It’s been a bit of a weird time this last few months. It started as a “better do something about how bleak the future’s looking, shall we go to a member’s meeting” between me and my poor unsuspecting partner Autumn. But that first commitment gradually escalated into deepening levels of involvement with Lewisham Green Party. On 7th May, peak involvement levels were reached, when the good folk of Deptford made me one of their three new Green councillors. (Thanks Deptford, love ya! x)

On the journey to the start of this surreal new chapter, I’ve dabbled in some AV, helped organise a Christmas party, delivered an unreasonable number of leaflets, written thousands of lines of code, and made friends with so many amazing people. It’s been a fascinating time so it warrants documenting for posterity. Read on to find out what it was like to witness an election winning local party/machine grow in real time. Hopefully I’ve done it justice!

Baby steps

When me and my partner arrived at our first Green Party meeting last year, we weren’t seasoned political campaigners; I remember being very nervous going in. We were furious with Labour. They were worse than we expected in government. It was no longer the party my parents and grandparents spent their entire lives voting for. Instead, it was (and still is) scapegoating vulnerable communities, pandering to Reform, and failing to be ambitious enough with the economy. So we thought we’d better do something to play our part in getting rid.

We were crammed into the small room at St Mary’s in Ladywell, soon needing to find a bigger space. The meeting touched on the need for more people to go canvassing. I wasn’t so sure about the idea myself; it sounded a bit scary to go knocking on strangers doors. Either way, we enjoyed a little pub trip afterwards, offered to do a bit of leafleting, and got ourselves added to the big WhatsApp (fateful moment, my phone is never going back to that serene silence it once knew before this day). At some point in the next few weeks I plucked up the courage to give door-knocking a go. I shadowed the lovely Nick, a long standing member, who showed me how it was done. While I wasn’t at all expecting to, I completely caught the bug and it was the first time of many. I had thought of myself as an introvert, but it turns out I’d been wrong for years, I actually love a good natter!

Left: Winter social scheming. Ele and Annabelle are also both councillors now. Right: Canvassing in the depths of winter.

Through the still reasonable number of WhatsApp chats now living inside my phone, I also caught wind that we wanted to start running hybrid member’s meetings, so we could have captions in the room and accommodate people joining from home. I thought “I can use a computer, I’ll have a go at helping with that”, and before long I was doing tech support for our ever busier monthly gatherings.

Armed with new confidence from getting involved, I joined a team helping to organise our winter social to give our hard-working exec committee a rest. Little did I realise then that soon enough I would be within that hard-working exec committee at the most exciting time in its history. Those WhatsApps in my phone were poised to get busier before long…

Trying to be helpful with data, getting excited, and ending up deeply embroiled

At the start of December, an opening appeared for co-data officer, managing the collection, storage, and processing of the party’s canvassing data from the doorstep. This was alongside Robin, who is now also a councillor in Ladywell (a lot of the characters in this story are councillors now). As a software engineer, this role was 100% my thing!

I’d already been plugging away at writing some code to digitise our marked electoral registers for a few weeks. These are stubborn PDF scans of physical pages filled with electoral data. After weeks of chipping away, these were scanning in at a 90% success-rate, good enough for us to scale our campaign in the time we had left. I was ready for my next challenge!

Once in post as a data officer, the first two issues were clear. Firstly, we needed to migrate out of Google Sheets and into a new digital canvassing system. Lewisham Greens were finally ditching paper and spreadsheets! The data entry that followed every canvassing session was too painful, stuff got lost, it took yonks, we just couldn’t keep doing it.

The other challenge was all the old paper sheets we still had lying around from before. We were sitting on a 600+ sheet backlog of paper-based data that needed to be typed up manually. Luckily, we were in the New Year’s Resolution window, so a flurry of keen data enterers volunteered, we assembled a team, and we smashed through it. People power!

We’d conquered our legacy issues, and the path ahead was clear, just in time to welcome Zack and 600+ keen volunteers to the borough. At the time this was the Green Party’s largest ever action day in London, an unbelievably exciting day. We’d just picked our mayoral candidate and our Liam did a fine job of getting the horde of canvassers energised ahead of campaigning. Having by now canvassed plenty of times, I had the pleasure of leading out a team of canvassers from our hub for a day of fun in the winter sun.

Top: Big day out canvassing, Tanya in the centre is also now a councillor. Bottom: Deptford team. Our ward coordinator Alex is putting himself forward to stay on as a co-ordinator of Lewisham Greens.

