Last week (seems like months ago), Natascha Engel became the first TUC Organising Academy graduate to become a Member of Parliament - when she held Derbyshire North East for Labour with a majority of over 10,000. While most politicians struggle to find babies to kiss on the campaign trail, Natascha had no problems on this front having a one and a half year old son and being 8 months pregnant!

For a few years after graduating from the Organising Academy, Natascha was the national trade union liaison officer at the Labour Party, before she moved on to work for The Smith Institute. While she was at the SI, she and John Healey MP co-wrote a pamphlet, Learning to Organise, for the TUC's New Unionism project (which I used to helped co-ordinate). The key thrust of the pamphlet was that unions needed to use their growing work on learning and skills to help build membership and extend union influence - it sounds worthy and dull, but it was actually a really good piece of work, and one that has gone on to inform a lot of the work the TUC has done in this area.

I spoke to both Natascha and John Healey this week, about possible links between the work of the TUC's Organising Academy into a project they are developing with Northern College, aimed at building community activism, and skilling up local activists - and I'll post more info about this project here as I get it.

I think anything which can bring union, political and community activists together has to be a good thing - and the reality is of course that many of the 230,000 union stewards and reps don't stop being activists the minute they leave the workplace; quite often they are school governors or active in their local community, church or voluntary organisation as well. Linking together these different strands of activism has all sorts of possibilities, and can only help unions extend their membership, influence and relevance.

If you are a union rep, you can exchange ideas, experiences and resources with other reps at the TUC's unionreps web-site, which is here.