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Every weekday morning, students from the south Asian community in this Lancashire town would meet up before making their way to school. It was the 1970s, a period when extremist organizations were mobilising, and these youngsters were the offspring of south Asian workers who had moved to Britain a decade earlier to address employment gaps.

Among them was the young Asad, who had moved to the community with his family from Pakistan as a small child. “We traveled as one,” he explains, “as there were risks to walk alone. Younger children in the middle, the bigger kids around the edge, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Conditions were just as difficult at school. Students would make offensive gestures and shout racist insults at them. Some exchanged Bulldog openly in the halls. Minority children “every day, at break times, we had to lock ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I began discussing to everybody,” Rehman states. As a group, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by collectively refusing to attend. “declaring that the reason was the schools were unsafe for us.” It was Rehman’s initial experience of mobilizing. As he joined wider antiracism movements emerging across the country, it shaped his activist perspective.

“We began defending our community which taught me that crucial insight remaining with me: we are much more powerful acting together compared to acting alone. It takes organizations to organise you and a common purpose that binds you.”

In the past few months, he took on the role of CEO of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. Historically, the familiar face of global warming was the iconic bear drifting on an ice floe. Currently, discussing environmental issues and not including inequality and discrimination is now almost impossible. He has stood as a leader of this shift.

“I accepted this position due to the enormous challenge out there,” he explained to journalists on the sidelines a Make Them Pay protest near government offices weeks ago. “We face multiple connected challenges of climate, social injustice, of financial structures which are biased against ordinary people. It’s ultimately about fairness.

“And there is only one organisation prioritizing justice – green rights and global climate fairness – that’s Friends of the Earth.”

Having 250,000 supporters and community teams, This environmental network (with an independent Scottish branch) represents Britain's largest green activist community. Recently, it spent more than £10m on advocacy from judicial reviews against state decisions grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in park playgrounds.

But it has – perhaps unfairly – gained a profile as relatively moderate versus other groups. Focusing on awareness campaigns instead of confrontational tactics.

The hiring of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman could be a strategic move to shed that image.

And it is not the beginning he has worked there with the charity.

After graduating, he maintained campaigning for racial justice, engaged with the Newham Monitoring Project during a period while extremist groups had influence in east London.

“We organized protests, and it was doing casework, deeply connected locally,” he recalls. “And I learned local mobilization.”

However, unsatisfied beyond addressing public discrimination and institutional bias he, along with many others, sought to place antiracism within a rights framework. This led him to Amnesty UK, during ten years he collaborated alongside international campaigners to push for a new approach in the understanding of human rights. “At that time, Amnesty didn’t campaign on economic and social rights. they only campaigned individual liberties,” he notes.

By the end of the 1990s, his efforts through his role introduced him with multiple international social justice organisations. At that time they came together in opposition to neoliberalism against neoliberalism. The insights he gained from these connections shaped his ongoing activism.

“I visited collaborating with activists, all those mentioned the severity of environmental issues, how farming was becoming impossible, creating refugees,” he recalls. “It struck me! Everything we have fought for and won might be lost due to climate change. This issue occurring, it’s called climate – but it wasn't being discussed in those terms.”

This led Rehman to an initial position with Friends of the Earth in 2006. Back then, most environmental organisations were talking about climate change as tomorrow's challenge.

“The organization represented the unique activist body that separated with what I’d call other green organizations. helping establish creating the climate justice movement,” he states.

He focused to amplify concerns from global south nations into discussions. This approach wasn't make him popular. Once, he shares, after a meeting between UK government representatives with activist organizations, a minister called his chief executive requesting he control his strong advocacy. He would not be drawn on which minister it was.

“Many believed: ‘Who is this person operate differently?’ Consider, the environment is a nice thing, there's common ground. [But] I viewed it as addressing inequality, defending rights … a deeply political fight.”

Fairness perspectives were increasingly becoming accepted in climate and environmental campaigning. However, the opposite occurred. with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling ecological challenges.

And so it was the anti-poverty campaign labor-aligned {