Maude Barlow's 10 steps to generating change

There are few social issues that Canada's most famous activist has not tackled. Maude Barlow, feminist, environmentalist, champion of the poor and anti-globalization campaigner, has pretty well seen them all and devised effective campaigns to raise awareness of them. The national chairperson of the Council of Canadians offers a succinct 10 steps on how to change society:

1) Get the right issue. You have to have an issue that people care about. You can't manufacture it. And sometimes you just can't figure out what issue will suddenly take off. Like when the Multilateral Agreement on Investment story broke in the late 1990s, I knew it was important but it was an obscure proposed investment agreement from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And for whatever set of reasons, it just hit a nerve and we ended up with no fewer than 600 local groups against the MAI in Canada. (The MAI would have given corporations in World Trade Organization countries the right to sue foreign governments that pass laws against the companies' corporate interests.) It was really truly a corporate bill of rights. We defeated it. It was the first international resistance Internet campaign.

2) Use the Internet to inform people and to organize them. It is the great equalizer. Even a small poverty-stricken village in Nairobi can raise world awareness of its plight through a single computer.

3) You must provide really good material that is readable. Even with a simple thing like a street name. If you are taking a thing like a proposed bit of environmental legislation or a trade agreement, you've got to make sure that you've got the background and the legal analysis and the political and social analysis. You have to have that because you have to convince the policy makers that you are serious. And then you have to turn that into language that ordinary people can understand and use. You need to put out basic factsheets and you put out little mini videos on an issue over the Internet. The kind of media that young people can relate to. Do whatever is going to reach people.

4) Make activism easy. Give people simple ways to express their opposition directly to the people in power - politicians, corporate leaders, etc. Use a phone or email tree where you can get literally hundreds of thousands of calls and emails in to your member of Parliament in a matter of days. Once you have got this technology down pat, you can really move it.

5) Get to the media. Frankly, that's harder than it used to be. Print media are more conservative and owned by some pretty big business interests that wouldn't necessarily agree with your point of view. It's harder to get through the mainstream media, but you can't bypass that.

6) Network. You always have to network. You have to identify other organizations you should be working with. So, for instance, on the campaign for the right to water, we brought in environmental groups, human rights groups, labour groups, faith-based groups, social justice groups, and brought them together from different perspectives but where we have one common goal, and that is that we want Canada to reverse its opposition to the right to water. In other words, rally the stakeholders.

7) You are in for the long haul. The notion of winning climate-change issues or winning decent legislation for water is not going to happen in any of our lifetimes. Winning is building a movement and winning is building consciousness. And then the consciousness is going to flip enough so that it is the dominant consciousness. Like climate change has suddenly happened. For years and years and years you are in the wilderness and then all of a sudden your viewpoint is the dominant one.

8) You have to give people benchmarks for success. You can't win every single campaign. It's a mug's game to think that you are going to win every time. You have to think in terms of building a movement.

9) Always treat the opposition with respect.

10) Have some fun. If you don't have fun and you don't make it joyful and you don't stop and have a glass of wine and take some time to renew, it's just all work. What people don't realize is that social activism is just a wonderful choice of lifestyle. You meet the nicest people and I have the most interesting life of anybody I know. You have to get pleasure and joy from it; otherwise you will burn out.