Thank you for visiting the Guy Hughes award Just Giving site. We are trying to raise as much as possible by the end of March in order to support the 2009 winner of the Global Action campaigning award, founded in memory of Guy. So please give what you can.

Global Action award

The award supports 18-24 year olds working towards global justice, challenging the root causes of world poverty, international conflict, environmental destruction or human rights abuses. It was established in 2007 in memory of Guy Hughes.

The award, which is part of a set of awards administered by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, does not offer a monetary prize. Instead, it focuses on developing  campaigners' skills and deepening their understanding of successful campaigning techniques. It does this by providing a tailor-make programme of support and training, including mentoring by experts in the winner's particular field of activity.

2007's winner, Harry Giles, had been part of an incredibly successful student campaign to persuade his university to adopt an ethical investment policy. He was looking for support in setting up a national student ethical investment campaigning network - which is now going strong!

2008's award-winner, Juliane Heider, is campaigning to stop the use of immigration detention, especially of children and families at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre. As a member of a student group working in solidarity with asylum-seekers and other migrants in detention centres, Juliane seeks to empower detainees facing deportation with skills and resources to appeal against their situation. The campaign is developing an action network to bring together individuals and organisations concerned about the wider issues as well as focusing on individual anti-deportation campaigns. 

We've also had a series of exceptional runners-up who have also some received some support.

So far, funding for the award has come from a range of sources; NGOs and campaign groups that Guy worked with, Guy's parents Lynda and David Hughes, and the APE Foundation. We are now hoping that Guy's friends might be able to contribute as we try to find the funding for 2009's award.

 About Guy      

Guy Hughes was an inspirational campaigner and activist who died tragically in a mountaineering accident on the 28th of January, but who achieved more in his 32 years than most people manage in a lifetime.

Growing up in and southern Scotland and southern Germany with twin brothers Eric and Andy and his parents Lynda and David, young Guy developed a passion for mountains and forests. He laughingly claimed Dr Seuss's eco-tale The Lorax ("I save the trees") as his early inspiration.

Highly intelligent and analytical, Guy studied physics at the University of East Anglia, but his interests soon turned to environmental politics and social justice. He joined a campus activist group and was soon blockading a Shell Depot in Norfolk following the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa.

In spring 1996 he arrived at the site of the proposed Newbury by-pass with climbing gear and lived up a tree for a month. Only four trees out of 10,000 survived the onslaught of bulldozers. Guy's was one of them and it still stands tall. The Newbury bypass was built, but road-building policy would never be as unthinkingly rapacious again.

By the age of 24, Guy had moved to Oxford and become Head of Campaigns at Third World First - which changed its name to People & Planet (P&P) in 1998. His first major success at P&P was to force the £20bn Universities Superannuation Scheme, the third largest occupational pension scheme in the country, to adopt an ethical investment policy- an unheard of move for a mainstream City fund at the time. He also persuaded 48 universities to switch to green electricity.

In 2003 Guy left P&P to focus his talents on foreign policy, establishing a new NGO in London called Crisis Action. Guy was totally opposed to Britain's involvement in the war, but equally frustrated that civil society had not been more effective in preventing it. He believed that civil society, particularly NGOs working on international issues, would have been much more effective if they had run a co-ordinated, unified and clever anti-intervention campaign at an early stage. Confident that this also applied to many other crises and conflicts of our time, he decided to sort it out, starting a brand new coalition.

Guy is deeply missed not only by his family, partner and friends but by a generation of idealistic students, campaigners and guests at his legendary Oxford cocktail parties. He was a man of sparkling intelligence, energy and wit who knew how to make life fun as well as being determined to change the world for the better.

No-one has summed up how so many are feeling better than Guy's friend and fellow activist Lucy Michaels: 'I'll always think of Guy as incandescent - a bright star burning fiercely in the few short years we were permitted to have him with us. Few people can have achieved what he did in such a short time. I know that the best way that I'll remember him is through continuing the work that he engaged in with such unswerving passion and commitment, towards a world of peace and social justice.'

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