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Monday May 22, 2006

Even Richard Ashcroft Supports Oxfam!!

One of the bonuses of being an Oxfam Outreach Campaigner is that you get  to see gigs for free....although this isnt the only reason why i do it!! It also involves campaigning very hard to convince those coming to watch the gig  to sign the petition! 

As a supporter of the Control Arms Campaign, Richard Ashcroft  invited Oxfam to join him on his last tour across the UK. i joined the fun last friday (19th May).

The best time to grab people to fill in petitions i have found is when they are queueing in for toilets, to get into a  venue etc. as they dont have much else to do (and its a bit difficult to escape us!) so the minute people started queueing to get intio the gig we targeted them with lots of information about the arms trade...in all situations like this you get the awkward few but a lot of people are very interested to find out more and may even go on to sign the petition!  People often appear to support the campaign but wont put pen to paper as  they ferel that petitions dont work or they dont want to pass on personal information due to the fear of being contacted!  For those fans that 'worship' Richard Ashcroft, telling them that he had asked us to be there - scored big brownie points!! Although what i learnt quickly  was not to embarrass  myself by mistaking  Richard Ashcroft for someone else  -  knowing that  Richard Ashcroft had previously been  a  member of a boy band  but not realising it was the Verve and putting my foot in it! whoops!!

Being able to campaign inside  also  had its  ups and downs  it became somewhat clearer that we had been asked to be there…but we lost the queue and had to distract people away from buying beer to sign our petition, a lot harder than grabbing peoples attention when they were in the queue.

The Control Arms campaign takes a slightly different approach to other petitions, with the aims of collecting a ‘million faces’. This means that as well as getting all those names on paper we had the added task of convincing people to have their photo taken or draw their face! im rapidly learning how many people are photo shy and when one of our cameras ran out of memory –I ended up getting people to draw their faces anyway! This had the added bonus of encouraging groups of friends to compete against each other to see who had the best drawing skills …with some rather amusing attempts!! This took a little longer but it made it easier to chat and giggle with the ‘artists’!

While Richard Ashcroft was performing we stood little chance of getting people to support the campaign…which meant we had time to socialise with the other campaigners and enjoy the gig ourselves!! Even though I had forgotten that Richard Ashcroft’s history was in the Verve having seen the gig I’m not likely to forget it in a hurry!!

Posted by Helen Bryant ( 1:37 PM )
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