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The primary purpose of the Equalities and Diversity Co-ordinator is to ensure that the principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion are deeply embedded within the Green Party’s operations and policies. This role is crucial for advocating and advancing these principles across all levels of the organization, ensuring that they are not only upheld but also promoted actively. The Co-ordinator leads initiatives and strategies to foster an inclusive environment where all members feel valued and respected.
The Candidates
Rosa Al-Baldawi & Luanne Thornton
We are Rosa Al-Baldawi and Luanne Thornton, and we are standing together as job-share candidates for the role of Equality and Diversity Coordinator. Between us, we bring a wide range of lived experience, grassroots activism, and institutional knowledge to this vital role within the Green Party.
Rosa has served as the International Officer for the Young Greens over the past year, where she has worked to build connections with Young Green movements across Europe. As part of her role, Rosa has been an active and vocal delegate to the Federation of Young European Greens (FYEG), consistently advocating for international solidarity and justice. She has stood up for the rights of Palestinians and has led the way as part of FYEG’s Anti-Racism task force, ensuring that anti-oppression and decolonisation remains central to our international work including helping run a decolonising workshop in Croatia this year.
Luanne has served as Co-Chair of the Young Greens for the last two years, championing inclusivity and member empowerment throughout her leadership. She played a key role in delivering two of the most diverse cohorts of the 30 Under 30 programme, ensuring voices from across regions and backgrounds were represented. Luanne has also supported the growth of the Young Greens’ liberation groups, helping them gain visibility and influence within the party. Her focus on accessibility, representation, and grassroots leadership has strengthened the Young Greens as a more inclusive and dynamic movement, rooted in justice and collective action. Outside of the Green Party, Luanne splits her work between working as a Disability Advisor and a Sexual Violence Liaison Officer. She also chairs her workplace’s LGBTIQA+ Staff Network. In this capacity, she has built strong relationships with the wider LGBTIQA+ community, championing accessibility and inclusion. Luanne also sits on her organisation’s Equality and Diversity Steering Group, helping shape policy and drive change in professional settings.
As your Equality and Diversity Coordinator we would commit to:
- Integrating intersectional analysis in all party processes, including policy development, candidate selection, and internal decision-making frameworks
- Investing in leadership development for underrepresented members
- Removing structural barriers to participation
- Establishing accessibility as standard practice
- Organising anti-racism and unconscious bias training
- Developing a mental health and neurodiversity framework
- Launching additional internal education initiatives around gender diversity, to create a more trans inclusive environment
We want to ensure that anti-racism, disability justice, queer liberation, and international solidarity are not just values we talk about, but as a party are committed to through our policies, campaigns, and culture .Our shared commitment to you is to continue pushing the Green Party to be a truly inclusive, safe, and empowering space for all. We would love to represent our membership as your Equality and Diversity Coordinator and strive to deliver intersectional justice with sustainable change. <3
Campaign video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zD6XYzCoUvGvbqdb0anIrdf0PXtgxakr/view?usp=sharing
Ekua Bayunu & Kathryn Bristow
Ekua is based in Manchester and Kat in Bristol, we are standing together as we have the experience and connections to communities to cover all areas of E&D.
Our core priorities are:
- Up-resourcing our liberation groups so they can be more effective at reaching their communities.
- Ensuring Green Party candidates are representative of the electorate.
- Pushing for accessibility across the party for disabled people, those with caring responsibilities, and other material conditions that impact participation in meetings, events and being candidates.
- Holding the party to doing what is right, whether that’s calling a genocide for what it is or standing against the erosion of human rights.
Our experience includes:
Ekua being elected to the Equalities and Diversity Committee in September 2024, she stood due to her passionate desire for bringing a kind and inclusive approach to the party as its membership grows and diversifies.
Ekua is Chair of the Deyika Nzeribe Fund Board and prior to this was the Communications Officer for Global Majority Greens. Ekua is a non-portfolio Officer for Muslim Greens with a remit to ensure Muslims from across the spectrum of cultural backgrounds are encouraged to join the party.
Professionally, Ekua has held leadership roles in organisations that have actively sought to widen their reach to diverse communities. Working for Contact Theatre, as Head of Participation, this included working with Disability Rights organisations and Youth Offending organisations alongside organisations with a focus on serving Global Majority communities from all faith backgrounds and none.
Ekua is also leading in the work locally to build strong relationships with Trades Unions. She led on Union backed motions whilst a Green Councillor and continues to lead seeking public speaking engagements at protests for members and councillors.
Kat has been a very active Green Party member creating policy to widen access to fertility treatment and enhancing our policies on trans rights. She has also taken on numerous roles in the party across their career focused on E&D such as co-chair of LGBTQIA+ Greens and Green Party Women, LGBTIQA+ officer for Global Majority Greens, and E&D officer for Bristol Green Party and South West Green Party.
Outside the party Kat has worked with numerous stakeholders to improve services for LGBTIQA+ people including Bristol Council, the NHS commissioning group and service users as part of their role on the LGBT+ Steering Group for Bristol Independent Mental Health Network. She also has leadership skills through professional experience in management.
