What is ‘Learnt’ Experience in GRIPP? 

Written by GRIPP member, Dr Rhetta Moran 

Drawing on recent discussions within GRIPP, Rhetta explores how we need to release both lived and learnt knowledge of poverty within our movement, whilst also challenging the “lived/learnt” distinction so as to find the common commitment that binds us across our diversity. 

Over the last six weeks I’ve been listening to members who have come to GRIPP as people with ‘learnt’ rather than ‘living/ed’ experience talk together about what this ‘learnt’ label actually means, how accurate it is, whether they ever explore these questions in their poverty related work outside of GRIPP, and what the point is to be exploring them at all.  After taking those soundings I then had the chance to ask GRIPP members with living/ed experience of poverty who are in our current Action Learning Set what they thought about our ‘learnt’ experience members’ takes on these labels. Here I share some of my highlight learnings, so far, from these discussions. 

First up is the recognition that, historically, a weird split has existed between people paid to do work to try and end poverty and people who have lived their whole lives through these experiences who are now doing this work. GRIPP is about ending that split.  

In part that split has come about because of an implicit assumption, rarely acknowledged in most institutions and organisations, that to talk about the living/ed experience of poverty is somehow ‘unprofessional’.  Of course, just because there is a workplace expectation or culture that you’re not going to share your living/ed experience – either your own directly or your witnessing of poverty through your work and how you feel about that – doesn’t mean that these experiences aren’t impacting on how you work.  In fact, all that happens is that understanding about this impact at work becomes suppressed.   

In part, some people feel that this suppression may arise out of our colonial legacy, which has inhibited real cross fertilisation throughout the spectrum of poverty experience and, at the same time, projected the condition of experiencing poverty as somehow self-inflicted, where the individual is held responsible for their poverty and expected to feel shamed by it, rather than poverty being rooted in structural issues that needs collective action to overcome them.  This is what GRIPP is striving for as it stimulates and shares our understandings about what is happening for GRIPP people inside of ourselves, as well as inside of our institutions, so that we can achieve our purpose. 

These understandings include recognizing the diversity of experience of poverty that is both living/ed and learnt, and not mutually exclusive: through living it firsthand, or because of working with people as a health, social, housing or human rights worker, for example, or because of media messaging.  

Whichever ways we’ve learnt about poverty though, the fact remains that people who are in GRIPP because of their jobs are dedicated to making GRIPP work by respecting the agency of everyone in our partnership and everyone we want to join us in the future.  This happens through allyship: this isn’t something we are, this is something we practice, it’s an action.  That means, rather than doing something on behalf of someone else, we stand together in trust, consciously engaged in thinking out loud about how to move our Ending Poverty agenda forward and becoming its Tribunes wherever we are.  

Through GRIPP, all members are accessing ‘concentrated whacks’ about what is actually going on in the here and now from the viewpoints of people living in poverty.  Lots of organisations just don’t have such contemporary, consciously nuanced and completely authentic members.  Even if they do have such members among them, they may not be continuously centering living experience at their work’s core.  GRIPP is doing this to make sure that we never fall foul of the ‘lab rat’ syndrome where people living in poverty end up being ‘studied’: there’s nothing participatory about that.    

GRIPP members who have come in as ‘learnt’ want to use GRIPP’s knowledge development processes to systematically dismantle the barriers that inhibit the communication of GRIPP’s messages within and beyond their own organisations.  Aiming to reach a ‘broad public’, they are exploring the viability of offering opportunities for external organisations, populated by people who don’t have any living/ed experience of poverty but who are working in this area, to access GRIPP arenas where they witness our crucible and interact with us as we model an infinitely better way of driving through real co-production processes.

GRIPP’s endeavor is strengthened when we come towards it from all our slightly different angles, each of which is exposing poverty as a human rights violation.  For all of us, whatever the sources of our experiences, learnings and knowledges about poverty, it’s in our interests for poverty itself to end.  Our diversity, combined with our commitment to becoming ever clearer about what binds us, is essential for growing the confidence needed to raise the roof with GRIPP’s living and learning voices of experience.   

This blog was funded by Human Rights Local, a project of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex (ESRC Impact Acceleration Account).