In the Beauty Disruptors series, BeautyMatter speaks to those breaking the mold of the traditional beauty industry, from shining a light on controversial issues to paving an alternative discourse of its themes.
Long before the word “sustainability” was on the radar of the collective consciousness, Harriet Lamb was fighting for change. She headed the Fairtrade Foundation and Fairtrade International from 2001 to 2015, helping the movement reach mass adoption and helping two million farmers and workers receive fair pay and production standards across international supply chains in 68 countries. She was appointed a CBE in 2006 for her contributions and also became the first female Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge.
As the former CEO of climate change charity Ashden, Lamb helped lead community-based solutions like UK schools become zero carbon. Her time heading global peacemaking charity International Alert addressed resource conflicts and climate change conflicts across countries including Lebanon, Kenya, Syria, and Rwanda. Between all these endeavours, Lamb managed to write two books: Fighting The Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles (2008) and From Anger to Action: Inside the Global Movements for Social Justice, Peace, and a Sustainable Planet (2021).
Today, as the CEO of global environmental action NGO WRAP, she is focused on circular living models and ending plastic, textiles, and food waste (which, combined, produce 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions), with ambitions to scale these models not just in the UK but also internationally. Circular living promotes using reuse models to help drastically reduce these emissions, the impact of which goes far beyond our own recycling bags. In 2024, WRAP was represented across 30 countries and 274 employees and convened 691 organizations in the UK to help tackle waste from textiles, foods, and plastics, while working on 12 international plastics pacts with over 900 members.
Lamb sat down with BeautyMatter to discuss her passion for sustainability, the interconnectedness of poverty, conflict, the refugee crisis, and climate change, and how beauty marketers can transform public perception of eco-friendly living.
I wanted to start at the beginning, which is growing up India and how that shaped your interest in sustainability and eco-consciousness. When was the key moment it turned from an interest into a career path?
I was very lucky to have spent three years as a child in India. That meant I went back when I was 18 and when I was 22. I would say it was the third time [visiting]. Obviously, each of those meant that I was in love with India. It also gave me an awareness and understanding that within our very privileged world, on the other hand, there were people who were living with so much less, but also had so much to teach us about other ways of living more in harmony with nature and the world.
When I went back after university to be a volunteer, to work with people in rural India, overwhelmingly around tackling poverty, that’s where I learned–in those times, people saw issues around social justice over here and issues around the environment in another place—that in India, they always saw fairness to people and nature as being the same and intertwined. You can't separate it in the way that Western thinking had done. So I've always had that very strong belief that we need to be tackling the issues around social justice for people alongside justice for nature and the issues around the environment. I was very inspired by the groups I met and volunteered with in India, many of whom were also themselves very informed by a Gandhian principle about your need to be the world you want to see. You have to live those values in your daily life as well as working for the wider structural changes that we need.
When I started thinking I wanted to volunteer, actually, I got put in touch with Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, who was working in some villages in Maharashtra, which is near Mumbai, and where I learned a lot from ways of organizing small scale farmers. That stayed with me, planted a seed with me, if you like, that then turned into spending 15 years working for fairtrade. So much of that was because I had seen how people can organize at a village level with small scale farmers helping bring people into cooperatives. That although any individual farmer or person may be very vulnerable and very hard to change things, if you come together in a community group, as a farming co-op, that begins to change your power, and you can begin to get more change in the way you work with your traders, for example. A lot of my interest and my beliefs do trace back to that time in India.
Touching on Fairtrade, it's become such a part of our everyday vocabulary. How do you feel about the evolution of it?
Last week, I went to a party to celebrate 30 years of Fairtrade. It was so much fun to be together with the gang who'd helped bring fair trade into the world and obviously stretching through the ages. But there was something very unique that we'd worked together in those early days when everyone laughed at us and said it would never work or be condescending to us and said, “How sweet, darling, it'll always be a sweet little niche,” and treated us with division; people looking down their economic noses at us. In the early days, people thought fair trade meant the Office of Fair Trading in the UK. People got it muddled up, which was of course, the opposite.
