I am amazed about activists and their passion and drive

Tell us a bit about yourself. Who’s Kacper?

My name is Kacper Lubiewski, I’m an Israeli-Polish activist. I have been based in Poland for the majority of my life, but for a year now I’ve been living in Berlin. I’m 19, and the majority of the activism that I used to do and that I’m still doing is climate activism. Since I moved to Berlin I also started being active in a housing activist group.  

How did it all start for you?

It all started for me in 2019, so I have been active for four years now. I was 15 at the time and I attended a session of the European Youth Parliament (a great organisation by the way that I am recommending everyone to check out) and I met a lot of fantastic and motivated people there. This has really put me in a dilemma with what I am doing with my free time. I come from a village next to a small town in Poland called Opole and in my life I had this feeling that everything is sort of just omitting and getting by Opole and there’s nothing happening there. 

And 2019 was the time of Greta Thunberg and climate school strikes. I wanted to be part of it. I saw great potential in the movement, that was just getting started but seemed like a cause that I wanted to help with. So yeah, that was definitely one part of it, just being surrounded by and seeing for the first time a lot of people who are active, passionate and dedicated.

I realised that’s an important cause and I’m not going to let another great big thing just not happen and that’s how I started a local group of Fridays for Future in Opole and then I started working with the national and international movement. 

What does activism mean to you? 

I think that activism can be understood very broadly, as in this day and age there are just so many ways to be an activist.

“You can be a cyber activist, a street activist, you can be a spokesperson, you can do graphics, you can do some other type of art you can use to support your voice.”

There are so many different areas but I think what binds it all is the drive for change. And I think that activists realise that there is something wrong in the status quo, be it climate policy or the situation of the queer community. And then they sense this need for change there and they work towards it. 

I started being active in the climate movement just because I realised that this is purely a survival issue for the entire planet and the next generations on it. Sometimes it is a question of survival and knowing that this is the very last moment that we can do something about the climate catastrophe before we cross the tipping points.

What activities are you engaged in at the moment?

I’m still quite fresh in the housing movement. It’s only been a few months and I have dedicated most of my time to just learning and reading up on the issue. But when it comes to the climate movement, I’m proud of quite a few things. I feel like I and the rest of the people in my local group have effectively brought the climate movement to my city. We have organised dozens of different protests and we stayed vocal on a lot of issues. We have organised different types of protests, but I’m most proud of a very big march that we did there. 

That was around the time of COP26 in Scotland. I’m also proud of all the workshops that we’ve organised. Educating others has become such a big passion of mine and I have organized workshops on the different intersections of climate catastrophe with other issues, like the queer movement, or I talked about the comparison of Polish and German climate policy. 

I myself am Jewish, so I was very excited to see the intersection between the Jewish culture and the climate crisis. So I also led such workshops and I’m currently working as a climate educator in an online school. 

What kind of communities do you work with?

At this point in my life, I like to identify myself as an independent climate activist. I think that over those four years, I have worked with pretty much everyone that was there in Poland. For example the Rise for Future, Greenpeace, 350.org, with Extinction Rebellion, with everyone that was there that they considered the issue important.

Right now, I think I’m just supporting whatever causes I find necessary and interesting. When it comes to the housing movement, I’m part of a group called Right to the City, which is based in Berlin, part of a bigger campaign in Berlin called Deutsche Wohnen and Co Enteignen. We are an English-speaking group of immigrants in Berlin who try to give this unique perspective on the housing crisis from an immigrant’s perspective. 

What do you enjoy most about being an activist? 

What I enjoy the most is the beautiful community that it creates. I think that activism is just full of beautiful people with so much drive and passion for knowledge, for change, for growth. I have met my best friends there, people that are closest to my heart at this point. 

And I’m just utterly amazed by what they do and by their passion and drive. I think that being part of a group helps you feel that you’re not alone when faced with big issues like discrimination or climate catastrophe. And you feel like you’re part of something bigger and that in this collective, you can cooperate to work for a greater good. And I definitely felt very supported. I grew a lot. I feel that I am simply a better person through my activism. The community definitely plays the biggest part for me.

How would you go about engaging more diverse groups of people into activism?

When it comes to the right to the city, we’re an immigrants-based group and you would think that it naturally means the immigrant community in Berlin is diverse. That isn’t actually the reality that often, because even in those marginalised communities, the default is there are only the most privileged in that community. So we have a lot of Western Europeans in Berlin, a majority of the group is white. There are some people of color as well as Eastern Europeans, myself included. 

We are currently brainstorming how we can expand the representation in the group to people of lower income, perhaps to people that don’t speak English fluently and to more people of color. We need to improve our outreach and actively engage with those groups. 

In Fridays for Future, however, I think that the movement that we started with was diverse. We had people from big towns, small towns, a lot of women, a lot of queer people,  and I would even say people of very different cultural backgrounds. 

We have very much celebrated that diversity. It went like: “You come from a small town?” “How can we platform your voice and make sure that you’re heard?” so that it is not just the Warsaw voices that are being heard.

How has the climate movement changed since you joined in 2019?

It got better funded. It also got better organised, there are more people with more experience. People get better at what they do over time. It also got incredibly more diverse. 

There are lots of different initiatives, small, big, loosely connected, very tight communities with a lot of philosophy behind them for the elderly, or for young people, for the in-between… There’s just so much to choose from. 

It has also radicalised itself in a good way. I think that the climate movement has begun to start asking itself about questions of intersectionality of the voices of the people from the Global South. It has also definitely started looking more at the housing crisis and how homelessness intersects with the climate crisis.

What’s next for you?

I want to stay within the climate movement. I definitely want to go to different blockades. I want to help out other activists. I want to support them however I can. I don’t think that I want to get involved in a particular group at the moment. I definitely want to get deeper into housing though. 

“The reason why I got into the housing movement was because I experienced the housing crisis myself.”

I realised how cruel it is and that has really pushed me towards organising myself within that sphere. The campaign that I mentioned before will be pushing for another referendum in Berlin to expropriate the very big housing companies that own a great deal of Berlin’s housing. I definitely want to work within that campaign and collect the signatures and engage in outreach and education on that topic.

If you could send a message out to these people that are thinking of getting involved in activism?

Do it. I would say to everyone who wants to get involved in activism, do it. 

And research the cause that you want to get involved in. Knowledge is a great power and it makes your work a lot easier, better informed and a lot more nuanced. Find a cause that’s dear to you. It might be animal rights, queer issues, women’s rights, climate policy… I assure you that there’s something for you. I really do doubt that there are people who are just indifferent to the entirety of all politics.

Second would be to find a community. I always think it’s better to actually start working in a group and just get knowledge and develop bonds. I think that’s a wonderful way to get active. 

And then I would say to just not burn yourself out and to remember about your own needs and your own health. There are too many wonderful activists who just keep burning themselves out because they have too much to do.

“Remember that a burned out activist is a useless activist because that doesn’t help the cause in the long run. It’s an investment.”

It’s an investment towards the cause and it’s also healthy and respectful towards yourself to know where to stop and when to stop and when to come right back to it with bigger strength.