Author: Sarah Corbett / Source: Positive News
Angry activism has a place, but there are gentler ways to make a difference too. The Craftivist Collective’s Sarah Corbett makes a case for craft-based activism
I’d always been an activist. I grew up in a low-income area of Liverpool in the 1980s in an activist family.
I was taken to protests from the age of three and was present with local residents trying to save good housing from demolition. I’ll never forget a family trip to South Africa in 1991. I was eight and Nelson Mandela had been released from prison the previous year. For three weeks, we visited churches and communities who had worked to end apartheid. At secondary school, to my surprise, I was voted head girl and successfully campaigned for lockers for the students. At university, I campaigned on global issues and spent the first seven years of my career working for large charities as a professional activist and movement-builder.But by 2008 I felt burnt out. I’m an introvert; so going to marches and meetings drained me. I didn’t like shouting, demonising people or telling people what to do, and I didn’t feel as though I fitted into some groups. And so much of my work as a professional campaigner and as an activist in my own time was online and not very creative. I really missed using my hands to create and make things.
The news might all seem bad, but good things are happening too.
In the summer of 2008 I picked up a cross-stitch craft kit from a local shop to stitch on a train journey when I felt too travel sick to work. Stitching calmed me down, helped me think through issues more clearly and I was able to be creative with my hands. It felt empowering. I discovered that the act of stitching in public led to people asking me questions about the injustice issue I was stitching about. My local politician had been ignoring my petitions and requests to take particular actions against injustice, so I hand-embroidered a message on to a handkerchief, asking her not to blow her chance of making a positive difference in her powerful position. I gave it to her as a gift to show that I wanted to encourage, support and help her tackle injustices as a critical friend, not fight her as an aggressive enemy.
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