The Office of Fair Trading is focused on protecting the consumer. We were focused on protecting the producers in the developing world, but, just to give a sense of the scale of what we had to overcome: within quite a short time, we'd reached 90% recognition among the public. People understood at a very top level, it was about a fair deal for farmers in developing countries. The farmers who grow our tea, our coffee, our honey, our rice, our chocolate, our cocoa. It was really tough and super exciting to build something up and then we'd get the next jump into the mainstream.
Sainsbury's decided all their bananas would be fair trade. Then Waitrose did the same, then Co-op did the same. Then Cadbury’s Milk said, we'll look at doing fair trade, and then in came KitKat. There was a real sense of momentum and this amazing movement, both of the farmers and the workers in developing countries and of the public who were asking for fair trade, lobbying their supermarket, asking their council to offer it. What I learned there was, because I feel we're in the same situation now with the circular economy, I'm convinced we're on the cusp of the circular economy becoming the norm. At the minute, everybody is nibbling around the edges trying: Shall we try rental? Shall we try refill? What can we eliminate?
Everyone's trying and we haven't yet got that flip where you tip the balance and become the mainstream. We haven't got there yet, but I'm convinced we will get there. That comes from having spent that time at Fair Trade, building and building, and then suddenly it's not that all of trade is fair, but you begin to get significant enough market shares that you're having that wider influence on the sector.
It sounds like getting Sainsbury's and company on board was really the tipping point to helping you get that mass level in such a short time.
And then we always said, “Each success is but the springboard to the next.” So the minute Sainsbury's have done their bananas [fair trade], you're thinking, what's the next flip? I feel it's exactly the same with the circular economy. We have to use it in that way. Every time a company tries the next step towards refill, say we have to use that as the split to the next one and the next. Then suddenly the supply chains will lock into place for the companies and the brand, because suddenly it becomes interesting enough and commercially imperative enough that everybody will have to invest it. In that point, of course, the economics begin to shift.
At the moment now, where it often feels quite difficult, where people are quite struggling, there are pilots and they don't quite break through. But I honestly think we're just in the foothills and we're about to walk up to where the mist clears and you begin to get those wonderful views as you go up a mountain. We're on our way up.
What do you think are the biggest blocks to achieving that circular economy, especially as it relates to beauty?
Beauty, it’s such an iconic sector. What's so important for us is that people see circular living as bringing joy and quality into their lives. This is not about crying in a corner because something's sustainable. There is absolutely no compromise. If anything, sustainability should bring you more joy. It fits the values of so many beauty brands because you want to be in tune with nature. People are thinking about their skin and looking beautiful and you want that to be in harmony with what's happening in the world. For many people, that is really important. There's no question that for them, sustainability and tackling climate change all through the cost of living crisis has remained super high. Then there's a chunk of people for whom it's absolutely going to be what determines their choice. Obviously, that's only a subset.
There's a whole lot of others who want companies to deal with it for them. They don't want to have to go hunting out the special sustainability brand. They want the brands they know and love to have addressed the core sustainability issues for them. Now, I have to say there's no question that we also face many problems in getting this to work, and I think some of that is also that the public get used to ways of shopping. They find it very hard to switch to, for example, refill. Although in all our consumer testing, the public say they really want to have more refill because they absolutely hate the scourge of plastic.
People are really upset by the the iconic David Attenborough Blue Planet [series with] birds being opened with plastic in their stomachs. People can't bear that and in particular the younger generation are absolutely horrified. But they don't want to have to choose. They want their same lovely, beautiful product without the plastic and the damage to the world with plastic pollution. Mainly people don't want to change their ways of shopping, and so we've got to find a really easy way for them. They're going to have to change. Because in the end, if we want to move away from plastics pollution, the single best answer is reuse. It's refill, it's going back to the shop and getting a new lipstick to put in your same lipstick container that you had before. It’s getting little refill pouches to go into your face cream pot. Scent is another great one, to be able to refill your scent bottle, made out often, very beautiful, iconic brand shapes in glass, very lovely. The answer is that we want to be able to refill it, but that needs a step of change from the consumer, and that needs us as the brands in the industry to make it incredibly easy for the public because they're not used to making that change, which they will make in the end.
It's a bit like [how] it seemed really hard to do without plastic bags, and suddenly we all seem to manage to do without free plastic bags at the supermarket. People can make that change. In my lifetime, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes, in restaurants, in cinemas. It's unthinkable now. At the time, it felt brave to ban it. In 20 years time, we will look back and think, can you believe it: we used to buy all our beauty products in new plastic packaging? In the meantime, there's no question it's tough to get those supply chains lined up so they work with as much ease and so it's streamlined.
