Learning Together: Building the rights-based world we want to see  

Written by Laura Grace from Just Fair 

Poverty is a human rights issue, but what does that mean?  

Those struggling to access a decent home, enough to eat, healthcare, and a chance to learn, often find the blame being put squarely at their feet – when all too often, these situations are the result of the actions (or inactions) of the UK Government.  

How can we shift the dial as activists with living, lived and learnt experience of poverty? 

These questions are the concerns of the Growing Rights Instead of Poverty Partnership (GRIPP), who came together last month to talk about the importance of naming and claiming our human rights in our lives, work, and campaigns. As proud members of GRIPP, Just Fair were honoured to facilitate these spaces, and share reflections on the sessions. 

Learning together 

In September, Just Fair facilitated two online learning together spaces for GRIPP members and friends, to talk about human rights and their value in our work.  

Though led by Just Fair – a ‘learnt’ partner in GRIPP, the session was designed together as a space for all to bring their authentic selves and experiences, to share and build our understandings of poverty and rights and how they intersect. As the only UK-wide civil society organisation focusing on economic, social and cultural rights in the UK, Just Fair then opened an exploration into these rights, which include our rights to decent homes, enough to eat, clothes to wear, access to healthcare, a healthy environment, and the chance to learn. 

The UK Government promised us these rights (our ‘everyday rights’) when it signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1976, but for too many people in the UK, they aren’t part of our reality. As a group, we talked about the reality of these rights in the UK today – buildings and institutions crumbling, long waiting lists, and a feeling that a life is getting harder – especially for those experiencing poverty. Indeed, we recognised that poverty represents a violation of human rights.  

The blame game 

When governments and public authorities cause us harm, fail to invest in the resources, programmes, and services that help us access what we need, they are breaking the promise they made to us. But all too often, when we can’t access what we need, we are told it is our fault. We are told to see difficult situations as hardships – the result of bad luck or bad choices – leading to isolation, helplessness, embarrassment.  

GRIPP’s submission to the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the international body that monitors governments’ implementation of the International Covenant) in 2023 sums this up: 

“We recognise that there is a system being created and maintained by the UK Government that not only works against people breaking out of poverty, but in fact works to keep our communities poor, to keep us ill, to keep us isolated… We are blamed for our ill health. We are blamed for not working. We are blamed for our broken families. We are blamed for our poverty – when in fact it is the state that is denying us these rights.” 

We spoke about how naming and claiming our rights can help to shift the dial, reframing the conversation about responsibilities and taking us from hardships to grievances. We also touched on what we want to see change – the interdependency (an example of the jargon we busted – meaning all rights rely on each other and that for rights to work properly, we must have all our rights at the same time) of our rights means that for poverty solutions to work, they must be led and designed by those experiencing  poverty, consider the person in the whole, and understand poverty as structural – a cause and a consequence of lacking power and opportunity. 

Where we go from here 

When we think about our next steps, we remember our guiding principles in GRIPP – that we do not leave people unsupported or become a talking shop. We will try our best to build spaces that reflect the world we wish to see – spaces of solidarity, where we acknowledge, celebrate and validate. But though it can be buoying to share in solidarity, this shared learning space is temporary, and at the close of the sessions we shut down our computers and phones and return to a world where our rights are violated and our experiences minimised. Our hope though, is that these sessions help us return to this world with a new framing that helps us identify what needs fixing, and a megaphone to spread the word.