Fuddland
The news of the death of Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace, has gotten me thinking back to my days as a Greenpeace canvasser in Toronto, in the summer of 1996. If you’ve know me for more than ten minutes then chances are I’ve already told you all about this, so you can go and make a cup of tea or something whilst I tell the others.
The job of the canvasser is, as you might expect, to go door-to-door trying to rally up support for the organisation they represent. Now I know that, at least in the UK, in terms of how welcome a visitor to ones door they are, door-to-door solicitors for pressure groups are generally on a par with bailiffs and pitchfork-wielding lynch mobs, but in Canada I found it to be a different story. On the whole, people were receptive and those that didn’t want to support Greenpeace for whatever reason at least gave me either a friendly, “Not interested,” before I said much, or listened to what I had to say before nicely saying no. My task was not simply to ask for monetary donations to swell Greenpeace’s coffers, but to get people to become card-carrying members — a pressure group relies on the size of its membership to put the weight of public opinion behind its causes.
The canvassing staff are divided up into groups of five or six and given a part of town to work on; each team has a field manager who assigns sub-sections of the area to each canvasser. After a couple of days of shadowing more established canvassers, learning about the issues in general and the specifics of Greenpeace’s work, I was trusted with my own turf each afternoon in which to sign up as many members as I could.
I was rubbish.
Because we were paid employees rather than volunteers, we each had to average a certain quota of donations over a week in order to justify our wage. By the end of my third week I was well under the quota, despite the best efforts of some of the field managers to give me the juiciest turf, and was called in for a talk with the manager of the Toronto office, the gist of which was, “You’re not really working out, we need to let you go.”
Dejected, I headed off to the bar with my fellow canvassers to drown my sorrows. Then a wonderful thing happened. Over the next couple of days, certain friends that I’d made on the staff spoke to the management, and petitioned — without my knowledge — for me to be given another chance. I was back in my basement flat feeling depressed and wondering where to look for another job. Soon I got a call from one of my friends telling me that, if I really wanted to have another go, to come in to the Greenpeace office and tell the manager that I was keen to return. And I really was — the people I’d met had already become my friends; I enjoyed learning about the issues and what was being done about them; and it was a fantastic way to see a whole lot of Toronto and the surrounding area.
I convinced the manager to give me a second chance, and somehow, that was all I needed. All of a sudden, I was brilliant at the job [do excuse my immodesty]. I signed up many new members every day, and began to enjoy — relish, even — the challenge of turning around the opinions of initially apathetic, or even unfriendly people. Getting a $2 donation out of a died-in-the-wool Greenpeace-hater was in some ways a lot more satisfying than a $100 donation from a lifelong member.
Now it’s true that the accent helped and a significant percentage of my contributions came from bored housewives, but you gotta go with your strengths! And for every ten or so friendly responses, there was an angry, sometimes aggressive person waiting behind the next door. One man, who had made all of his money from his dry-cleaning business, tried to set his dogs on me. Then there was the day that a man in a Range Rover kept driving past, slowing down and taking my photo — I never did get to ask what on Earth he was up to.
But at the end of each day we’d all head down to the local bar, swapping stories about people we’d dealt with that day [until I instigated a “no shop-talk” rule to force us to talk about something other than work for a change]. I made some friends there that I’m still very close with to this day, and all this reminiscing has prompted me to try and get back in touch with some of the other people I knew back then. A quick surf around the Canadian site has already revealed that at least one person I knew is still involved with the organisation, and I’ve already had response from her — what’s more, she remembers me!
