Learning Together: Exchanging knowledge and understanding about Poverty 

Written by Diana Skelton and GRIPP’s 2024 Campaign Team  

“Poverty is a spider’s web, almost impossible to get out of. Poverty is the absolute terror of nastiness, attitudes, and assumptions every day. Poverty is not being able to smell the flowers because the stress of life gets in the way. Poverty makes you feel lost in the fog, not knowing if you are disconnected or cast adrift.” 

Because of our diversity in GRIPP, our members with lived experience of poverty spent a day unpacking some of their experiences for our members with learned experience of poverty. After travelling in from across the UK  we met in a big circle at Amnesty International office in London on 19th September 2024.  

Charlotte told us, “Poverty is about isolation. It is about being excluded from your community. People living in poverty do not have a voice. It means needing to rely on others when you want to be independent. Poverty is keeping secrets and putting on a front. Poverty is telling my whole life story, over and over again, just to get what I’m entitled to. Poverty is a dungeon of boredom, staring at the same four walls, chained up in a place where nothing happens.” 

Ruth said, “Poverty is feeling like you are not classed as a citizen. Although you are supposed to be entitled to basic needs, you can’t afford them, and no one does anything about it. You are always restricted, in every aspect. Poverty is realising that when there is no help, you are alone. You feel unworthy of living, like your presence is a burden. As if you are asking for too much when in reality you are asking for basic human rights.” 

Amanda and Patricia explained how poverty impacts the right to protection of family life: “Poverty is having to be better with my kids than anyone else because someone is watching me. Poverty is trying to provide for my children’s day-to-day needs, but not being able to support my family financially at Christmas. It’s dreading every Christmas and birthday in my children’s eyes. Poverty is seeing foster parents get so much money to buy my children the things I could never afford to buy them.” 

Sarah read her original poem “Junk-yard news”, including these lines:  

And I’m told that we would benefit 

from a little more lies and hate, 

as we’re told to tear 

and pry into single mothers, bring decay 

to their already broken minds, fractured 

as we steal from their children’s mouths their scraps. 

Experts-by-experience also said that poverty is a denial of one’s dignity and described what dignity looks like. In Angela’s words, “Dignity is being treated as an equal, and being respected. Dignity is being talked to and treated like a human being.” 

Tammy: “Dignity is holding my head up high even when the authorities and people look down on me for what my house is like and what the clothes are like.” 

Lareine told us, “Dignity is being able to take your child to school and make her proud of herself. Dignity is your life skills being recognised. Dignity is being generous in spirit, having solidarity, and a strong community spirit.” 

Using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed technique, people in poverty acted out a scene where human rights organisers mean well—but get things wrong by individualising situations without recognising systemic barriers and or attempting to shift power to people in a community centre whose knowledge, skills, and aspirations have been ignored. Everyone in the room was welcome to jump into the scene to experiment with better approaches.  

By the end of the day, when we were checking in with participants, Dr Koldo Casla, who is a Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights at the University of Essex, said: “I teach interviewing skills and ethics at university. After today, I will revise my own notes, because I’m not sure everything in them is quite right.” 

Susanna Darch, who is GRIPP’s beloved cocktail stick, ie) the one who holds us all together, said: “Even when a participatory process has been done perfectly, after the research or the project is finished, the big institutions leave. And when they leave, the power goes with them. They are the ones who will chose their next project, which is still essentially extractive. The difference in GRIPP is that the big institutions have stayed with us for the long haul. Not really knowing where things are gonna go, but staying alongside us as we work it out — sometimes saying ‘Really?? You want to do that?… but OK, we’re with you’.” And that’s what’s special about GRIPP