Anna Watson’s Run on Sun campaign lets schools across the UK harness the clean, renewable energy beaming down on their roofs. “Every school should be able to go solar if they want to,” she says. “Children understand these issues so easily, and they say: ‘Of course we need to look after our environment.’”
In fact it was her own biology teacher’s lessons on climate change that inspired Watson to join Greenpeace as a teenager, starting a lifetime of campaigning. She then became involved in action against genetically modified food and other green issues while studying ecology at university in Lancaster.
“This was in the mid-90s, when there were road protests and we were galvanising communities. It was a very exciting time to be a young person involved in the environment movement,” she says.
Watson has worked for Friends of the Earth for 16 years now and is a senior campaigner for the organisation. She recently helped lead a gathering in Derbyshire attended by around 450 activists, working with them on issues from fracking to renewables.
The Run on Sun project was sparked by the success of an idea she had as a governor at her own children’s school in Bradford. Watson persuaded the school to install a solar roof funded by a loan from the council which they will pay back with the money they save on energy bills.
“Parents and kids were talking about it in the playground. We had a celebration assembly when the panels went up and the kids got really excited,” she says. Now she is in contact with more than 1,000 schools across the country which want to do the same, and she says the enthusiasm that the project inspires in communities drives her to continue.
“When you’re working with and talking to children, you know it’s our generation that has to take action so that their world is going to be left in a better place.”
Runners-up: Georgina Downs; Helen Rimmer; Reiss Salustro-Pilson; Claire Wallerstein
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