Jenny Edwards CBE

Whether it was supporting the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common, promoting women’s rights through the UK Parliament or leading institutions supporting the arts, the homeless or people with mental health concerns, Jenny Edwards has spent her life improving the world. Her formidable influencing skills drove the establishment of free museum entry for all in the UK. Her ability to empathise and willingness to listen have helped her successfully advocate for the disadvantaged in society and address inequality, something she continues to do to this day, not least as Chair of the People’s Health Trust.

I was keen to learn how to influence and engage people for the better from a proven master of campaigning. And as a someone with such extensive experience in the charity sector, I also wanted to hear Jenny’s take on how marketing and communications can help improve the world.

Martin: Thanks very much for agreeing to have a chat with me. You’ve done so many different things to make the world a better place, I thought you’d be a brilliant person to interview for this blog. Can I start by asking you about the time of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common?

Jenny: Well, I was National Organiser for CND, so we were supporting the Women’s Peace Camp and were somewhat, I have to say, taken by surprise by the way it all happened. I remember a phone call from some of the mothers who were going to do this long march there, taking their young children and babies and everything - it was a very innovative approach which probably took CND a little bit of time to get used to, particularly when the women decided to stay. [We thought] “Oh, this is a really interesting tactic!” but it really showed how powerful it could be for people to make such a commitment and it galvanised not only the women who took part directly and stayed there at a lot of cost of personal discomfort – it was cold, it was muddy, sometimes they were manhandled by security people, there were families who had to support them – but there were also all the other people who then turned up and realised that they could bring themselves very physically to those circumstances.

The fence that had been put up was a barrier for a long time to people getting in, so they learned to cut the fence. [It] became almost an artwork, with people bringing very personal messages, pieces of art, wool woven in - many things that were part of women’s lives were used to decorate the fence to say, actually this is about humanity, it’s not just weapons one side; here on the other side is humanity saying “This is not what we want in our country and on a common space; the commons have got a particular historical resonance for us”.

Martin: It’s interesting, this point about making it personal. I was talking to Chris Hines, co-founder of Surfers Against Sewage, about his campaigning work, and he said that they succeeded partly because they were able to tell a story, they had the better stories.

Jenny: Yes, to the public and to the media - and some of the media were very hostile – but also through the fence. There’s was quite a lot of singing to the guards on the other side and sometimes quite deep conversations that happened, to treat people on the other side not as the enemy, but as people who thought they were doing an honourable job; to plant seeds of doubt and explain why people felt so strongly that they would do such a thing was important and could be very empowering.

One of the things I remember most was when a group of women with disabilities decided to block the gates and chain themselves together and that was really turning the tables to say “Actually this is something that you have no idea how to deal with and we’re going to stay here for a long time”. [It] generates headlines and it puts the power in the hands of people who society often ignores or portrays as being weak and needy and that was really fantastic to see.

Martin: Your ability to get coverage for the issues was incredible. The stories are driving that, but the visuals as well – the decorated fence, those interactions we would see on the news….

Jenny: Yes, human stories – it’s important that you have facts and figures, because that’s part of the argument, but unless they’re enriched with humanity, they don’t really stay with people. When somebody talks to you about something that they’ve seen in the headlines, or even something they’ve heard of in a meeting or from a neighbour, it’s always the human that comes to the fore; it’s got to touch your feelings, so it’s got to be uplifting, or tragic, or sometimes humorous. A lot of the work that went in around die-ins and civil defence – Protest and Survive, Hard Rock = Hard Luck, whitewash your windows and go and hide under the table and so on – there was absolute tragedy at the bottom of it but it had that humour on top that meant that we could open up our hearts to receive the tougher message too.

Martin: It reminds me of that Maya Angelou quote that I always love, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Jenny: Absolutely! It’s so true.

Martin: You’ve had an amazing career, and you’ve been campaigning for so many valuable things is society.

Jenny: I’m never going to stop!

