In March 2024 we launched our Cathy McCormack Community Activism Fund, in honour of the late Glaswegian community activist and anti-poverty campaigner. This Saturday 21 June 2025, 2-4pm at Glasgow Women’s Library, we are delighted to be helping to launch a new freely-available audiobook of Cathy McCormack’s 2009 book The Wee Yellow Butterfly.
The book tells the story of Cathy’s life and community activism in Easterhouse, particularly campaigning against damp housing conditions in Council-owned schemes in the ’80s and ’90s. Making the connections between these local social injustices and the global climate crisis led Cathy to help develop a pioneering solar heating project on the Easthall housing scheme, the first of its kind in the world.
The launch of a free audio edition of Cathy McCormack’s classic, The Wee Yellow Butterfly, is a momentous occasion. This book, whose radical implications cannot be exaggerated, documents Cathy’s achievements as a activist, campaigner, catalyst and popular educator, who persuaded countless people around the world: that neoliberalism is toxic to people and planet; that its ‘experts’ are often part of the problem; and that a war-without-bullets is being waged against innocent communities around the world. The inspiring story of a woman who left school at 15 but shook the foundations of the status quo and demonstrated how, in the teeth of Establishment opposition, reduction of climate damaging carbon dioxide emissions, poverty and ill health could be simultaneously affordably achieved, is now a mere click away. — David Fryer
I am delighted that Cathy’s Wee Yellow Butterfly has been made into an audiobook. It brings to life an amazing journey of hope and inspiration for all. When we started out, all those years ago, as members of Easthall Residents Association Dampness Group, none of us could have imagined where that journey, metaphorically and/or globally, would take us. Cathy’s story lives in the hearts and minds of those folk, like us, who never give up despite the labels and backlash, because we believe that another world is possible. — Helen Martin