Ruben David Gonzalez Rojas with Jonathan Bartley

The Young Greens is the youth and student wing of the Green Party of England and Wales. This summer, members of the Young Greens will be voting to elect a new executive. Bright Green is offering each of the candidates a chance to set out their vision.

What is the point of the Young Greens?

This is a question, that I personally have asked myself a couple of times, despite having been involved with the Greens for a while.

My experience with the party involves having been election agent for Lambeth, former council of Jonathan Bartley, during the May 2022 elections, as well as having been recently co-opted for elected members liaison officer for London.

This has allowed me to meet a wide variety of Green Party of England and Wales members, party officers and staff. Amongst these people the ones that always stood out to me the most were the Young Greens.

In London some of the most impressive breakthroughs such as Newham or Tower Hamlets were achieved by candidates and party officers from the Young Greens.

Young Greens have a sense of mission in our important role to address climate change, economic and social justice. We know what’s important, we know what our priorities are and being the Young Green voice in the room is powerful.

Positive things happen simply because we raise issues and ideas that others wouldn’t.

I am running for Young Greens treasurer because I have a vision of how we can organise better and get into power without compromising or watering down our ideas.

The treasurer has a big say on the organisation’s budget, as well as having direct contact with finance staff from the Green Party.

My main focus for the upcoming year would be on lobbying for new canvassing software to be adopted by the Green Party.

I think it’s crucial that we step-up our game, for the sake of overworked party officers that can see spreadsheets and action network pages when they close their eyes as well as for the benefit of attracting new members.

The reason why the custard Tories (the Liberal Democrats) are able to achieve astonishing by-election victories is because they can send waves of activists to an area and just provide them with a code for the MiniVan app on their phones.

We all know that the Lib Dems stand for nothing nowadays, yet by having that strong overwhelming presence on the ground they are able to persuade voters and canvass a constituency in record time.

I want to support Carla Denyer in becoming MP for Bristol West. Overturning a 28000 majority can only be achieved by using state of the art technology that allows us to harness the potential of our increasing membership.

On this line, within the Young Greens I would discuss with the co-chairs and elections officers to massively increase the budget of Bristol Young Greens.

Those familiar with local elections will be familiar with target to win, we need to direct as many resources as we can into Bristol because we urgently need another green breakthrough akin to Caroline Lucas’.

PS. We hope you enjoyed this article. Bright Green has got big plans for the future to publish many more articles like this. You can help make that happen. Please donate to Bright Green now.