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Every weekday morning, children from the south Asian community in Burnley would assemble prior to going to school. This was the seventies, a period when extremist organizations were mobilising, and these children were the offspring of immigrant laborers who had been invited to Britain ten years before to address employment gaps.

Among them was Asad Rehman, who had relocated to the community with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We would all walk together,” he explains, “as there were risks to walk alone. Smaller kids at the center, the bigger kids around the edge, since we faced assaults on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Other children would make offensive gestures and hurl racial epithets at them. They shared extremist publications without concealment at school. Students of color regularly, at break times, we secured ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked.”

“So I started talking to everybody,” says Rehman. Together, they resolved to oppose the teachers who had ignored their safety by collectively refusing to attend. “and we will say that the reason was the schools aren’t safe for us.” It was Rehman’s initial experience of organising. As he joined wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it shaped his political outlook.

“We started to protect our community helping me understand that crucial insight which I've carried: our strength multiplies as a united group than when we’re individual. You need organisations to bring people together and you need a vision to maintain unity.”

Recently, he took on the role of CEO of the environmental charity the well-known activist organization. For decades, the familiar face of environmental crisis was the iconic bear on melting ice. Now, to speak of the climate crisis and not including inequality and discrimination has become all but unthinkable. Rehman positioned himself in the vanguard of this transformation.

“This role appealed to me given the scale of the crisis out there,” he shared with the media on the sidelines a Make Them Pay protest in central London last month. “We face multiple connected challenges of climate, social injustice, of economic systems designed to favor against ordinary people. Essentially about fairness.

“And there is only one organisation that has always centred fairness – ecological equity and global climate fairness – that’s Friends of the Earth.”

With more than 250,000 supporters and community teams, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own) is the UK’s biggest green activist community. Recently, it invested significant funds on activism including judicial reviews to government policy grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

Yet it – possibly mistakenly – earned a reputation as a less radical organisation compared with its peers. Focusing on awareness campaigns than road blockades and occupations.

The hiring of someone focused on inequality like Rehman could be a strategic move to change perceptions.

It's not his initial stint he collaborated with the charity.

Following university, he maintained campaigning for racial justice, engaged with the Newham Monitoring Project at a time when the far right was still a force in the capital.

“We organized protests, and it was doing casework, based in neighborhoods,” he says. “And I learned being a community organiser.”

However, unsatisfied with simply reactively countering public discrimination and government policies together with peers, worked to frame antiracism within a rights framework. This led him to Amnesty UK, where over the next decade he collaborated alongside international campaigners to advocate for significant change in the understanding of human rights. “Previously, Amnesty didn’t campaign on inequality matters. their work was limited to political freedoms,” he says.

As the conclusion of the 1990s, his efforts through his role connected him with a range of worldwide activist networks. Then they came together in opposition to neoliberalism against neoliberalism. The insights he gained through this experience would affect the rest of his career.

“I visited meeting campaigners, and each person was saying how bad climate was, how farming was becoming impossible, creating refugees,” he recalls. “I thought! All our achievements through activism could be undone due to climate change. This issue that is happening, it’s called climate – however it wasn't being discussed like that.”

This led Rehman to his first job within the organization years ago. Back then, most environmental organisations discussed environmental issues as a problem for the future.

“This network represented the unique environmental organisation that then officially broke with what I’d call typical conservation groups. and was one of the founders creating climate equity activism,” he states.

Rehman worked to include perspectives of the developing world into discussions. This approach wasn't make him popular. On one occasion, he remembers, following discussions with officials with activist organizations, an official contacted his boss demanding he call off his “climate Taliban”. He would not be drawn the individual's identity.

“People just felt: ‘Who is this person challenge conventions?’ You know, ecology matters, discussion is possible. [But] I viewed it as addressing inequality, advocating for freedoms … a deeply political fight.”

Justice narratives found acceptance in climate and environmental campaigning. But the converse took place. organizations focused on equality engaging with sustainability concerns.

This led to the charity the trade union-backed {