RightsBridge: Showcasing Good Practice in Local Advocacy

The second event in the Building a Human Rights Bridge out of Poverty series will bring together activists and communities to showcase good practice in local advocacy on poverty and human rights.

Register here.

This event will bring together activists and communities to showcase good practice in local advocacy on poverty and human rights. The session will include 8 different projects, from across the four nations of the UK, giving short presentations about their work followed by interactive workshop to allow participants to learn from their experience, share ideas and make connections.

The event aims to showcase the great work of fighting poverty through human rights across the UK, create space for network and build connections between projects and activists, and inspire us all to develop campaigns and actions that are creative and that centre those with lived experience.

Presenters in the first half are:

• Clare MacGillivray and Heather Ford, Making Rights Real is a new grassroots human rights organisation in Scotland that aims to bring the power of human rights to the people and communities who need economic and social change the most.
  
  

• Dessie Donnelly, Participation and the Practice of Rights(PPR) in Northern Ireland, has supported the Right to Work: Right to Welfare campaign (R2W) since 2012. R2W assert human rights to challenge decision making systems which deliberately drive people into poverty. This workshop will examine key milestones in their campaign to date and analyse how the state has responded to people effectively using their rights to challenge inequality.
  
  

• Dada Felja and Gaba Smolinska Poffley, from Law for Life & the Roma Support Group will be sharing their work of developing knowledge and understanding of legal frameworks of child protection amongst Roma parents in the UK. This workshop will focus on a short film and which was par of the multimedia toolkit created by the project.
  
  

• Corrina Eastwood, Dylan Eastwood and Tracey Herrington, Poverty 2 Solution – Do your duty for equality: making the case for addressing rising levels of inequality in partnership with people with lived experiences of poverty. This interactive workshop will focus on the Poverty2Solutions journey to date, our experiences and successes of working in a participatory way and will investigate the term – participatory, co-production and collaborative.
  
  

Presenters in the second half are:

• Kay Polley TCC (Trefnu Cymunedol Cymru / Together Creating Communities) is a community organising organisation that works with communities across north east Wales to tackle social injustice by supporting diverse communities to gain the power they need to enact change. Join our workshop to hear more about our Stop School Hunger / Dysgu Nid Llwgu campaign which has recently seen the Welsh Government commit to pilot a new scheme that will see all eligible secondary school pupils receive an extra £1 so they can afford to buy breakfast as well as lunch at school.
  
  

• Sarah Lewis and Andy Towers, Hart Gables: A Journey Through Transition: An interactive exploration of a trans+ person’s journey through social and medical transition. The workshop will focus on milestones and barriers throughout transition, with an aim to highlight misinformation and dispel contemporary myths.
  
  

• Anya Bonner & Carrie Rosenthal, BetterConNEcted is a rights-based campaign taking steps to close the digital divide. Our workshop will explore how using human rights can strengthen your work in digital inclusion and bring a diverse group of people together to work on this issue.
  
  

• Rhetta Moran, RAPAR will run a session called “You want me to do what?!” – Working together to Achieve Equal Human Rights exploring the nuts and bolts of equitable participation in human rights advocacy. Since March 2020, stimulated by the emergence of COVID, Status Now 4 All initiated by RAPAR, is dedicated to securing the Indefinite Leave to Remain of people who are undocumented, destitute and in the legal process in the UK and Ireland.
  
  

Event Series Info

Between October 2020 and May 2021, Just Fair, Amnesty International UK, ATD Fourth World and the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex will facilitate a series of events to build bridges between people with lived and learned experience of poverty in the UK. They are working in partnership with a diverse group of individuals and community based grass-roots organisations tackling poverty, inequality with some using human rights in their work. The events will include talks, webinars, and training sessions with people who experience or have experienced poverty in their lives. Face to face events in London, Glasgow and other locations will hopefully take place in mid-2021. Having grown out of a number of years working together, these events aim to:

• Build and re-establish connections between people working on poverty & human rights across the four nations of the UK;
  
  
• Gain new skills and developed existing ones, enabling people to carry out their work, networking, advocating, and campaigning in a more effective manner;
  
  
• Increase confidence in carrying out work on poverty & human rights;
  
  
• Develop understanding of the situation with regards to poverty & human rights in the UK;
  
  
• Start the participatory process to gather data and identify the key issues for 7th review of the UK by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which will take place in 2021and 2022. This will be one of the first stages of the evidence-gathering process.
  
  

This blog was first published on the Social Rights Alliance website.