Description
Who: Fossielvrij Onderwijs and other grassroot groups, The Hague, the Netherlands
What: A four year campaign against Shell's children festival. Grassroot groups managed to stop the annual subsidy to Shell for the festival. The festival fled to Rotterdam and was discontinued afterwards.
When: 2016 - 2019
Shell used to organise an annual children’s marketing festival Generation Discover in the centre of the Dutch political capital, The Hague. Festival Generation Discover is an Edelman PR production for its client Shell.
This Shell festival, aimed at kids from 6 to 13 years old, was all about sustainable development goals and renewable energy. In the run-up to the festival and during the festival, Generation Discover was all over the Dutch media.
The festival Generation Discover by Shell won an important European award for public affairs. This showed that the festival was not only aimed at kids, but also at parliamentarians and policymakers.
The city of The Hague used to subsidize this Shell festival with 100,000 euro from the city’s educational budget.
Fossil Free Education raised the issue of the festival and led the actions to resist the festival. With the support of multiple other grassroots organisations, they managed to chase the festival out of The Hague and stop it all together.
Keys to this win were, among others:
- They convinced the city of The Hague to stop the subsidy.
- They convinced 38 schools to publicly declare not to visit the festival.
- They unearthed a scandal about kids that had to sign a gag order to visit the festival.
- They won a complaint about misleading advertising at the festival, in which Shell claimed gas was contributing to SDG7 for sustainable energy.
- Creative actions at the doorstep of Shell’s festival.
- Partners of the festival withdrew.
- Attention from national television.
