Areeba Hamid

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Barbara Brayshay: And, so you said you talked about your vision for Greenpeace. So it might be nice to kind of put that, we could perhaps put something about that down on the record.Areeba Hamid: Yes.Barbara Brayshay: To say what you, what you would like to- You know what you feel that, you know, you’d like to bring to the organisation. Or how you’d like to see the organisation going forward.Areeba Hamid: Yes. I mean we have just finished our two year strategy actually. I can send something longer to you. But one of the things that really sort of both when I left Greenpeace and when I went to Sunrise, because Sunrise is also very invested in making movements stronger. I sort of was convinced that we cannot do this alone. Greenpeace can’t win this alone. We have to be a better ally in the movement. We have to work with others. And it’s frustrating and sometimes it slows people down and I get it. But I was also very adamant that, yes, we are not a lone, we are not a lone actor in this. Like we have to work with XR and we have to work with JSO and we have to- Because we all want the same things. We might disagree with each other on tactics.Barbara Brayshay: Tactically. Mmm. Mmm.Areeba Hamid: But that’s fine. I mean I don’t see BP and Shell having a spat in public do we? So I was adamant that that’s what I wanted to change about Greenpeace. Because Greenpeace has been a lone actor far too long right. I was adamant that I wanted to also talk about values and how we relate with each other but also with the outside world. And decided some of this work, when I was setting up the team from scratch in Sunrise, I sort of thought about how I want this team to be set up. And if you write it down and if talk about values, actually corporates do it really well.Barbara Brayshay: Yes.Areeba Hamid: Corporates have values ingrained on their marble and what not, right.Barbara Brayshay: So are you thinking about the sort of ethos of the organisation?Areeba Hamid: Ethos of the organisation, yes. And we do have values which are non-violence and you know we don’t take money from governments or corporations. Those are global values. But the ethos, the, the values that you know- So we introduced values, three values. We want to win, relationships first and lifting all boats, which sort of speaks to the vision of like, you know, intersectionality of the movement and building good relationships with allies both inside and outside so that we can take risks together. It’s about trust. And then winning, like we don’t have the- We don’t have the luxury of despair. We want to win. We are in it to win it. I have no shame in saying that as in, not for Greenpeace but for the movement. Again, like we are like, oh we get all very, you know, modest about being ambitious and I don’t think we have the luxury.[…]Barbara Brayshay: So I’ve got relationships and wanting to win. And you said three.Areeba Hamid: And lifting all boats, which comes from the saying, A rising tides lifts all boats. So basically it’s like we don’t want to, we don’t want to win in one area to lose in another area.Barbara Brayshay: Okay.Areeba Hamid: We don’t want oil workers to lose jobs because we are ending North Sea Oil and Gas. We are going to work with trade unions to get them a better deal so that there is just transition. And we don’t want to get global south countries to stop using fossil fuels without necessarily getting them the money they need to adapt and mitigate for climate change. So just speaks to the overlap of issues that we work on. But yes those are- So the values which speaks for basically being more collaborative, more open, more ambitious. And, and I think that if I can send you a plan once it’s online. It is nearly ready. You will see that it is lots about, the question after XR and JSO in the movement has been what is Greenpeace’s role and that’s a question that, you know, any, even the board had. Like what do you think if you get this job? And I think we have to, very simply put, keep doing the things that we are really good at, that nobody else can do, nobody else has ships, nobody else. Shell will not take anybody else to court. Shell will take Greenpeace to court. We don’t take money from governments or corporations which means we can stand up to them and do stuff that other org- So keep those things but also change to be more relevant, to attract more diverse people, more younger people, to, you know, people who support us sometimes are the ones who when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in the eighties, they set up a direct debit and never cancelled basically. Those are our supporters. And I love them and they are the reason why we are still here. But we also need new ones.British Library catalogue number: C2037/77 Project clip number: 232