Martin: Very glad to hear it! Was CND the start of that? Because you’ve worked in social justice, the arts, homelessness, mental health…

Jenny: No it wasn’t the start. I can remember at school being very affected by Cathy Come Home, and some friends playing some songs about homelessness – it might have been [Ralph McTell’s] Streets of London – and collecting money. I’ve always been interested in things that seemed wrong and unjust and unfair, and I think that probably goes quite deep to my parents’ experience in the war, certainly my dad coming back and wanting a better world. Many people came back having seen complete horror and losing friends in wartime. My dad saw his friends drown in the Atlantic when his ship went down.

I was involved in women’s issues, because we all see the things that affect our own group first and, a bit later on, after CND, I wrote the first women’s manifesto for the Opposition at the time, drawing together a whole range of things, from childcare to pension rights to women’s safety, fair employment, women’s health, etc. When I first came to London, I was involved in some of those, but also there was an issue in the area of London I was living about the sus laws, which was something new to me. I hadn’t heard about them before, but I heard about the injustice of regular stop and search for young black men, particularly in my community and got involved in screen-printing t-shirts and things I haven’t done since! If you hear about people being treated unfairly in the area that you live, once you’re aware of it it’s quite hard to shut your eyes and just carry on as before, and I wanted to get involved.

Part of the fence at Greenham Common (Image: Wikimedia Creative Commons)

Martin: Do you see campaigning as a sort of marketing or PR activity, whether it’s t-shirts or something else?

Jenny: I was pondering this while reading some interesting pieces on your blog and I thought “I don’t use the marketing word very much, but I need to open up to broader understanding of what it can bring”, because that skill-set, particularly reading Chris Hines’ discussion with you, is so valuable for the David-vs-Goliath-type movements. I’ve seen that type of thing work so well, but you can, in the non-profit sector or the campaign sector, be very stuck along the tram-lines - that doesn’t bring people’s imagination to it or their sense of human connection very well. It’s that spark of doing things differently with imagination and with ongoing humanity and connection that really makes a difference. There are so many causes out there that people are pursuing and want to change, and so many deserve more attention than they get, so I do think that marketing skills could really play such a vital part.

Martin: It’s trying to use those techniques to do some good, isn’t it? Rather than just seeing it as the Devil’s Art. I suppose we associate it with persuasion, but another way of seeing that is advocating.

Jenny: It’s about opening eyes, isn’t it? But then it depends on the purpose for which you’re doing that. If it’s to tell something that’s true and authentic, we should all be thankful if something reaches us that we needed to hear. If it’s to create a sense of dissatisfaction, neediness, something that actually isn’t for our own good or isn’t for the good of the planet or our society, then that’s when it becomes Devil’s work.

Martin: If marketing is about communication, it doesn’t have to be purely transactional or financial. In the charity world, I guess you might want a donation, but often you are looking for support.

Jenny: I was always happier asking for money from funders, or to do something in partnership with local government or national government than seeking funds from individuals. I’m happier [asking] for legacies because I think often people do want to leave something that will make a difference and that’s quite a nice place to ask people to contribute.

In homelessness, for example, which I used to work in, I would much prefer people to think what they could do in their local area, to stop people becoming homeless, to help people get out of it quickly, to find answers for the people who have had the longest experience of homelessness, than simply put their hand in their pocket and put a couple of quid in a collection box. It’s a sticking plaster, in that case.

Martin: It’s about changing attitudes to homelessness and homeless people. Perhaps the first step to solving the problem is encouraging more empathy and understanding?

Jenny: Everything can happen at that point. Aidan Halligan, someone who is sadly no longer with us, set up this brilliant organisation called Pathway, which helps people who are homeless when they’re going through the hospital system – first of all, to get access and support while they’re doing that; and appreciation of what they might come with – they might have addiction or mental health problems and so on. He started that off when he bought a Big Issue and he said to his secretary “I wish I could do something more; I don’t know what to do” and she said “Why don’t you go and talk to the guy you bought that from?” and he did and he sat down and he had a conversation. At that point, he had a connection, and it gave him the motivation to go on and use his expertise in the medical establishment to make real change that’s benefitted probably thousands of people now.

Martin: Using that transaction to launch a deeper conversation that led to something amazing. I must ask you about when you were Director of the National Campaign for the Arts and you successfully advocated for free entry to museums. That’s an example of changing the relationship between museums and visitors.