Lastly, Kat is a researcher and takes on speaking engagements with a focus on intersectional issues with class, disability, race, sexuality and gender being at the forefront. This is work they do within trans organisations as well, ensuring people of all backgrounds are represented in the furtherance of human rights.
Our shared commitment to working class communities of all abilities, cultural heritages, genders, and sexualities will be the bedrock of the focus we will bring to E&D. While guiding our membership through tackling oppressive systems towards inclusive practice with sensitivity and insight.
Aasiya Bora & Debra Cooper
Debra Cooper
Having taught in primary schools and specialist units for 38 years I have knowledge and understanding of the challenges young disabled people face. I have witnessed the success that disabled people can achieve, given a fair opportunity in education, college and the workplace.
I would like to improve the opportunities for all members of the Green Party to feel included. In particular I would like to improve accessibility to conference for all people with protected characteristics. Internally the Green Party must become more welcoming and recognition that diversity is a strength is crucial to a well functioning political party.
I joined the Green Party because I believe it best represents my working class roots and middle class values. As a teacher I was also a Forest School Practitioner and developed an award winning school food and wildlife garden.
As convener of the Disability Policy working group I co- wrote the new Disability Policy, which was adopted at conference.
I became the Chair of the Disability Group last year, and as a group we met with the Leadership and our MPs to discuss Policy and internal organisation requirements which could promote inclusivity.
I recognise that the Supreme Court judgement has implications for both our internal structures and our policies. As an experienced policy writer I will endeavour to ensure that our internal structures comply with our legal obligations.
If elected with Aasiya, I pledge to represent all people with protected characteristics in fair and equal measure.
Aasiya Bora
Hello, I hail from Leicester Green Party and am secretary for Muslim Greens. I’m an English teacher, long-standing climate justice activist and a project officer for an active travel charity, teaching children across inner city Leicester, to ride bicycles and then walk or wheel to school.
I’ve stood as local councillor, Police crime commissioner and a Parliamentary candidate. It was a candidate for Councillor in the contentious Leicester East seat during the Spring of 2022, I determined that divisive politics between Hindus and Muslims would not seep into our area. I stood on a platform of unity, dialogue and real cohesiveness between people of all faiths. The Greens achieved the highest ever percentage share in a local election in Leicester that year.
The climate crisis, austerity, the divisive narrative used by current leaders and media and an incredibly frayed and worn out social contracts are processes that affect our most vulnerable communities the most. It’s working families, young people, people of colour, faith groups, particularly Muslims and Jews at this time, our trans and LGBTQI communities, asylum seekers, Romani and Traveller communities as well as disabled friends who will find themselves suffering the most. Our common humanity is the single most important principle which the Green Party understands so well. I want those with the least amount of power socially see themselves proudly reflected in our party. And that we create a culture of genuine enriching cohesion within our party, using mediation if need be. Our conversations with each other must continue so no one goes unheard or unseen.
Cade Hatton
I joined the party at sixteen, and my fifteen years of membership have meant a great deal to me. The last five years in particular have been eye-opening, and I have learned so much from incredible people in the party. I have years of experience in EEDI spaces and have instituted programs and best practices in bodies throughout the party.
I intend to make the E&D Committee a space where the special interest members’ groups of the party feel able to work together on things that can impact us all, like our opposition to the Welfare Bill in the Green Party Disability Group, and Green Party Women’s support of Women Against State Pension Inequality. None of us is truly liberated until we all are.
Over the last five years within the party, I have been on the committees of a number of bodies – LGBTIQA+ Greens as comms officer and chair, Young Greens as Trans Officer, Feminist Greens as secretary, and now the chair role of the Green Party Disability Group. But I’m most proud of my work on the Conferences Committee, a role I’ve had for three years, this year as Co-Convenor. I instituted the first use of the Access Team at Autumn Conference ‘24, and I’m so excited to bring it to Bournemouth. One of the biggest impacts on accessibility is funding priorities; for example, the cost of the Sign Language Interpreters is often stated as astronomical, which is why they’re often not included.
While election success is at the core of how we improve lives, I feel it’s vital to have a passionate voice on GPEx to ensure that enough funding is given to important but less exciting projects – diversity schemes for staff members and volunteers of colour, disability inclusion schemes and admin support, and more – and to provide training to all regional and national bodies, on things as ‘minor’ as how to use Teams through to how best to deal with competing access needs, and safeguarding. I also strongly believe that investigating Target To Win and seeing how to make it more accessible for disabled volunteers and candidates should be a priority, as many have found it exclusionary.
I would push for an in-house lawyer with specific experience in equality and discrimination law. We spend vast amounts of money on legal advice and representation only when we’re already reaching a crisis, significantly more than we would if paying the salary of an in-house lawyer. It is likely the party will face further lawsuits over the years – we live in an extremely litigious time, and as we gain more of a footprint on the national stage, we should prepare for it.
I believe strongly in supporting our staff. Many come from marginalised backgrounds, and we need to uplift and support them all. Working alongside the Management Coordinator and the Trade Union Liaison, I would ensure we brought in schemes that would benefit all our staff and make sure people are aware of the hard work they do.