October 3, 2023

Here in Cumbria, we have been facilitating a Poverty Truth Commission (PTC) in South Lakeland.

This is thanks to funding commitment and partnership working with a wide range of statutory sector, voluntary sector and community groups working to listen to and learn from individual residents with direct experience of poverty.

Just in time for Challenge Poverty Week (16-22 October), on 13 October this group of individual residents will be sharing their stories of poverty at the South Lakes PTC Launch at the Ladyholme Centre in Windermere. This event is about responding to a Poverty Emergency declared in South Lakeland in October 2020 by involving people with lived experience of hardship in local policy-making and service design, to help end, among other things, the stigma associated with poverty.

For the safety and dignity of those taking part, the launch is an invitation-only event but those invited include representatives from the private, statutory and voluntary sectors whom we trust will help us build awareness about the challenges of living in financial hardship in an affluent tourist area. The launch also heralds the second half of the project, in which those speaking and representatives of those listening will meet as a full Poverty Truth Commission over the coming months to look for practical solutions to meet some of those challenges.

The real experts on the causes, impacts and, in many cases, the solutions to poverty are those with direct experience of living in poverty. We look forward to listening to them.

South Lakeland Poverty Truth Commission is part of a national Poverty Truth Network whose starting point for anti-poverty work is ‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us.’ It identifies that lasting social change only happens when those who experience the struggle participate in generating that change.

Cumbria CVS invites your organisation to get actively involved in challenging poverty in October 2023.

Gordon Henry
Development Officer
Cumbria CVS