Jenny: It wasn’t in the mainstream of the work we were doing, which was much more about the performing arts and the visual arts, rather than heritage, but it came about because, again, an individual story got into my heart, really. Somebody was working with young people with mental health issues and used to take them to her local authority museum in London and found that touching objects, which they could do there, really grounded them and gave them a sense of where they were. [The museum] introduced charges, and she didn’t have any money and neither did the young people, and so it stopped. So she came to see me and said that this was getting in the way, and it seemed to me the cultural right that’s fundamental, really – it’s in the UN convention on human rights, the right of people to connect to their culture.

There had been free entry in the past and it had gone away, I think probably under Margaret Thatcher. I was told by people in many different parts of politics “Oh well, that’s gone now; having payments makes organisations more business-like” and so on, and that didn’t seem right. So I did a lot of the research in the days when the database at the Museums and Galleries Commission was all printed out on dot matrix printers! Piles of paper [I had ] to work through with a ruler and a pencil to see what was happening, where charges were coming in. They were already there in the national institutions, but you could see it in many of the local ones, regional ones, where the directors in local government were really unhappy to have to be doing this, but they couldn’t see another way of making a difference.

It was a slow process, helped by a change of government – Chris Smith was much more inclined that way. The National Gallery helped and provided some artwork for our lobbying document. The Minister for the Arts in the Lords suddenly got it because he said he dropped into the National Gallery most mornings on his way to the Department just to look at one of his favourite paintings, and he suddenly realised [that] if there was a charge he wouldn’t do that - you could have a whole relationship with something that really meant something to you deeply. It was totally different from paying because you’re visiting a city and you’re going to rush round and see as many as possible of the famous paintings. We needed that for our own local areas, not just for the great works of art. So it did take time – it happened after I had changed roles, but I got invited back to the party to celebrate, and one of the first things I did when I had a son, he was about three or four, was take him to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum and proudly walk in and it was free for him, and gradually for everyone else. The attendances doubled within a certain number of years, probably even more than that now.

Martin: When I worked in central London, I used to go up to the British Museum when I had a spare lunch hour, and it was fantastic.

Jenny: At all times of your life, it’s valuable. When you’ve got children, you never know how they’re going to be on a visit – if you’ve paid a lot of money and someone throws a wobbly, you’re not going to go back and do it again, whereas you can say, well OK, we’ll come back another time, and that could build that child’s relationship with art for a lifetime. When you’re unemployed, working part-time or retired you can just sit and bewith something – I’ve done a mindful tour of the British Museum which only looked at about five items, but you looked properly at [them], all the textures and the background – you weren’t even supposed to read the text about it - just absorb what it was and what it means to you.

But the point you made about dropping in, we had support  from Sean Scully, who’s an internationally recognised artist – his work hangs in Downing Street, or certainly used to – and he said he used to be a painter and decorator at the Victoria Palace Theatre, slapping stuff on the walls there before he made it as an artist, and at lunchtime he’d make his sandwiches in the morning, he’d walk down to Tate Millbank, and he’d just go and look at Van Gogh’s The Chair over and over and over again and absorb every part of it, every brush stroke, how it was in different light, in different moods for him and that made him the artist that he became. So we just don’t know what’s going on in all these many encounters.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Chair (Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Creative Commons)

Martin: And value was created by a new artist finding his voice and society benefits from that. You mentioned data and research – you were using them to justify your proposals?

Jenny: Sometimes in campaigning for change you find a story that just does it, because it’s so telling and it just reaches the right person who can bring change about, but often that’s not enough, and I’m always reassured to have got the data together. Sometimes that’s just scrabbling around for what’s there – in the media that you can call on, or existing research – but sometimes you have to create it. In homelessness, we had to create our own data because, for people on the streets, there was very little either academic research or real monitoring of what was going on or what it meant for people, or why people were getting stuck.

What I’ve enjoyed about my career being in an umbrella organisation for a whole area is that you can call on different expertise and bring it together. If we’re going to tackle the big issues in our lifetime, like climate change, like social injustice, like health inequalities, the quality of all our lives, then we need to drop the institutional boundaries and work across areas and with the people with experience and that’s what I really enjoy doing.

