Here is a blog from the inspirational Andy Balaam who was the SPEAK web manager with one of our first websites launched in 1999 taking us for a trip down memory lane. It has been great to hear from Andy when during our 25+ years celebrations:
When I first encountered SPEAK, it seemed like a short-lived thing: a rag-tag
collection of hippy students who wanted to fix the world. It seemed inevitable
that the stresses of adult life would dampen the organisers’ principles, and the
only hope for continuity would be to find a continuing supply of naive students
to grab the baton.
So it is with great surprise and joy that I celebrate 25 years of SPEAKs work,
fighting to change the conversation around the core values that almost everyone
agrees with, but very few fight for: we shouldn’t help tyrants and aggressors by
selling them weapons; the global financial system should not be a way to oppress
the poor; we need to face up to the climate crisis.
If you spend that long fighting for this stuff, and you consider prayer to be
part of that effort, you’re going to find your faith changing: when you pray for
25 years and the problems are not magically fixed, you either give up or you
deepen your understanding. It’s been exciting to me, as my faith has faltered,
dissolved, re-formed and wobbled along, to see Speak exploring what it means to
pray for justice in a way that feels parallel to my own journey, and how the
work never ends.
All of this is about not just a belief that things are not OK as they are, but
also, critically, a hope that they can change. In some ways this is close to
what “faith” means to me now, so it is utterly inspiring to see SPEAK just
_refusing_to_shut_up_ about what is wrong in the world, and in the process
changing the conversation, and the parameters of the decisions that are made.
Thank you, everyone who is, or has been, involved with Speak over the years: you
fill me with hope.
My own involvement with Speak was mostly through creating their first ever web
site. Here is how it looked:
The Speak web site front page on 4th Dec 2000. Thanks to archive.org‘s Wayback
Machine!
Yes, the text across the top scrolled from right to left using the “`marquee“`
HTML tag. I am so, so sorry.
The main page looked like this:
The web design is pretty shameful to me now, but even back then, the campaigns
were on the same themes: the arms trade, debt relief, and climate action. The
vision statement holds up today: “To transform situations of injustice through
linking people together to use their voice and pray for change.”
To compound my embarrassment, I will show you one more page:
Now this doesn’t come across very well in the capture from the Wayback Machine,
but if those broken images actually loaded, you’d see pictures of me and Tim
(who maintained the site at the time), with googly eyes that followed your mouse
pointer as it moved around the screen. If you scrolled a little lower, there was
actually a Space Invaders game you could play!
I guess this is a little insight into the sweeter, kinder times of the Internet
when SPEAK was formed!
It was a privilege to be part of a movement that stood up for what is right,
it’s been a joy to see that movement thrive for 25 years, and it’s a thrill to
think what might come next.
Congratulations to SPEAK on your new web site. It may not have all the chaotic
charm of the year-2000 version, but it’s a whole lot better in every way!