Another hurdle, which will help, is that we have advancements in recycling technology that will helpmake it easier to recycle beauty products back into skin contact packaging because obviously we understand if we have packaging that's going to be near products that are going to be on people's skin, we've got to meet very particular guidelines. That's the shift we might begin to see with advances in technology.
Our ideal is of course to reduce. One part of reduce is refill and reuse because obviously you're just using the same thing many times at the bottom of the waste hierarchy. You also have to recycle and that's really interesting because all our research shows that some of the items people most often put in the waste bin, when it could be in the recycling bin—one of the top five is perfume and aftershave bottles. Our research shows it's because downstairs people have segregated bins in the kitchen. Easy, they're used to it. And they have one bin in the bathroom. They put everything in and don't want to go disaggregating it so they just chuck it all in the waste. But actually that scent bottle could be recycled and could come back to you as another scent bottle. Again, that's talking to the awareness raising campaign above all else, isn't it?
Also the desire for newness is so much of what our industry is built on. The biggest argument there is that the most sustainable thing beauty can do is maybe not launch so many products to begin with. Because even if you're being as sustainable as you can, there’s still a footprint. That consumerist psychology feels like such a big hurdle, making people enjoy sustainability. Not to mention greenwashing and not having the correct or enough recycling facilities.
People get a kick out of buying things. We have to find other ways around that. One of my colleagues is part of one of these schemes where you can rent whole outfits for a month. It's great if more people did that, rent all kinds of different things, have them for a month, send them back, and rent the next lot. That way I get the fun out of choosing new things, but I'm not consuming new all the time.
For me, it's going to a charity shop. Actually talking beauty, it’s one of my personal rules that I always buy my soap in charity shops because people give away lots of lovely soap. It's treasure in the trash, finding something hidden away in the back of a charity store. We know people want that kick, but what about getting it from repairing a jumper that the moths have eaten? Get the same fun out of finding someone who can repair it for you and perhaps make it look different. Put little flowers over the holes, so you get the joy of something new without having to go on and on consuming. In the end, it comes back to two things. One is designing differently—for end of life. People design for the consumer, but they need to increasingly think, how will it be appealing to the consumer and what will happen to it after. That’s a really interesting strand of work going on in the sector, designing for longer life and durability.
There’s also the concept around emotional durability that if people buy something and it costs them a tenner and they spill their tea down it, they just think, “Oh, well.” But if they've spent £100 ($125) or £50 ($62) on something very nice, obviously they rush to the water [faucet] to try and get it out. Caring for something even though it may have been cheaper because it may last you just as long; the fact that it's cheaper doesn't always mean it's going to be less durable. We did some testing and some very cheap T-shirts lasted just as long as the posh lot that were charging a fortune. There's also that connection about helping people value their products.
You touched upon exciting new recycling technologies. Are there any you would like to highlight?
Chemical recycling. It boils it at such high temperatures that basically it can come back into contact with your skin. There’s a plant opening on Teesside in the UK. There's also lots of much smaller SME [small and medium enterprises] brands trying to work out different ways of taking this forward and coming up with innovative ways to bring what the consumer wants without piling on more packaging. A couple of examples where we've managed to make those shift, one was Easter eggs. There was a time when the packaging got bigger and bigger, so we worked with all of the brands and the retailers to say, "How about if we shrink the packaging, we don't use so much plastic, etc." We came to some really good solutions together.
Another very interesting example of the company making a brave change would be Sprite. Sprite's bottles used to be colored yellow and that was their iconic brand, the heart of Sprite. But of course it made it much harder to recycle. In the end they did change the color of their Sprite bottles and sales did not go down or collapse. People were in love enough with Sprite for the shape, the flavor, and all the other things. It takes quite a lot of bravery at first because what if things did collapse? What if people only bought it because of the color of the bottle, but in fact they didn't and, if anything, they valued that shift to sustainability. All credit to those companies like Boots, The Hut Group, L'Oréal, Bulgari. There's so many companies trialing different ways to overcome the problems in this sector.
