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Day after day, youngsters from the local Asian population in Burnley would meet up before making their way to school. This was the 1970s, an era when far-right groups were mobilising, and these children were the offspring of south Asian workers who had been invited to Britain a decade earlier to work in understaffed industries.

Among them was the young Asad, who had relocated to the northern town with his family from Pakistan as a small child. “We would all walk together,” he recalls, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. The little ones in the middle, older children on the outside, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

The situation was equally bad at school. Other children would perform Nazi salutes and yell abusive language at them. A few distributed the National Front newspaper without concealment at school. Minority children regularly, when the lunch bell rang, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I initiated conversations to everybody,” says Rehman. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by as a group declining to attend. “stating it was due to the schools aren’t safe for us.” It was Rehman’s first taste of organising. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns emerging across the country, it influenced his political outlook.

“We began defending our community which taught me that crucial insight remaining with me: our strength multiplies when we are a ‘we’ than when we’re individual. Groups are necessary to bring people together and a common purpose to maintain unity.”

In the past few months, Rehman became CEO of the green organization the well-known activist organization. For decades, the familiar face of environmental crisis was the iconic bear in a thawing landscape. Currently, discussing environmental issues without mentioning inequality and discrimination is widely considered highly inappropriate. And Rehman has been as a leader of this transformation.

“I accepted this position because of the scale of the crisis out there,” he told journalists during a Make Them Pay protest outside Downing Street recently. “These issues are linked of climate, social injustice, of economic systems which are biased elite interests. It’s ultimately about fairness.

“Just one group that has always centred fairness – green rights and climate justice – namely this charity.”

Having 250,000 supporters and 233 local action groups, This environmental network (with an independent Scottish branch) is the UK’s biggest environmental campaigning network. In the year to summer 2024, it spent significant funds on campaigns from judicial reviews against state decisions community initiatives changing municipal practices in public spaces.

But it has – albeit undeservedly – earned a reputation as relatively moderate compared with its peers. Known for fundraising and appeals instead of confrontational tactics.

The hiring of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman may represent the organisation’s attempt to shed that image.

And it is not the beginning he's been involved with the organization.

Post-education, he maintained advocating for equality, collaborating with a community organization during a period as nationalist movements remained active locally.

“It was running campaigns, handling individual cases, based in neighborhoods,” he recalls. “And I learned being a community organiser.”

But not content beyond addressing public discrimination and government policies collaborating with activists, sought to place equality work within a rights framework. Which guided him to the advocacy group, where over the next decade he partnered with international campaigners to advocate for a new approach in the understanding of basic rights. “Back then, Amnesty didn’t campaign on inequality matters. they only campaigned on civil and political rights,” he states.

As the conclusion of the 1990s, his efforts with Amnesty introduced him with multiple global equity groups. Then they came together in opposition to neoliberalism challenging free-market policies. The insights he gained from them would affect the rest of his career.

“I traveled and working with these people, and each person mentioned the severity of environmental issues, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he explains. “And I was like! Every gain through activism could be undone by this thing. This issue that is happening, termed environmental crisis – but it wasn't being discussed in those terms.”

Which directed him to his first job with Friends of the Earth in 2006. At the time, most environmental organisations framed environmental issues as tomorrow's challenge.

“Friends of the Earth represented the unique environmental organisation that then officially broke from the rest of the environment movement. helping establish creating environmental justice campaigning,” he declares.

Rehman worked to amplify concerns of the developing world into discussions. This approach wasn't gain widespread approval. In a particular instance, he recalls, post-negotiations with officials and green groups, an official phoned the leadership demanding he call off his assertive tactics. He would not be drawn the individual's identity.

“There was a sense: ‘What gives him authority who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ You know, the environment is a nice thing, there's common ground. [But] I viewed it as combating discrimination, defending rights … about power structures.”

Fairness perspectives were increasingly becoming accepted within green movements. Simultaneously was also happening. with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling climate and environmental issues.

Consequently that War On Want supported by unions {