Introduction
On March 7th 2021 the charity Campaign Bootcamp announced that they would close down after nine years in operation, during which they trained over 1,300 graduates to run activist campaigns. Some of those graduates went on to work for political parties, to testify before Parliament, and to lead major activist groups. Despite this success the charity had to close down because of internal pressures. They came to a head after the summer of 2020, which was dominated by the Black Lives Matter campaign. Staff at the charity complained that the work culture was “hurried and stressful” and that they felt “undervalued and overworked”.
This culture had “a disproportionate impact on staff of colour, disabled staff, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming staff, LGBTQ staff, staff from working-class backgrounds and staff who experience mental health problems”. Some also said they had experienced “racist, sexist, or ableist” situations. Although the trustees launched an independent investigation into their own charity, they ultimately concluded that it was impossible to keep it going. So what was Campaign Bootcamp and why did it fail?
What was Campaign Bootcamp?
To find out, it’s worth looking at their 2019-20 accounts, the last before the fateful year of 2020 which led to their collapse. In them they say they trained 267 activists that year across their Bootcamp Residential, Everyday Activism, and Unpacked strands. Of these the most important was Bootcamp Residential, which involved one week of residential training for “high-potential activists”, followed by a year of “peer support” and an active alumni Facebook group.
In 2019 they had 354 applications for this, of whom 101 were selected. Of those, 90% received a scholarship paying for their training, 72% were women, 65% were BAME, 47% were LGBT, and 30% had a disability. Their training covered “strategy, using social media, coalition working, creating campaign videos, exploring ideas of power and privilege, storytelling, working with the press and much more”.
Everyday Activism was a local community training programme, which offered up to 28 hours of training over 12 weeks, with ongoing support afterwards. Unpacked was a ‘train the trainer’ programme, where their trainers would teach others how to teach activists.
The vast majority of their income came from big foundation grants and scholarship funding, with donations of £34,479 but core grants of £798,986. These included five or six figure sums from Esmee Fairburn, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Open Society Foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Facebook Community Leadership Programme, and Luminate. Over half of their income was spent on staff costs - £563,000 - for 16 staff, with the Chief Executive on £105,032 (up from £73,920 the year before). That means most staff were on a wage of £30,000 or less, which might explain why some of them were so angry.
On their blog they admitted to mistakes they’d made, in an effort to be transparent. They ranged from the mundane, like having a broken donate button on their website or nearly running out of beds, to ideological self-policing, such as complaining that 75% of the speakers they invited to an event were male. Amusingly they even had to admit to accidentally losing the mistakes section on their website.
Their blog also reveals their increasingly ideological shift. In 2019 they trained Fatima, who started the viral campaign #CharitySoWhite, which criticised charities for not having enough diverse staff (like her), and published a blog by one of their trainers encouraging people to abandon Western medicine in favour of using “Black, brown and queer astrologers, tarot readers, crystal healers”. In 2020 a graduate blogged for them about abolishing prisons while another expressed support for the group SOAS Detainee Support, which believes in ending all border restrictions. By 2021 they were hosting an environmental justice training camp which was only open to “people from racialised backgrounds” and running a bingo where all the prizes were “from Black artists supporting Black queer and trans folk”. Left-wing media commentator Ash Sarkar even showed up via video to cook a “fish finger bhorta”.
Who was involved with Campaign Bootcamp?
Unsurprisingly, much of Campaign Bootcamp’s team was very left-wing. Their Head of UK Programmes was Tara Mack, partner of prominent Guardian journalist Gary Younge. Their Programme Manager Sophie Yates-Lu was a Labour canvasser in 2019 and co-founded the group Decolonising Economics (which demands reparations and calls on people to “divest from whiteness”). Their Senior Fundraising Coordinator Olivia Andrews was involved in “decolonising curriculums”. Senior Trainer Grace Jeremy said after the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum that she would be “crying into my Corbyn colouring book”.
Probably the most extreme was Joshua Virasami, who worked as a Trainer. He’s better known as one of the key members of controversial group Black Lives Matter UK, who has written about the “political necessity of rioting”. He’s previously said he nearly “jookd up” (which means stabbed) an undercover police officer; he claimed that “MI5, Cobra and UK Gov counter-terrorism industry steers the counterjihadist far-right violence”; he said that “white-imperialist-hetero-patriarchy is the only terrorism I'm concerned about”; and when a BLM-inspired terrorist murdered 5 American police officers in Dallas, he called it “chickens coming home to roost”.
Amongst those trained at Campaign Bootcamp are Zeyn Mohammed, who ended up working for Jeremy Corbyn; Daniel Harris, a housing campaigner who was suspended from Labour for making a video depicting three Brighton councillors as dancing Jews; Rachel Diamond-Hunter, who worked for Diane Abbott, before joining activist groups 38 Degrees and then the New Economy Organisers Network in senior roles; Halimo Hussein, the student activist who led the protest demanding the Churchill-themed Blighty Cafe close down; Ayo Olatunji, who as a senior member of the NUS was criticised for comparing Israel to the Nazis; Nona Hurkmans, who was involved in the giant blimp of Trump as a baby to protest his visit; and Aisha Ali Khan, who was the parliamentary aide to George Galloway before resigning in complaint at him trying to get her to buy him his underwear.
Comment
Campaign Bootcamp encapsulated the way much left-wing activism works. Funded by the very wealthy and their foundations, it effectively had no enemies to the left, with it training a range of activists from the centre left to the wilder fringes. That allowed it to provide trained staff to left-wing parties, as well as filling the ranks of and creating new activist groups. However it was unable to sustain itself because of the radicalism of its own staff. The resignation of the CEO and giving staff two weeks extra time off over summer to provide “emotional space” only seem to have made things worse. Left to their own devices, the neuroses unleashed by the ideological shift proved to be self-destructive.