A lot of the big companies have made pledges to go plastic free. But obviously plastic is only one aspect of the environmental challenges we face. Granted it’s also a question of what budget is available to a company to make all these changes and how agile are they? If you’re looking at a five-year timeline, what would you advise companies big and small in the industry in terms of ways they could make meaningful change?
It is exactly about having a five- and a ten-year horizon where you can look to be really ambitious about where you want to go. All companies will be very aware that at the minute we've got a lot of legislative changes coming into place. We've got the plastics Extended Producer Responsibility coming in where companies will be responsible for what they put onto the market and will have to pay. We've got a Global Plastics Treaty being negotiated; trying to come globally to an agreement across all sectors about how we reduce plastics pollution.
We've got the big shifts that are coming, and so the clever companies are the ones who are ahead of the game in doing the trials and the innovations to see what will work best. If they're going to shift on a five- year horizon, we can look to really reduce single use packaging, drive up reusable and refillable, and make sure that all materials are sustainably sourced so that no packaging goes to waste. That's where we want to get to. It's really dangerous when some people think “Oh well, I'll switch out a plastic,” but then they go to another product which has different problems. Maybe they go to card but it's plastic lined because it has to because it's got a liquid-based product inside it; then it's multi ingredients, and then it's really hard to recycle.
Everything has to be thought through in a full lifecycle assessment to work out. We've got this chance to shift things, and I do think it is focusing on refill and reuse that will be the biggest game changer. If we can get to that, that’s what will really help shift [things in] beauty. But it's also groceries, and obviously the more they can move forward in tandem because it's all about the public getting more used to that as a way of shopping and not having everything packaged for them.
Or even just the tricky dilemma of people wanting sustainability, but sometimes they're not willing to pay more for it. Those economic realities. I'm pretty sure a mother of four trying to feed her kids isn't going to be worried about having a zero waste lifestyle. In what ways can that be made more accessible? So it doesn't become the case of having the privilege to be sustainable.
I completely agree. Those luxury brands that have the margins, if anything, they have a responsibility to lead the way, to help open it up for the brands that are absolutely on price point. For those people who are watching every penny, where there's no room for anything to go wrong. But whether you're buying a luxury, premium, or best value brand, people want their sustainability values put into play. They don't want to have to choose; they don't want to think, “Well, I can't afford it, so I'll have to buy one that's clearly not so sustainably packaged.”
It's really right that we need this to be absolutely mainstream for everybody. That's why we're really pleased at WRAP; we’ve been working with the sector. We've got some brands we've worked with already because we believe the way to be able to make it affordable is for the whole sector to move together as much as possible. Obviously everyone has to do what's right for them, but that’s where we can get those real changes and efficiencies. Which is why we would really welcome people joining. We're developing our new Plastics and Packaging Pact because the one we're in now ends in 2025.
The amazing progress that people have made in eliminating single use, in reducing, increasing recycled content, and so much more can go further. We're really keen to have more companies, and in particular in the beauty sector. We would love to work more with them and make those pledges to move forward and develop a long-term roadmap in the UK, globally thinking about how can we move together to ensure no packaging goes to waste; the challenge with refill and making that available to people, whatever their income.
Are there any kind of other current or upcoming projects that you have planned that you'd like to highlight?
We’re really pleased to work with local authorities and the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association (CTPA) on recycling. Often people put things in the bin when they could be recycled because they don't know what to do with them. Some things you could just put in your local authority bin. There is a big change coming in waste collections that will help us drive forward; that message of “your scent bottle can go in recycling.” That's why we ran a campaign called Rescue Me and had these hilarious, human-sized characters of the five items people most commonly put in the waste that could be recycled, like a a yogurt pot or a cleaning spray. We’re saying “rescue me,” like the characters in Toy Story that are all going into the incinerator. Boots joined us with that.
Then we have something called the Recycling Locator tool, so people can check the recycling possibilities and capabilities in their area. We would love if more companies joined our Plastics Pact and looked around the emerging thinking around reuse and refill in perfume, lipstick, blusher, eyeshadow. Obviously, they can just be part of our pact. But we could always form a subgroup for the sector because they're going to be facing particular problems they could work on together with logistics companies.
Do you think as a whole we're doing enough to move sustainability forward? We've touched upon legislation, consumers, beauty companies—who are the main actors that are going to help push it all forward?
