Hi all,
As you may know, we dedicate all of our Mumsnet Premium revenue to campaigning. A little over a year ago, we made the decision to ramp up our campaigning work - partly borne out of the experiences that you shared during the covid pandemic, which helped to highlight just how much institutionalised discrimination and misogyny women still face.
Of course, campaigning isn’t anything new for us, and we’ve always been proud of the amazing campaigns - like This Is My Child, Let Girls Be Girls and We Believe You - that started on Mumsnet. But given how much work there is still to do we wanted to really target our influence and experience in order to raise the voices of women with decision makers and secure policy change that makes life easier for parents.
What this looks like on a day to day basis is that our campaigns team produce regular briefings for MPs and Ministers on what Mumsnet users are talking about, and attend meetings with politicians and civil servants to argue for policy change.
They keep an eye out for relevant debates in Parliament where we think Mumsnet users have something important to say - and in the past 12 months we’ve had 17 mentions in the Parliamentary record as well as evidence from Mumsnet cited in two APPG reports: one on safe staffing and maternity care and one on menopause.
Childcare has been a major priority for us this year, and we’ve helped to shift the dial and ramp up coverage which has led to politicians of all stripes accepting that the system is failing and needs significant reform. We hosted events at both Labour and Conservative Party conferences in the autumn, to highlight the problem, as well as working with a new coalition of interested groups to keep the issue on the political agenda, and seizing every chance to speak to the media to share your experiences.
Our campaigning work has also helped us secure a series of high profile political interviews in the past 12 months - with Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, and Boris Johnson all answering questions directly posed by Mumsnet users, which again helps to generate media coverage for the issues that are important to you.
As a result of some of this work, we’ve been told to “keep out of politics'' by the usual suspects who clearly don’t believe that the voices of 8 million women are worth listening to. But this has only made us even more determined to fight for progress.
If this sounds like something you’d like to support, then do please sign up to Premium for as little as under a pound a week. Not only will you be directly supporting our campaigns, but you’ll also receive personal updates on the progress we’re making and what the campaigns team are getting up to behind the scenes. And your views and opinions will help us to decide on the issues we should be tackling.
For information on how to sign up, click here.
Happy International Women’s Day! And big thanks for all your support.
Justine xx