Campaign Diaries: Natasha joins the HQ Campaigns Team

Campaign Diaries: Behind the scenes with the Campaigns Team

In the first of a special series of blogs we take a look behind the emails, actions, and our work to save nature; and introduce you to some of the names and faces we meet there. With no further ado, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to Natasha Yorke-Edgell... 

Hi everyone, my name is Natasha, and I hope we are going to be talking and seeing each other a lot more in my new role with the campaigns team!

So – where have I come from? For the last two years I have worked as the campaigner for RSPB Cymru, based in Cardiff, but I’m now on a shiny new secondment at our UK Headquarters, based at the Lodge. My role is to co-ordinate and support our campaigning related to the new laws coming in because of the UK leaving the EU. This is across all four countries of the UK as well as delivering our Westminster campaigns with Kim. I’ll be working closely with colleagues in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to make sure all our Governments (and civil servants, in NI) are doing the right things for nature, and joining it all up to our big-picture ‘Let Nature Sing’ campaign.

 Trump Rally, London 2018

So far in RSPB I’ve campaigned on Welsh food and farming, nature laws in Wales post-Brexit and stopping the M4 relief road from devastating the Gwent Levels. I also supported our policy team with their communications. I still work on most of the same campaign areas, particularly on Brexit laws, but some new bits include campaigning on the Sizewell C nuclear development near Minsmere (watch out for this in the New Year!). I am really interested in expanding our off-line campaigning, connecting with local communities and groups to get more of the rich face-to-face and creative stuff happening on the ground – so if you have any ideas about what you would like to do and how your experience of campaigning with the RSPB could be even better, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Kim and I. (Though at this stage I can’t promise we will be able to fulfil all your campaigning hopes and dreams, seeing as we are a small two-women band - but we can try!)

  Show the Love, 2017

Who am I? I am 24 years old, grew up in the beautiful Norfolk countryside, and I am passionate about saving the nature that I love so dearly. In my time before RSPB I founded a successful ethical investment (and divestment) campaign at the University of Exeter, I’ve campaigned on human rights (Syria, Yemen, persecuted journalists…), FairTrade, community gardening and access to green space, waste and recycling, and climate change. I’ve done waste auditing, corporate social responsibility, resilience and movement building courses, but one of my most exciting courses is one I’m doing now, the Academy of Change, an international programme training up young people in NGOs to use behaviour change theory and tactics in their area (super exciting). I also worked in communications in the Netherlands for a year.

Although I am a nature enthusiast I’m a creative at heart, so terrible with taxonomy but better at images/patterns, so I love taking up close photos of miniature worlds
in nature, but I can never remember the names of anything I photograph! (Forgive me, techy people.) In my spare time I love to be with friends
(often eating and drinking together in some capacity) being in nature and going to see live music. Oh and a good read/some craft when I’m not too tired
(and therefore bleaching my brain with bad TV).

 NEON Movement Building Training, 2018

I really look forward to meeting more of you – virtually for now, but one day, I hope, in person too. You are the change-makers that inspire me every day that the world is good, people do care, and together we do have the power to build the future we want for nature and society. Before I go, I will leave you a quote from one of the greats that I think is as relevant today as it was in 1968:

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change,” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 1968

You and I are awake; we are agile, we are ambitious, we are changing the fate of nature.

Campaign love,
Natasha