Martin: You mentioned the mindfulness approach to appreciating art there and I must ask you about mental health. You were Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation. I’m conscious that marketing has been guilty sometimes of making things worse for people and particularly in certain industries, such as the beauty industry, which is sometimes accused of making people feel worse about themselves in order to sell them a solution to that. And of course, we know that social media can have a negative effect on people. I know the Mental Health Foundation is all about prevention, and I’m keen to think about what marketers can do to make sure they’re not making things worse for people.

Jenny: I’m retired now as the Chief Executive, but I’m still very much involved in mental health policy, with different hats on – I’m on the advisory group to the government on mental health and future policy. It is a very serious issue and I think we’ve seen, even before the pandemic, the problems with young people’s mental health, some of which, though not all, can be attributed to their exposure to a wide range of messages, some of which traditionally have come through marketing and advertising, but some is coming through more directly from platforms like Instagram. It was young women between 20 and 25 who had the biggest decline in their mental health and wellbeing and significantly different from young men of the same age, and while it’s hard to work out precisely what’s behind that it’s highly likely that a lot of that is about self-image, because we know there’s been a big increase in self harm as well, which is tied into that.

While stigma around mental health has been on the decline, it’s still there. Stigma about body shape, how you think you’re presenting yourself to others, is much higher than it ever used to be. If I think back a long time ago when I was that age, it was there, but it was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what young women now and teenagers are exposed to. So I think it is very significant, and traditionally if there isn’t a need there already, then create a need. What did women do before face creams, good heavens! And how many different types there are now! I keep finding a new one that does something, probably just one for your knuckles on your right hand at some point will pop up!

There is a responsibility for people who are working in that area to think [about] how to make a message that doesn’t knock people down before getting them to buy something, and clever people in this area should be able to find a way to say “Actually, do feel good about yourself, but this can support you in feeling good about yourself.” It might not sell so much but it might actually create loyalty to a particular brand or product. And I think there’s been mixed success, but some brands have really gone that way, particularly using diversity in the images they use and the voices that they hear from and how they present what they have to offer. For me that always wins my attention – I can see that by what Facebook now continues to send back to me! My feed is full of women looking brilliant, of all different ages and sizes, and that’s really positive, but I fear that that’s not what other people are getting in their feeds as well. Perhaps there’s some responsibility back on us as the ones that are being targeted to show that we like the positive images we’re seeing that will make people feel happier about themselves.

I think there’s also the opportunity for marketers to do a sort of 2-for-1 for the [meal kit] deliveries I get now to buy a meal for a child in Africa for every meal you buy [for yourself]. Maybe marketers who are selling something that [has] an unfortunate edge [could offer] the equivalent amount of time on marketing something that will enhance people’s wellbeing.

Martin: In their own companies, or voluntarily, kind of pro bono?

Jenny: I think if that can be in their own companies then that’s got longevity in it; even if they move on, then new people coming in might get into the habit of doing that. [Or they could work] pro bono to help them get their message out; I think it would win friends and influence people.

Martin: It’s a bit like karma.

Jenny: Yes. I suppose marketing companies are a bit like solicitors or barristers – you’ve got to take the work that comes, although I’m sure things that are really unethical people do turn down, but if you’re also doing the other side of things it should push things forward – “I’ve done something of value here, I haven’t just paid the mortgage”.

Martin: With social media, it’s interesting that the public can use it to criticise companies about what they’ve done. It’s not all bad, I don’t think?

Jenny: Even when it’s angry, anger is an emotion that we have and is very valuable to us as human beings, as it’s telling us to pay attention to something – it depends on the expression of it and how we turn it into something that makes a change we want to see. Again, clever people can turn people’s unhappiness with something into something very positive. I’m trying to think of an example now that isn’t too political! I’ve got the Led By Donkeys stuff right in my mind at the moment! But particularly if you can take people who are pompous or uncaring down with humour then it really cuts the ground out from what they’ve been doing – it can empower others to say actually “No, you’re not speaking to us or for us”. Think of the huge increase in donations that the RNLI has had as a result of people preventing one lifeboat from going out to rescue migrants coming across the channel. That happened as a result of word getting out on social media, people saying “No, that’s not us; here you are [here’s a donation], we’re on your side.”

