Remembering Sally Willington (1931-2008)
06 October 2008
Paul Ekins remembers Sally Willington, one of the founder members of the Green Party, who died recently.
A recollection of Sally Willington (1931-2008)
When I joined the Ecology (now Green) Party in 1979 Sally was already a long-standing Party activist, and a campaigner who had founded and brought to influence the Association for the Improvement of Maternity Services (AIMS).
She ran a small pottery in Battersea, South London, a few streets from where I lived, so we were in the same local Ecology Party, and I got to know her very well. I benefited hugely from her much longer political and campaigning experience and well remember her great energy and commitment, both in our numerous discussions and in our Party work together, whether at local Party meetings or campaigns, or at national Party Conferences.
In 1983 she had the idea that changed my life: to organise an alternative to the G7 Summit that was to take place in Lancaster House in London in 1984. I became Director of The Other Economic Summit (TOES), as it came to be called, and have been in economics ever since. TOES produced one of the first books of a new ‘green’ economics (The Living Economy) and was organised annually in other countries for a number of years, on the strength of Sally’s initial impetus. It also gave birth to the New Economics Foundation, which has done and continues to do pioneering and influential work on forging an economics as if people and the planet mattered.
Having had the idea, but recognising that economics as such was not her strength, Sally was quite content to leave its realisation to others – typical of her ability to see what needed to be done, and her generous willingness to allow others to get on and do it.
Sally left London in the mid-1990s to be with her family in Australia, and only returned to this country last year, and settled in Devon. We corresponded but never met again, so that I still have in mind the image of her as an indefatigable fighter for women’s rights and for an economics and politics that promoted above all environmental sustainability and social justice. Thanks, Sally, for a life well lived.
PAUL EKINS
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