Guest Article: Building Power and Resilience at Parents for Future UK
Rowan Ryrie, Co-founder & Co-director, Parents for Future UK, talks about their innovative approach to boost power and resilience in the fight for climate justice.
Love isn’t something that tends to feature in climate headlines. Parents aren’t typically a group associated with political activism. But one parent-driven climate movement in the UK has grown steadily since inception galvanising groups right across the country into grassroots climate activism.
Founded by a small group of mums in 2019 — and relaunched last year — Parents for Future (PFF) UK is, today, the largest parent climate movement in the UK. And it’s growing fast.
Empowering change
It’s well reported that a huge number of adults today feel helpless in the face of the climate crisis. This is especially true among parents who struggle with the realities their children will face as they grow older.
Parents for Future works to tackle these feelings of powerlessness head-on, by helping individuals build genuine emotional resilience and identifying opportunities for parents to win tangible change, giving parents a sense of agency in creating their children’s future. It does this by establishing powerful, parent-based, communities of climate activists that, together, campaign for justice — not just for this generation but also for those to come.
Through working in collaboration with other climate groups, they have delivered dynamic campaigns on issues such as fuel poverty, home energy transition and fossil fuels.
A growing movement
PFF operates as a supported network, helping parents across the country set up local action groups as well as using the voice of parents to campaign nationally. They engage parents through activities that are easy for everyone to access such as toy swaps, events in schools, craft activities and coffee mornings and use these activities to direct parents towards local and national campaigning.
This local connection builds a strong and committed membership; parents can more easily see the relevance to their community of local actions and can more easily contribute.
Parents have added a key voice to campaigns such as the Stop Rosebank campaign against the expansion of offshore oil exploration. By connecting local groups into national campaigns, PFF can win change at a systemic level and this approach is helping to grow the confidence of local groups.
For example, the PFF Scotland group now have well established schools engagement programmes in Glasgow and have recently established as a separate charity. They are having success in securing commitments from Glasgow City Council to tackle air pollution. Their work is supported by the Civic Power Fund.
This year PFF are building on their success so far by expanding their structured community organising into schools across the UK. They are also growing their partnership with Larger Us to train hundreds more parents and carers to have courageous climate conversations.
A supportive community
It’s an unfortunate truth that all climate movements face a high risk of burnout. For time-poor parents, this is especially true. The reality of climate and other interconnected crises and their impacts on children can simply be overwhelming. That’s why PFF has intentionally built emotional support into its structure. This is provided by trained volunteers and has helped the organisation become a highly supportive and nourishing community.
This supportive culture makes the movement more resilient. And critically: members also report that the emotional support enables them to move rapidly from not taking any action to being highly engaged with and active on climate issues.
“Before joining PFF, I couldn’t see how I could make time or find headspace for climate action. Gradually, I realised that the anxiety, feeling of helplessness and shame that came from not taking action was actually taking up quite a lot of my capacity and impacting negatively on almost all areas of my life. Since getting more involved in action and finding a community, those negative feelings have decreased significantly, making room for more action and joy.” Sal, PFF volunteer, 2023.
With training from the Climate Psychology Alliance, PFF also helps parents feel more confident in talking to their children about climate — a key way to combat escalating anxiety amongst the young.
Love for future generations
Recent research by Potential Energy underlines the importance of parents in the fight against climate change. They interviewed 60,000 people across 23 countries and discovered that love for future generations was the most popular reason for climate action in every country. In fact, it is quoted as being an astounding 12x more important than any other reason.
With polls showing the UK has the least welcoming climate movement of any EU country, Parents for Future design their work to be accessible and welcoming to those who aren’t already engaged in climate activism. And they are seeing results. The majority of Parents for Future’s new members have no prior experience of climate activism.
Bigger conversations
Over recent years, discussions about climate have become increasingly politically polarised. To combat this, PFF has partnered with Larger Us who help by training parents to have more courageous conversations about climate. A pilot in 2023 showed promising results. All participants reported the programme helped them feel more able to talk about climate issues with others.
It’s well known we’re in a time when trust in UK media is low — and the main climate voices we hear are youth activists and experts. More than ever, parents have huge potential to add authentic and relatable voices to the topic. Schools play a key part in this, as places in which parents can actively engage in climate conversations. Recent research underlined that parents of school age children are one of the most socially interconnected groups in society.
There have been many initiatives to engage schools on climate, but parents have been broadly overlooked as part of school communities. That’s why PFF is currently piloting the first national programme to engage and organise parents through school communities. This kind of long-term base-building is essential to the ongoing health of the climate movement.
But as Civic Power Fund’s Funding Justice report highlighted and PFF are finding as they fundraise for schools based organising, funders still often don’t understand how to fund long-term power building and this work remains severely under-resourced.
Growing parent power
In recent years, several parent-based organisations have become powerful advocates for different causes. Pregnant then Screwed and Flex Appeal campaign for fair childcare and flexible working. Parents for a Smartphone Free Childhood has exploded into a huge grassroots movement with over 50 regional groups within weeks and these are just three examples of many.
It’s fair to say parents have a growing voice. And it’s powerful: this is a voice politicians take note of. Labour’s election strategy has a key focus on reaching suburban mums.
Despite the growing evidence of the power of parents and the movement’s success so far, the scarcity of long-term, multi-year funding for organising strategies is having an impact on Parents for Future UK as it does for other groups using organising strategies.
With a tiny team of part-time parents, time intensive funding applications can require up to half the team to use all their paid hours for several weeks on meeting funders requirements. Often without any funding to show at the end of the process. This leads to pressure on team members to work far beyond paid hours to deliver programming and support the volunteers across the movement which raises concerns about team wellbeing.
Movements such as PFF are well placed to be highly responsive to news events or changing circumstances yet philanthropic funding structures can hold them back from leaning into this strength. Short-term grants with limited flexibility can lead to a loss of both agility and ambition. While other funding models such as paid membership can be options for movements, there is tension between paid membership models (with implicit paying someone else to take action on your behalf) and PFF’s focus on creating agency.
PFF doesn’t underestimate the challenges of communicating climate effectively but know that if they can galvanise parents right across the UK, they can be part of creating real, systemic change.
