Stigma and poverty — why and how we are investing in this work.
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 thinking and knowledge of those who live and breathe the injustice of poverty at the forefront.
Projects that take a justice-led or power sharing approach often prioritise issues that those who have learned about poverty at a distance would not.
It’s not that organisations don’t know that ‘dignity and respect’ are important. What they often don’t have, though, is the deeply held feeling of injustice which make it a top priority, and a central element in the definition of poverty. People distanced from the reality of the stigma of poverty may not prioritise it because they don’t fully understand the far reaching implications of it — because they’ve never lived it nor work closely with those who have.
This flagship discovery project on stigma is an effort to tackle epistemic injustice — where the contributions and knowledge of people who experience injustice are often not fully understood and therefore not acted on. This project is a statement saying we have heard and we are acting.
We have seen this bias play out in projects where stigma formed a central component in discussions, yet when it came to policy areas and recommendations, income related asks superseded the ones on poor treatment. The theory (logically and instinctively) being that income will solve all poverty related issues. We know it is more complicated than that and that for effective policies to be implemented, the deep stigma that surrounds poverty needs to be addressed.
In this project, perhaps somewhat controversially, we are proposing to flip this theory to a ‘tackle stigma first’ basis. The test ahead of us is whether this would result in policies that are more effective at lifting people out of poverty. I.e. policies that supported increasing incomes.
Would it be possible for our current social security system to even exist in a society that did not stigmatise? Much like flipping Maslow’s hierarchy on its head — if we put self-esteem, belonging and mutual respect at the bottom — would this set a strong foundation for also enabling the material side of poverty to be met? Taking a human growth first approach over (but not excluding) a reductionist mechanistic one.
Innovation comes from trying different things but also from a diversity of perspectives in any team trying to resolve the injustice at hand. This is something we are not so strong on in the charity/think tank sector as recent Reclaim research on class diversity has highlighted.
How are we investing in this work?
Continuing with an epistemic justice-led approach we wanted to put this work in the hands of a design team made up of diverse experiential knowledge and professional disciplines. Like poverty, stigma is deeply intersectional, so we recruited a team on the basis of diversity of experiences of poverty from different equality lenses — predominantly race, disability and gender. We wanted intersectionality to be an explicit approach for the analysis.
We are also experimenting with a pilot remuneration approach for people contributing to the project. Much like the poverty debate, there has been a dominant focus on income. In particular on the role of cash payments. We know from our close work with those at the sharp end of injustice that there is much more to this than payment — as important as that is.
We have designed a pilot package of remuneration that includes coaching and mentoring in addition to payment. This has been inspired by close learning from participants of past power sharing projects — that payment on its own does not enable equity nor does it create conditions for a person to progress.
Access to support that enables you to work out what you are interested in and where your strengths lie, connections into the sector and expanding horizons are what also counts. This demonstrates the broader analysis of power that those on the sharp end bring to the debate when their views are sought and properly listened to, even if they go against our basic instincts.
This is a pilot and may not turn out to be the answer but we will listen and continue to learn.
Beyond boxes
We had a huge response to our recruitment process and it has interestingly resulted in design team members that for the most part have a mix of lived and learned/professional experience. This is new territory for us that forces us to go beyond binary terms like lived and learned experience.
Some of the reflection work that one of our past partners did for us on co-production processes led to a light bulb moment — it’s not different levels of payment that result in equity in the process but rather that the expertise and contribution of one group of participants is born of vulnerability and that of the others is not.
One set of experience has come from educational institutions and the other is experiential — there is an inherent often silent hierarchy of knowledge that plays into the power dynamics of such a collaboration.
Going beyond boxes and working with a team of people that bring both the power and depth of understanding born of injustice, complemented by the professional diversity of expertise they own takes us into new territory, creating a very different and powerful dynamic.
We will be posting more blogs as we go and inviting wider reflection and input on the issues that we are deliberating, so keep an eye out and please do contribute!
