North Edinburgh and Leith Greens

North Edinburgh and Leith Greens: Annual Report
2025

We are pleased to publish a report of North Edinburgh and Leith sub-branch’s
activities in the period June 2024 - May 2025.

The sub-branch covers three council wards (Forth, Leith, and Leith Walk), and
has a very high concentration of Green members and voters. All wards currently
have a Green councillor: Kayleigh O'Neill in Forth, Chas Booth in Leith, and
Susan Rae in Leith Walk.

Contact us at nel@scottishgreens.org.uk

Committee

The subbranch committee elected at our AGM in June 2024 was:

This year’s AGM is scheduled for 09 June 2025.

Membership

The membership stands at 446: 76 in Forth, 140 in Leith, 232 in Leith Walk (as
of 26 May 2025). Membership is stable, with 433 at this time last year. A sudden
drop in membership occurred, likely due to a central database clean-up, but
membership numbers have since recovered. April and May 2025 saw a big increase
in membership with 13 new members in total. We also saw a slow, but steady
increase in active members and meeting attendance in the last few months.

The membership secretary continued to engage new members via welcome emails and
phone calls.

We started a phonebanking campaign, aiming to call of our members (who permit
it) at least once this year, with the goal of increasing our active membership
in preparation for elections in 2026 and 2027.

Meetings and events

The sub-branch meets monthly at Leith Community Centre (with breaks in August
and December). Meetings are hybrid and are typically attended by 8-12 members.
We discuss party and local news, campaigns, Green News, hear updates from
committee members and councillors and ask them questions.

We also held several social events and are planning more frequent socials going
forward.

We organised our traditional stall at Leith Gala Day in 2024. We will be taking
part again on 14 June 2025.

General Election 2024

During the Westminster election campaign, we focused our campaigning activities
on the North Edinburgh and Leith constituency, with candidate Kayleigh O'Neill.
The election campaign coincided with several active members being away, so we
somewhat struggled with capacity. Regardless, we delivered ca. 9000 election
leaflets (including eve of poll cards) and achieved 11% of the vote, the highest
in Edinburgh.

We were disappointed that the National Action Day in Leith was organised without
involving the sub-branch, with our leading campaign members learning about it
via national e-mail two days before the event.

Strategic Plan 2025-2027

We held a special meeting in September 2024 to work on a strategic plan,
covering the period from the plan’s adoption to the 2027 local elections. It was
finalised and agreed in February 2025, alongside an Action Plan for 2025, which
is updated at every meeting.

The Strategic Plan contains an assessment of our strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats, an outline of our major objectives and the actions
required to achieve them.

The Strategic Plan is available in the February 2025 meeting minutes:
https://members.greens.scot/file/nel-feb-2025

Green News

Our party newsletter Green News continues to be one of the best ways of
spreading our message to voters. Unfortunately, due to unpredictable and poorly
communicated delays in printing and distribution, currently handled by party HQ,
we struggled with Green News deliveries in the last year. The autumn/winter
edition had to be delivered to households in December and January, causing a
drop in volunteers.

Regardless, we significantly improved our Green News content production thanks
to a newly set-up working group of interested members. We are continuing to
improve our internal distribution and coordination processes in the lead up to
the next election, including a review of all leafleting routes to identify all
changes such as new developments and re-assess priority areas.

Finances

The sub-branch’s main expense is the monthly meeting room booking, which costed
£150 over the year. Another major expense was booking the spot for Leith Gala at
£65.

We were very happy to submit and win a bid for a new sub-branch gazebo a this
year’s round of branch participatory budgeting. The new gazebo will be ordered
soon, ready for an intense year of campaigning and fundraising.

Plans ahead

We will continue to execute our Action Plan for 2025, focused on increasing our
active membership and preparing for the 2026 Holyrood election. We look forward
to working with the branch, other sub-branches, and Green candidates, especially
the candidates for Edinburgh Northern and Edinburgh North Eastern and Leith
constituencies.

After results from the Holyrood election are available, as well as data
collected through canvassing and ballot box sampling, we will work with
Edinburgh branch to make a decision on whether to stand two councillor
candidates in Leith Walk ward, in line with the Branch Election Strategy. This
would be a first for the party.