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Every weekday morning, students from Asian families in Burnley would meet up before heading to school. It was the seventies, an era when the National Front were mobilising, and they were the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers who had been invited to Britain ten years before to address employment gaps.

One of these children was the young Asad, who had relocated to the community with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We walked in groups,” he remembers, “because it was dangerous to walk alone. Smaller kids in the middle, the bigger kids forming a perimeter, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Things were no better at school. Students would give fascist salutes and hurl racial epithets at them. They shared Bulldog publicly in corridors. Students of color day after day, at break times, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” says Rehman. Together, they chose to challenge the teachers who had ignored their safety by as a group declining to attend. “declaring this is because the schools aren’t safe for us.” This became Rehman’s first taste of mobilizing. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns that were formed across the country, it influenced his activist perspective.

“We started to protect our community and I started to realise that crucial insight remaining with me: our strength multiplies as a united group rather than individually. It takes organizations to bring people together and a common purpose to maintain unity.”

This summer, he took on the role of head of the conservation group the well-known activist organization. Over many years, the symbolic image of environmental crisis was arctic wildlife drifting on an ice floe. Today, discussing environmental issues without mentioning inequality and discrimination is widely considered highly inappropriate. And Rehman has been as a leader of this evolution.

“I accepted this position given the scale of the crisis out there,” he told the media at an environmental protest near government offices recently. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, social injustice, of capitalist models that have been rigged against ordinary people. It’s ultimately an equity issue.

“And there is only one organisation has consistently focused on fairness – green rights and environmental equality – this particular network.”

Having numerous backers plus hundreds of local branches, The organization (Scotland has its own) represents Britain's largest environmental campaigning network. Recently, it allocated over ten million pounds on activism ranging from courtroom challenges to government policy community initiatives against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

But it has – albeit undeservedly – been perceived as a less radical organisation compared with its peers. More bake sales and petitions rather than direct action.

The selection of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner such as him could be the organisation’s attempt to change perceptions.

It's not the beginning he collaborated with the organization.

After graduating, he maintained campaigning for racial justice, engaged with a community organization in the era as nationalist movements was still a force locally.

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

However, unsatisfied than just responding to everyday prejudice and institutional bias together with peers, worked to frame antiracism within a rights framework. This led him to the human rights organization, where over the next decade he worked with developing world advocates to demand a new approach in the understanding of freedoms. “Previously, they weren't active on inequality matters. they concentrated solely on individual liberties,” he states.

Towards the close of the nineties, Rehman’s work with Amnesty connected him with multiple international social justice organisations. At that time they had coalesced into the counter-globalisation movement against neoliberalism. The knowledge he acquired from these connections would affect his future work.

“I traveled collaborating with activists, all those was saying the climate crisis, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he says. “I thought! Every gain through activism could be undone because of environmental collapse. This challenge occurring, termed environmental crisis – however few addressed it like that.”

Which directed him to begin working within the organization in 2006. Then, the majority of green groups framed climate change as tomorrow's challenge.

“This network was the only mainstream activist body that separated from other green organizations. helping establish of the emerging the climate justice movement,” he says.

Rehman worked to include perspectives from global south nations into discussions. This approach wasn't earn him friends. Once, he shares, post-negotiations between UK government representatives with activist organizations, an official contacted his boss demanding he call off his strong advocacy. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“There was a sense: ‘Who is this person operate differently?’ Understand, the environment is a nice thing, discussion is possible. [But] I viewed it as a fight against racism, advocating for freedoms … fundamentally political.”

Fairness perspectives were increasingly becoming accepted among activists. However, the opposite occurred. with justice-oriented groups starting to address sustainability concerns.

This led to the anti-poverty campaign labor-aligned {