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Every weekday morning, children from Asian families in this Lancashire town would assemble before making their way to school. This was the seventies, a time when extremist organizations were mobilising, and these youngsters were the offspring of south Asian workers who had come to Britain a decade earlier to work in understaffed industries.

One of these children was Asad Rehman, who had relocated to the northern town with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We traveled as one,” he recalls, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. Smaller kids at the center, teenagers forming a perimeter, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Other children would make offensive gestures and shout racist insults at them. They shared Bulldog without concealment at school. Minority children regularly, when the lunch bell rang, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” says Rehman. Collectively, they chose to challenge the teachers who had ignored their safety by jointly deciding not to attend. “declaring this is because the schools aren’t safe for us.” That marked Rehman’s first taste of organising. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns that were formed across the country, it influenced his political outlook.

“We took steps to safeguard our community which taught me that crucial insight which I've carried: our strength multiplies as a united group rather than individually. You need organisations to bring people together and you need a vision to maintain unity.”

In the past few months, Rehman was appointed head of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. For decades, the poster child of climate breakdown was arctic wildlife in a thawing landscape. Currently, addressing the climate crisis while ignoring social, racial and economic injustice is widely considered highly inappropriate. Rehman positioned himself in the vanguard of this evolution.

“I took this job because of the scale of the crisis out there,” he shared with journalists at a climate justice protest outside Downing Street recently. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, social injustice, of financial structures which are biased elite interests. At its core a crisis of justice.

“And there is only one organisation prioritizing equity – green rights and climate justice – namely this charity.”

Having 250,000 supporters and 233 local action groups, The organization (Scotland has its own) is the UK’s biggest environmental campaigning network. Recently, it allocated significant funds on activism ranging from legal actions on official regulations community initiatives against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

Yet it – possibly mistakenly – gained a profile as not extremely activist compared with its peers. More bake sales and petitions than road blockades and occupations.

The appointment of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman may represent a strategic move to change perceptions.

And it is not his initial stint he's been involved with the network.

Post-education, he persisted advocating for equality, collaborating with an anti-racism group at a time when the far right had influence in east London.

“We organized protests, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he explains. “I gained experience in local mobilization.”

Yet seeking more than just responding to everyday prejudice and institutional bias together with peers, aimed to elevate antiracism as a fundamental right. That brought him to the advocacy group, where over the next decade he worked with international campaigners to advocate for a new approach of the definition of basic rights. “Previously, they weren't active on financial and community issues. they concentrated solely on individual liberties,” he states.

Towards the close of the 1990s, Rehman’s work at the organization connected him with multiple international social justice organisations. Then they had coalesced as anti-globalization activists challenging free-market policies. The knowledge he acquired through this experience would affect the rest of his career.

“I was going collaborating with activists, and each person discussed how bad climate was, agricultural challenges, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “And I was like! Every gain through activism is going to be unravelled by this thing. This challenge that is happening, it’s called climate – and yet few addressed it like that.”

This led Rehman to his first job with Friends of the Earth during the mid-2000s. Back then, the majority of green groups discussed global warming as a problem for the future.

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

He focused to bring the voices from global south nations during negotiations. This approach wasn't make him popular. Once, he shares, post-negotiations involving ministers and green groups, a politician called his chief executive insisting he stop his strong advocacy. He would not be drawn on which minister it was.

“Many believed: ‘Who is this person who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ Consider, the environment is a nice thing, there's common ground. [But] For me it represented addressing inequality, defending rights … about power structures.”

Fairness perspectives gained traction in climate and environmental campaigning. But the converse took place. organizations focused on equality starting to address ecological challenges.

This led to the charity supported by unions {