Martin: They’ve had one of their best years for donations ever, haven’t they? I think Led by Donkeys is a fantastic example, actually. The other one that comes to mind is Dove, trying to show real women in their advertising, rather than supermodels. I loathed the famous Protein World ‘Are you beach body ready?’ ads, and I think Dove is a valuable counterpoint to that.

Jenny: Some of those casual sexism things are so counter productive. I remember when a company was advertising deodorant saying “Nice pits” [and I just think] “Right, I’m never buying anything by them ever again! That’s it!”

Martin: It’s very divisive, isn’t it? Protein World were gleeful about it, proud that they had ruffled feathers. You have to take responsibility for what you put out into the world because it can have real world consequences.

Jenny: I think marketing skills can be used to really overcome some of those things that we haven’t got far enough with at the moment. I think particularly in terms of disability, where there’s still a huge amount of prejudice and stigma; I used to work with people with learning disabilities at the Mental Health Foundation and they [told us that they] would go out holding hands with their loved one and people would throw things at them. We’ve got so much further to go to be an inclusive society and the only healthy society can be one that includes all its citizens, otherwise it’s a divided one.

Martin: Jon Alexander is using marketing techniques to engage people with aspects of society but it’s behaviour change, attitude change that we’re talking about, which is difficult to do. It’s trying to get people to have a stake in society and the big issues we’re trying to wrestle with.

Jenny: Going back to my anthropology days, we are primed as human beings to put a framing around our world which is ‘the in and the out’ that anthropologists talk about, and how much disruption we psychologically can take at any time. A lot of non-Western societies are wonderful at welcoming guests, [but with] others, anybody from outside is going to be treated potentially as a threat.

There was some interesting research in the States where they sent people to interview different households at either end of the authoritarian spectrum – the least authoritarian and the most – and the different behaviour people showed to racially mixed interviewers was extreme. At one end, the least authoritarian found being interviewed by diverse interviewers really exciting and interesting and at the other end, people were very anxious. That said a lot about people’s inner states and if we live in a society where some people are understandably very anxious, very insecure in their income, their status, the things they value, we’re going to have more of those attitudes, so they don’t spring out of nowhere.

Martin: That sounds like it’s cultural. I teach about Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, which is a way of comparing different cultures, such as whether societies are more individualistic vs others that are more co-operative societies. It makes you realise how different societies are around the world. How do we change the culture of a society?

Jenny: To help us see our community as being a very broad one that incorporates people whose lives have been very different from ours and may be facing all sorts of challenges that we haven’t had to ourselves; it may be quite uncomfortable, but if we just pretend that they’re not there or push them away we don’t solve any problems. And actually we can learn and be enriched by our connection with them.

I’ve learned so much as I’ve come into connection with different people who might fit within one of those groups. I’ve learned a lot of disability politics from somebody I was arrested with [while] putting flowers on the gates of South Africa House to call for Nelson Mandela’s release and he was in a wheelchair. They just arrested us for putting flowers on the gates, as they did back in those days! “Breach of the peace!” They didn’t secure his wheelchair in transporting us to the police station; when we were preparing the court case (which they then dropped) he was telling me a lot about what he faced. He’d come from South Africa [and explained] the difference between the racial circumstances in South Africa [and the UK]. So it really is so enriching but you have to have opportunities to meet people and learn from them, or you can just live your life in fear of the ‘others’ and the outsiders.

Martin: I wonder if this is something marketers can help with. It sounds like you’re saying that if we can empathise with each other then that may be the solution - walk in each other’s shoes?

Jenny: I think it does. There’s a project which is [named for] walking in someone else’s shoes, where they do have a whole range of shoes - you pick one that’s your size and you walk for a while listening to a recording of somebody telling you about their life. I think that’s quite an interesting physical connection [in which] to hear it. I think the risk is we hear a lot of things that make us just feel “Oh, how awful” and you can only take so much of that; then you get compassion fatigue and there’s nothing you can do and actually the people who can help remediate this [should] lead on to thinking “Well that’s not right, what can we do about it, well here’s something that we can do.” And that should ideally go beyond putting your hand in your pocket for a donation (which can be useful in itself) [to] writing a letter to an MP, which not many of us do, to other forms of action that we can do in our own sphere of influence that will make a difference.