It's all of the above. We believe what you need are governments to set the baselines and the regulation internationally, which is why the Global Plastics Treaty is really significant. Global principles can translate into national legislation. Then you need the companies and the brands, the retailers and the brands, and the public. If we're going to get change, we need all three. If you miss anyone, it doesn't work. But if you have all three, then we can get those seismic shifts we want to see in the market. The beauty brands are genius about inspiring the public.
They can use those enormous big marketing brains they have and turn sustainability into the most beautiful thing. They could make it so desirable and therefore bring the public along with us. If we don't do that, we know from some of the trials we've done, it won't land. We did some trials with Asda; they converted one back of the store in York into a refill [section]. First off they thought, we've got to make it interesting, so we'll have dog food, washing up liquid—the things that people expect—but we're also going to have Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons and some treats, and we'll market it as cheaper. This was during the cost-of-living crisis. Huge headlines, it said, “This is cheaper and better for the planet.” Better for the planet was number two in the hierarchy of messaging. People still walked past it and went straight to the shelves where they always got their products as they always got it in the same way. We've tried so many different ways to help the public, and it definitely needs more work on what can we do to make this attractive, desirable, and indeed cheaper for the public. It's often a whole sector moving together that makes the difference. If all eyeshadow was in refillable formats, then people would quickly get the knack of it, but as long as they can say, “Oh, no, I've got to do something new and complicated, but I don't have to with this brand,” they're going to go to their default habits. We're all creatures of habit, and we're always in a rush.
You need the NGOs as well. Ellen MacArthur Foundation is another very important player in this. They did a report about what's happening in France, where often the legislation is ahead and in fact we've both got people who are having to go to food redistribution charities and then we've got food waste. In the same way we've got unsold hygiene and beauty products being destroyed, and yet we've got people needing them so that is the strange world that we live in where we have these extraordinary contrasts.
You have previously highlighted the connection between poverty, conflict, the refugee crisis, and climate change. How those are all intertwined? What does that dynamic look like in 2024?
Going back to the heart of the question you asked, we are not doing enough. We're not shifting the dial. It's really exciting to see all the changes coming in. I do think we're on the cusp of a big change. The new [UK] government has set up a circular economy task force, and it is a priority for them to drive the circular economy forward. On the one hand, there is a lot happening, and on the other hand, we're just off target. The climate crisis is already upon us. We're seeing it every day now, even in this country with the flooding.
But of course, the people who are most hit by the climate crisis are those who've done the least to cause it; people in developing countries who have the least resources to cope with it. When that flooding happens, their home is washed away, and their country doesn't have the infrastructure to help them rebuild their lives. That's the global injustice around it all as well. Which is why both the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations were going on in Busan and people were just collapsing at the other end of the COP29 talks in Azerbaijan where the single biggest issue was developing countries saying, "We didn't cause this problem, we need the resources from the rich world to deal with it."
The deadlock is what's the size of the check that the rich world is ready to write to help the developing world cope with climate crisis? And of course, 45% of global greenhouse gases are caused by the things that we consume. That's food, clothes, beauty, personal care, and hygiene products. That's less known. People know about flying, electricity, transport, and cars. They know much less that almost half of carbon emissions are from the everyday products that look quite innocuous. But actually that's adding up, and that's why we need these major global shifts.
Undoubtedly, our global systems are broken and interconnected in their brokenness, which does make it harder. In this country, we do a lot of waste work on food waste, but food waste is also connected to the fact that more and more people can't get enough food to eat, and for sure they can't get nutritious food to eat. There's a crisis around ultra processed foods. Then that connects with the crisis in agriculture. You can see across all the products, our systems are broken, and we are still in a headlong pursuit of profit and GDP growth.
What we've absolutely got to do is disconnect value creation from the endless extraction of virgin raw materials. It can't go on forever. If we don't, then the climate crisis will be exacerbated. Around the world, the climate crisis is causing refugee movements and conflicts. Many conflicts are over water or resources themselves, made more acute by the climate crisis. People are worrying about the boats crossing the channel to reach England, when actually we need to be worrying much more about what are the root causes, why are people displaced? Why are there so many conflicts at the minute? Obviously we can't all solve everything and you can end up disappearing under your duvet. We have to break it down into those chunks and the pieces that we can all do that both create change here and now today and create those major system shifts; the transformations that we need to see.
