1 year on, we’re still running for it
Run For It founder, Ed Krutsch reflects on a year of movement building and fighting for a better democracy.
In early September 2020, Run For It was founded and officially kicked off with the launch of our very first campaign to elect more young people to Victorian local councils.
The idea of a youth-led democratic justice organisation had been on the mind of many young campaigners, such as myself, for a long time, and a few projects to better engage young people in Aus-pol had been floating around, but had never quite found the momentum to properly take off.
I had been involved with some of these campaigns and had also spent a lot of time campaigning for issues that were important to me and often impacted young people first and worst, such as climate change, and economic injustice.
One of these movements I was involved with was the School Strikes 4 Climate, both speaking at the Melbourne 2018 rally and co-leading the organisation of the March 2019 rally. Globally, movements of young people had been not turning up to school and instead turning out to protest and send a strong message that young people cared about their future.
I visited Canberra twice in the lead up to the federal election and presented a list of asks to national decision makers. We discussed the fears we had for our future and the actions we believed necessary from the government. They smiled, took nice photos and told us they’d ‘think about’ what we’d had to say.
Up until the 2019 election, I was hopeful that with some strong asks and large public demonstrations, we could change the hearts and minds of our politicians and see meaningful change within an election cycle or two. I was wrong.
After further campaigning on the federal election and after participating in a global youth-led movement for action on climate change, I learned that our politics just isn’t fair, meetings where older straight white male politicians nicely smiled and told us they’d ‘think about’ what we’d had to say was never going to cut it.
We might have had three clear asks and organised some large rallies, but that was nothing compared to the billionaires who donated millions of dollars to the big parties, let alone spent millions of dollars on their own election campaigns, just to ensure that the hopes of young people for their futures would not be reflected in national policy.
From that point on, I realised that young people really needed to get in the game. We needed to stop asking our politicians for change but change our politicians. So, I got to work on recruiting a group of young people interested in building a movement to change the face of politics and see better political outcomes for future generations.
We decided our three central values were Climate Justice, Economic Justice, and Social Justice. In our movement to change politics, we’d ensure that our team members and the candidates we supported, always upheld these three core values. We also decided that the representation of young people mattered at all levels of government, so we’d start building power at the local council level and grow from there.
We then made a plan for our very first campaign on the Victorian local council elections. In our infancy, we built a strong group of volunteers and supported 67 first-time candidates and 72 local government candidates in total to run for elected office. We brought together candidates to share tips and shared lessons supported the field campaigns of candidates and amplified their voices on social media and in the headlines.
Our candidates were incredibly diverse. Young workers ran, young farmers, young queer people, young people of colour ran and young people at the forefront of the climate crisis ran. Previously Victoria had around 8 young progressive councillors, and just over 20 of the young candidates we supported were elected, meaning we helped double the amount of young progressive councillors in Victoria. With more young people on Victorian councils, we now have more representatives across the state working to help more young people participate in politics and fight for climate, economic and social justice.
And even when it seemed challenging to beat those efforts, it’s exciting to say that things have really taken off even more since the end of 2020! I’m proud to say that we have recruited even more young people into our movement, we’ve refined our goals and objectives, and brought in an entirely new brand and style guide.
We’ve also expanded nationally, building additional local campaigning teams in New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia. These teams have been working to establish local capacity for election campaigns when they come around, and designing their own campaigns for local issues to make our democracy, local, state, and federal, more accessible for young people.
Excitingly, we are also currently working on our second local government campaign, on this year’s NSW local government elections. At the time of writing this, we are supporting 11 amazing young local government candidates across New South Wales and using some exciting digital organsing techniques to recruit and support young people running in these elections.
Building a movement of young people to change the face of politics and reclaim our democracy has not always been easy. Providing young people with resources, training, and inspiration to engage in politics, sometimes takes resources and skills we don’t have. In most circumstances, we’ve luckily been able to find creative ways to work around these issues and still run strategic campaigns to help reclaim democracy.
Building a community of young people during a global pandemic has also had its challenges. Our first 12 months have almost entirely been online, with all of our candidate support, volunteer recruitment and voter contact happening via zoom. We’re all really hopeful that if we’ve been able to do everything we can during the pandemic, we’re going to only grow larger when we are able to run large events, knock on voters doors and socialise as a team of committed young people.
So, as we tick over 1 year of existence as a youth-led grassroots campaigning organisation, I’m proud to say that we have a few big accomplishments under our belt and some really exciting plans on the horizon.
It couldn’t have been possible without the incredible young organisers that have helped build the movement, from designing social media posts to organsing recruitment meetings, the dedication that so many have put into working with me to grow Run For It has been amazing, and I’m so so grateful. I’m also so so thankful for the mentors that have guided me through the trickiest times and helped ensure Run For It is sustainable, effective, and strategic.
All in all, that’s a wrap on one year of Run For it — it’s been a really exciting year, but we’re only chipping away at 0.1% of the problems facing young people’s political engagement in Australia.
Please keep an eye out over the next few years, as I can guarantee that as our movement builds, we will be able to elect some real heroes, completely restructure our systems to become fairer for young people, and finally, reclaim our democracy.
Ed Krutsch founded Run For It in September 2020 and is currently the National Director. Whilst in high school, Ed established a Youth Advisory Committee in his local council area and led the organisation of the School Strikes 4 Climate rallies. Ed has also mobilised grassroots volunteers to campaign on the 2019 federal election with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and has worked for both state and federal MP’s.
