, how to turn concern into action. When movements stay rooted, they become resilient rather than reactive.
Public Perception: Radical or Necessary?
Over the past decade, the public perception of climate activism has shifted markedly. Where environmental protest once seemed fringe, the language of climate emergency is now used by councils, schools, and even financial institutions. Yet groups like Just Stop Oil demonstrate that visibility and acceptance are not the same thing.
The method of activism shapes how it is received. Disruption can force urgency into public consciousness, but it can also trigger backlash. Media narratives — normally framed by those in power — can determine whether activists are seen as defenders of the future or threats to the present.
CANWM’s approach is intentionally different: they prioritise relationship-building over shock, collaboration over confrontation. Not because confrontation is invalid, but because no single strategy can carry a movement alone. Movements must be multi-form, multi-voiced, capable of shifting tactics without losing their direction.
Individual Action and Systemic Change
One of the longest-standing tensions in activism is the role of individual action. Can one person make a difference in a system built on industrial-scale environmental harm?
Simbi’s response rejects both helplessness and moral perfectionism. Individual action is not the solution, but it is a gateway to collective power. Personal action matters because it shapes identity, and identity shapes behaviour in groups. Someone who composts their food waste is more likely to join a local repair café. Someone who joins a local repair café is more likely to attend a town planning meeting. Someone who attends that meeting is more likely to challenge policy.
Activism scales. It does not begin at scale.
Todd summarises it more bluntly: “What difference can you make in your life?” Not in the abstract, but in the real, immediate spaces you occupy.
The Question of AI
The group approaches AI cautiously. Simbi describes it as a tool, not a driver. It can help activists coordinate and communicate, but it comes with environmental and ethical costs: enormous energy consumption for data centres, exploitative labour in training datasets, and the risk of replacing real community-building with automated messaging.
“How you use it matters,” she says. “Use it as a tool only and understand the cost.” AI should extend human action, not replace human connection.
Young People: The Movement’s Strategic Core
“Young people are absolutely critical,” Jules says. But this is not romanticism. It is structural.
Young people:
Set cultural norms
Shift public language
Challenge what is considered politically acceptable
Make future stakes impossible to ignore
Simbi notes that “we alongside them are navigating.” Neither older nor younger activists have all the answers. But young people bring urgency grounded in lived inheritance — they are the generation who will live in the climates previous generations shaped. Their activism is not philosophical. It is lived necessity.
This is why youth-led direct action, school strikes, campus organising, and mutual aid efforts have become central to global climate politics: they are not asking for the future — they are defending the possibility of one.
When People Feel Powerless
For those who care deeply but feel overwhelmed, CANWM’s advice is neither soft nor abstract:
Show up.
Support each other.
Do something, however small.
Jules calls this “power to the small, massive” — the truth that movements are built not by a heroic few, but by thousands of ordinary acts that accumulate into pressure. The narrative in climate politics is also shifting from mitigation to adaptation. Some governments and institutions have already begun to quietly accept severe warming as inevitable. “Certain people with power and influence have given up,” he says.
But giving up is a privilege most people do not have. Communities that are already vulnerable — economically, geographically, socially — cannot afford surrender. And so, the work continues.
The Quiet Truth of Activism
Activism is persistence, not a spectacle. It is the slow push of the boulder. Sometimes the slope steepens. Sometimes it slips back. But the push continues.
Because the alternative is to let it roll.
Liza Arshad
Sources-
(interview with members of the group)
https://climateactionwm.org.uk/ (CANWM official website)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zh6nsk7 (Suffragette movement)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism (Activism)
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-ethics (AI ethics)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/clicktivism-changed-political-campaigns-38-degrees-change (Digital activism)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20220803-gen-z-how-young-people-are-changing-activism (young people and activism)
