This campaign follows on from our success of officially condemning the sale and distribution of shark fin in Cambridge in 2013; where due to the efforts of our first Fin Fighting community group (Fin Free Cambridge) in 2013 we achieved the miraculous! Cambridge became the UK's first city to officially condemn shark fin. Through lobbying the city council and petitioning the community we were able to secure the first ever backing of a council in the UK to protect sharks....which was HUGE.

We are now working to replicate this in cities across the UK.

CAMBRIDGE - BATH - BRISTOL

Whilst we totally recognise the importance of Fin Free campaigns and fully support encouraging business to stop selling fins (in a respectful way!) Fin Fighters are trying to look at the bigger picture of how we can make the most impact on this issue in the UK as a whole through the cumulative effect of multiple city-wide condemnations.

How our Fin Free by 2023 campaign works;

Our Fin Fighter city condemnations are NGO co-operative and aim to ensure that the cites at the focus of the campaign are Fin Free through local engagement; lead by volunteers and community members with our support and encouragement. We aim to build these local campaigns into networks - gathering political and public support for a massive country wide campaign asking the government to totally ban the sale and distribution of shark fin in this country in 2023.  

With this strategy, the Fin Fighter network works together to build public and political support for a much bigger country wide campaign. (Which we are also considering widening to the EU)

We are working in this way to ensure that the UK government and the EU recognise the growing public demand for an end to the SALE AND DISTRIBUTION of shark fin throughout the UK.

This is a challenging task - but by building a larger campaign from a network of smaller localised ones; we are working on creating the positive sea-change that we know will really make a difference to this aspect of shark conservation.

 In Bath we are working with a collation of schools from the Bath and BANES area and the children are creating their own campaign aimed at the future generations of the region. So far we have been working with the children to collect the signatures of their fellow students and have 2000 to date, they have also written and presented talks, held events and questioned the local politicians on the issue. 

‪#‎BathSchoolsUniteAgainstSharkFin‬
The children of Kingswood school have been very involved and are leading workshops and hosting fundraising events around the city to raise awareness and collect petition signatures.

With the support of all the political parties Bath is now looking set to become the second city in our Fin Fighter mission - We will be presenting our motion to the city council very soon.

We wanted our campaign to be all inclusive and our work in the city so far has included engaging positively with the businesses selling shark fin, raising awareness through fun and creative events and giving Bristol a voice by collecting signatures for a petition to the council. From live music fundraisers, stand up comedy nights, giant shark puppets and 'sharks' in Bristol harbour we have so far managed to gather great support, assemble a team of amazing volunteers and collect over 3000 signatures and counting! and with so much more planned for 2016 we hope to make this change for a positive future a reality. 

Like our previous campaign in Cambridge a motion will be put forward by a councillor along with all of our collected signatures which will create a by-law effectively stopping the sale and distribution of shark fin within the city limits.

Our petition has now been handed into the Bristol council for verifying, we hand collected over 5600 signatures! Lou Ruddell will be presenting the petition to the council in Novembers meeting, we will announce the results soon!

Contact us on –  info@finfighters.org  to get involved.