One thing I'm always curious about too is the impact of individual waste and commercial waste. How much is one person contributing to climate change versus the bigger companies? Which sectors are the biggest contributors? I'm always curious to see the actual breakdown of that.
It is really complicated to narrow that down because let's take food as an example. If you take food waste, the retailers have got the waste down to the tiniest little slither in the pie chart because they're machines of efficiency. They're not going to have food waste if they can possibly avoid it. However, farm food waste is at about 24%, and then you've got this enormous chunk of household food waste. The biggest amount of food waste is in the home. However, why is it in the home? Some of that you go backwards to “I went shopping and I wanted to buy potatoes. The ones that seemed to be the cheapest were in a big plastic bag. Then I didn't actually need them all, and they rotted in my fridge and I had to throw them away.” So I am actually wasting those potatoes, but the reason is because in my supermarket, that big bag is the cheapest. Although most of the waste is happening in the home, it's connected back to what is the offer the retailers and the brands are making to the public. It's the same with beauty. In the end, the products end up in the public's home and therefore in their recycling or waste bin. But that's because we haven't given them different ways of shopping, and that's where the really exciting frontiers are for the future.
I can imagine your work is also a very emotional and maybe at times even frustrating journey. How do you stay positive and motivated when it comes to fighting for change?
I think there are two big things. There is such an amazing community of people trying to change it, and it is so inspiring. Just to give an example from a fashion SM [small to medium business], there is an app called The Seam, which is a combination of new ways of shopping and old ways. If you have something that needs repairing, you can go directly through the app and they will pick it up from you, get it fixed by their network of tailors and cobblers, and get it back to you. Fantastic.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't work for me. Maybe I like going into the shop. Then The Seam has got a connection with some of the high street brands, including COS. I can go into the store and ask for something to be repaired, and they connect to The Seam who behind the scenes is doing the work for that high street brand. I love some of those connections. The young woman in London running it [Layla Sargent], her grandmother taught her how to sew and be a tailor. She’s taken that quite traditional skill but combined it with modern tech, linking up with a high street brand to help make repairs become the norm again. We lost that, we just thought, “Oh it's got a tear, I'll throw it away.” People put it in the waste bins all the time. Clothes that could be repaired, that could be rescued and given another life.
Another organization with a very similar model is called Sojo and they link up with Selfridges and M&S. It’s the same idea; you can go direct to them or via the big high street bands. I get my insight from people like that who are creating the next generation of solutions and are just beginning to get the breakthroughs from being very small and on the outskirts to getting into the mainstream.
The other bit that always gives me inspiration is going for a walk in nature with my dog and the power and beauty of nature and the sense that it can bounce back if we just give it a chance. That gives you energy for the next battle.
There was an event I went to last year called Biofabricate, and they had a lot of interesting start-ups and companies growing materials from mushrooms, finding plant grown alternatives to the plastics that are often glitter shadows. The trickiest thing is scaling those things. They are really innovative materials and could have a huge impact, but then adopting them across the industry is another pain point. Obviously this shift to recycled plastic is already a step forward but it's not the full solution.
What's the hardest of all is that they can't get the finance to scale, and that drives me mad. All these finance houses talking about sustainability and yet not willing to take a risk because it is a risk. But then you're not driving sustainability if you want exactly the same rate of return and exactly the same low risk for your money. You've got to take more risk and a lower rate of return if we're going to get these innovative new companies to take off. I find that so frustrating. But surelyone of the obstacles is the availability of finance willing to take a risk.
What have been the biggest triumphs and challenges in your career thus far.
I hope you can come back in five years time and ask me that, and I'll be able to say, “Do you remember when circular living was unknown, was a minority activity,” and we will have got it to becoming commonplace in every boardroom and every home. That's what I'm really focused on now. In the past, it was doing that same thing with fair trade. It was taking fair trade from an unknown niche idea that people said would never work, to becoming a mainstream proposition reaching 1.5 million farmers and workers with 90% recognition among the public in the UK and support. That's what I really hope we're on the cusp of achieving for circular living. Always key to that is the role of community groups as well, like repair cafes. That is so much at the heart of change; people in their own communities organizing.
