Sam Sleeman

I was really inspired by Greta Thunberg the Swedish activist and I was wondering why… you know why isn’t this happening in the UK? And then… kind of that converged with me, I was on Facebook… and social media has been a really good way of getting connected with this movement. So I was on Facebook and I saw Youth Strike 4 Climate UK, and someone posted ‘comment your city and see if there’s interest’, so I was just thinking ‘okay I come to Exeter for college everyday’ so I put Exeter in and about a week later actually I got contacted actually by Natasha’s mum, who said ‘oh my daughter is really interested, do you want to make this happen?’ and I was like ‘I’ve never been to a protest before, let alone organised a protest before, but I thought you know this is really important so I went through it and her mum had a load of contacts so we set up a group chat together and then it just went from there really. We were like ‘where shall we do it?’ and we thought, you know the local authority is Devon County Council so we’ll do it there. And… uh lets make some posters, lets make a social media and… it just kind of tumbled and tumbled until I was standing in a crowd of 500 people outside… um the council building and was like… it happened (laughs). Um, so it was kind of really surreal the whole thing I’d say.

So that was February the 15^th.  We met at Devon County Hall at 9 o’clock… umm we were originally going to do it at 11 o’clock but then we discovered that all of the councillors would already be in the building by then and we wanted them to walk past us… to see the kind of presence that we were creating there. So um… we all kind of gathered outside by the building. People had banners, people were chanting and um… then the leader of the council came out. We were obviously loud, he was shocked and he addressed the crowd and at one point in his speech he said ‘oil is necessary for water’ which we were a bit taken aback with, we were like ‘have you seen an oil spill?’ So the crowd started to boo at him, it got quite tense quite quickly so he went inside. Then… by then everyone in the crowd was like ‘yeah let’s start a revolution!’ so we kind of walked through the building… but we didn’t actually go through the building, there’s like a walkway and so we went onto their grounds outside where there was like a… a platform and then people started to take the microphone, give speeches, it was all kind of spontaneous. I think I was the only one there who had written a speech, um… and then the plan wasn’t to do a protest march but I think on the day we just felt lets go for it… it was incredibly dangerous (laughs), we had a lot of… that’s the thing there we had a lot of small children but we managed to get everyone from the council building which is slightly out of the town centre into the town centre and from there we finished in Belmont Park in Exeter, um… where there were more speeches… so it was kind of all just happening as we went along, people were just interacting and they were talking about what to do and it was just very… I guess hopeful… I don’t… I don’t… the thing with the climate is we don’t want to feel too hopeful because of all the reports coming out and how, uh… hope is something that the politicians are using to kind of, uh… diminish the situation and we don’t want to use that ourselves, but that day did feel genuinely hopeful.

Notes:

Read more about Sam Sleeman’s involvement with Exeter Youth Strike 4 Climate:
https://exeterobserver.org/2019/06/06/exeter-youth-strike-for-climate-floodgates-open/