Martin: So it’s that idea of agency or empowerment to try and drive change. So it’s about making sure you give people some practical things they can do to effect change.

Jenny: And particularly going beyond pity, which is not empowering for the person on the other side. The reason why I’m Chair of the People’s Health Trust is that it’s quite unusual when it got started ten years ago in really being about the agency of communities. The people who get funded are partners and that’s a real two-way process. If you just go in and help sort out a community, it’s all going to go horribly wrong at some point.

Martin: And that’s your focus now?

Jenny: What we’ve seen over the pandemic is a real laying bare [of] health inequalities – [it’s] absolutely clear and the death rate (and I’m sure it will come out in the long Covid rates as well), the people who’ve been most likely to be affected, infected, lose family and so on, have been those who’ve either got disabilities - eight times as many people, the proportion of people with learning disabilities died, as the rest of us – or live in overcrowded conditions. Multi-generational households have been very vulnerable or [those] who work in front line [roles], or occupations where people can’t afford not to work because they’re a week’s paycheque away from not being able to cope. And those really lead into health inequalities right through life from childhood, from when children are in the womb, and each stage can be getting worse.

But communities are not powerless to bring about change, and what I love about the work of the People’s Health Trust is that it’s finding communities that have got the opportunity to get together and say “Actually, this is the thing that’s our problem – it might be poor repairs making our homes damp, with mould, and that’s affecting our asthma and our kids’ health and so on, and so we’re all going to get together and talk to the landlords in this area”. They can do that with the right sort of support and resources to bring people together and make it happen. And also to share the lessons from one community to another – “You did that? That’s interesting we didn’t do it quite that way, but we can try this”.

That’s where a bit of campaign expertise, encouraging the good and the right impulses, and making it clear that there are costs of not engaging, managing that in the right way can get people to the other side of the table and prepared to help.

Martin: It’s an amazing skillset that you’ve got, to be able to facilitate those conversations – making people willing to talk and then making a case. The success you’ve had speaks volumes.

Jenny: Some of its translation, because when people first come together, those who are energised tend to be those who are angry and have been treated with injustice and that’s very hard to hear unmediated, or without people thinking about how they’re going to make their case and it’s not necessarily for a professional to come in and say “Oh, you’re much better off doing it this way…” – it’s got to come from people who’ve been through that process themselves. And working with homeless people and people with addiction and so on a few years back in Stoke and Bristol, turning their experience and anger at the injustice around; and helping people who have experienced that to see that people on the other side not as being hostile, wanting to put them down, but [to see them ] as human beings, and vice versa. People in the council or housing associations not seeing them as “Oh, they just need lots of help from us” but as “These are people with things we need to hear; it will help us to do what we’re here to do much better”. It’s a process. It doesn’t always happen, it doesn’t happen quickly, but when it happens it’s really good.

Martin: Sounds like perseverance is another important skill that you’ve got. So to wrap things up, if you’re a young marketer or business person – whether in charities, the public sector or private sector – and you’ve got some agency to improve things, what advice would you give them?

Jenny: I’d say, if you’ve got these skills, which are quite precious and needed in the world for the bigger things that we’re tackling, [I’d say] “Yes, pay your bills, [but] try and influence where you are, see if that can also lead to change for good”, because when you get later in life, to my age and retired, what you look back on are the things that you’ve achieved that have made positive change.

And we’ve got some really big, tough issues, like making sure we still have a liveable world, ahead of us, and that skill to understand people and human psychology and reach inside us and help us see how things can be in a positive way, even if we have less stuff – I don’t care if I have a new mobile phone every year, but I do care that there’s a world in which we keep our children, grandchildren and all the species we depend on healthy. And OK, we’re in the real world, but imagine if you can help more and more people see that,  or be at one with the other members of our own society, maybe our global society.

Martin: Couldn’t agree more. That’s a really positive place to end. Thank you ever so much for talking to me, and best of luck with the People’s Health Trust. I’m really interested to see what you do next!

Jenny: There’s always something! Thank you. It’s a pleasure.