In this blog Steve Arnott, Founder, and CEO of Beats Bus Records and member of the Exploring Stigma and Poverty design team, shares how important personal lived experience is to the work the group is doing. I’m part of the ‘Exploring Stigma and Poverty’ design team, a group that’s been created to look at the issue of stigma and the impact it has on poverty. Our discussions and exploration have been deep as well as wide-ranging. When we met in January 2023 we looked at the imp

The JRF ‘Exploring Stigma and Poverty’ design team met in January 2023 to explore how stigma plays out in society and impacts poverty in the UK. In this blog post Hal Khanom, Head of Economic Development at Bromley Council, shares her reflections of the day. I’m on the train back to London from the session, glued to my phone reading Judith Herman’s ‘Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence’. I’m reading about abuse because I was struck by one insight we uncovered whilst

The phrase ‘be the change you want to see’ always stuck in my head but I’m not sure I properly understood what that really looked like until I joined the Stigma Free Futures Design Team. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of change and this has shaped and driven what has been quite a varied working life including being a cleaner, care worker, full-time mum, activist, campaigner, policy and rights worker, funder, and strategic leader. I know what poverty and stigma loo

Our Grassroots Poverty Action Group (GPAG) has been meeting throughout 2021 to inform our UK Poverty report. One of the key issues members have shared is stigma, and how stereotypes and prejudice unjustly shape essential services and systems. Here they talk about how this holds them back in their daily lives, and present some ideas that could help. You enter a new housing estate and see the front doors are painted two different colours. You reflect for a moment about why this

In this blog Dr China Mills, from JRF's Exploring Poverty and Stigma design team, explains how stigma is a force that entrenches poverty. But can it be used as a short-term strategy to change those who have power? As a tool in the abolition of poverty? I applied to join the JRF-hosted Exploring Poverty and Stigma design team because I know how fatal stigma can be. In my work leading the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing Justice Ldn, I see every day the violent ways that su

Flipping the usual dynamic of income first approaches Last month we kick-started our work on Stigma in Poverty. A design team of 10 people were brought together to do a deep dive into the drivers of stigma, to learn from current and historic initiatives to tackle it and to do the difficult work of prioritising themes to develop a concerted call for action. Why are we investing in this work? Quite simply, it is an issue that is repeatedly prioritised in work that puts the thin

Steve: “When I joined the SFF team, I brought my lived experience of poverty and a desire to change stigma around that. This work has made me look at my past and deal with a lot of things I blamed myself for that was not my fault, it made me apply a stigma free lens to everything I do. Our work has made me look at everything so differently, its made me realise that you have to challenge stigma to be able to conquer it. You can say, ‘wait, stop, think about what you’re saying’

This piece was originally published on the JRF website. The Stigma Free Futures Design team is a diverse group of people, with lived and learned experience of the issue we’re working to change. Through either our professional or personal lives, and mainly, through a combination of the two, we have engaged with poverty, alongside issues like unemployment, homelessness and mental health. In doing so, we have witnessed or experienced stigma at play.It was early on in the project

This piece was originally published on the JRF website. Introduction In this article, we share the process of how photography and imagery can be developed through an “anti-stigma” lens. We also outline how we went about working in coalition between the Stigma Power and Poverty Design team, JRF teams and alongside photographer Sukhy Hullait, and how we built in learning as a key objective and output of this project. At the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) imagery plays an impo

Close your eyes and empty your mind for a second, and imagine walking down a street, and it is peaceful… no sirens, no shouting, you can hear the birds tweeting.You turn to your left, children playing in the street, off-ground tIg, rialio, double dutch, skipping, headers and volleysYou turn to your right, you see smiles and echoes of laughter, neighbours sharing stories and fist pumpsFurther down the street, you smell food, Indian, Chinese, Kurdish, Polish, English, African,