It was also around this time that I decided I’d have a go at putting myself forward to be a candidate. Winning in Deptford was a long shot, but I knew I was organised, motivated, and enjoyed working with people. If by some absolute freak accident of history we were to actually win, I backed myself to do a decent job¹. We had a hustings, one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life (Greens ask good questions!), and my peers thought I should be one of the candidates in Deptford ward. Hau-Yu, Dan and I got straight to work!

Campaigning (lots and lots)

All the while, we were adding more wards to our campaign as more energy and excitement built up; the canvassing data was starting to roll in faster and faster. With this rapid growth came apprehension from some quarters; what if we were spreading too thin; did we actually have a shot in some of these places? We needed an analysis pipeline we could run our canvassing data through regularly, to build a picture of how our campaign was looking. There are nuances around how Greens collect data which made this a little fiddly,² but I was able to put forward some meaningful canvassing performance metrics which did the trick. I presented my findings to the exec, followed by the membership at one of our monthly meetings.

We also were fortunate enough at that time to receive one brief glimpse into how many doors Lewisham Labour were getting around. We were neck and neck with them on people spoken to, and our data was showing early promise too. All of the wards we were campaigning in were leaning Green or sitting on a knife-edge. A Green Lewisham was staring us in the face for the first time. We just had to be bold enough to lace up our shoes, pound the streets, and campaign to make sure it happened, so that is exactly what we did, in our droves.

Teams of volunteers coalesced across Lewisham around the singular mission of getting Greens elected. Canvassing teams, ward teams, social media/comms teams, sub-committees, you name it! People piled in to lend their time and skills to building the campaign. I had the privilege of watching with excitement as our work paid off and the numbers of doors knocked grew exponentially month on month. It was so exciting to watch people power pay off all over Lewisham in real time.

Campaigning in Deptford with the lovely local Greens was definitely the absolute highlight for me. It’s difficult to convey what a privilege it is to spend months hanging out with a bunch of lovely people who are giving hours of their time to making you one of their local councillors, and of course to receive that trust. We were out multiple nights a week; pretty much every day for the final month. Needless to say, we all collected a lot of blisters, but there was no shortage of smiles and laughter as we etched every street and block in Deptford into the depths of our minds.

Shout outs need go to:

• Sharon Bass for her unrelenting support. Follow her on Instagram at @thesharonbass.
• My mum (Hayley, she has a name too), Bronte, and Ashley for rocking up at the end and keeping me sane.
• Autumn for being the most patient and supportive human being alive in the world today.
• Dan and Hau-Yu for being so dedicated.
• Alex for being an admin machine.
• The lovely Swiss journalist who came to one of our canvassing sessions, one of the more random moments of the campaign! You can read Julie’s article here.
• All of the wonderful volunteers who showed up time and time again. There are too many of you to name!

When polling day finally did roll around, the whole team knew there was absolutely nothing more we could have done, we could not have spoken to more people, delivered more leaflets, or squeezed more out of our data in the time given to us. Once the results started to roll in, it was clear my expectations were completely wrong. Wards I had primed people to believe would be close races started to come in as decisive victories. Over a day of many happy tears our hard work was resoundingly vindicated. The pub trip afterwards was legendary; it would probably have been unforgettable if I’d enjoyed it less (drink responsibly folks).

Lewisham Greens have shown what happens when ordinary people channel their frustration into action. We realised our agency and turned up again and again to take matters into our own hands. By taking small acts which added up over time, we made a difference. When we yammer on about hope being here, this collective power we have built is exactly what we are referring too.

What’s happening now then?

Well, I don’t expect things are going to calm down for a bit now. It’s been just under two months since I was elected alongside 39 other local Greens, and I haven’t really stopped since then. You’ve sent us plenty of emails and we’ve been spending time going out into our communities meeting local groups. We’ve also been sorting out who sits on what committees and learning how to do the best job we can in those roles. Oh, and there’s been a by-election on in Crofton Park!³ I’ll chase this post with a little update on what my two months have looked like. It’s certainly been varied, and a few sentences won’t do it justice, that’s for sure.

All that remains to do until then is to send a mega big thank you to the people of Lewisham who voted Green, and to the hordes of Lewisham Greens volunteers who worked tirelessly to make it happen. We’ve built an amazing Lewisham Greens community in the last few months, I’m so excited to see how we build from here. I hope my ramblings have done justice to the campaign we all built, it was absolutely unforgettable to be part of it!

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1. I’d better make sure past Heather is proven correct over the next four years. The people will be the judges. ↩︎
2. I won’t share too much detail about why it’s fiddly, sorry if you’re from Lewisham Labour and reading this. ↩︎
3. This is because Liam was basically too successful! He won the mayoralty and his council seat in Crofton Park. Legally he cannot hold both posts, so there has to be a by-election. ↩︎