poverty working group

Making the Links between Women’s and Children’s Poverty

In light of its goal to proactively establish links with women experiencing poverty, and open spaces for them to feed their experience and priorities into the work of the WBG, the Poverty Working Group organized a Workshop with 35 women with experiences in poverty on 6th May 2004. This very successful ‘Voices of Experience Workshop’ was instrumental in identifying the key issues that concern these women, especially in relation to how these concerns link with child poverty. The workshop included women from several parts of the country, associated with ATD Fourth World, the Single Parent Action Network, Groundswell, Gingerbread, and Church Action on Poverty.

Click here for a report on the Voices of Experience Workshop.

With the intention of carrying the concerns raised at the Workshop a step further, the Women’s Budget Group organized a seminar-meeting on the 17th of June 2004, that sought to highlight the links between women’s and children’s poverty. The ultimate purpose behind the organisation of this seminar has been to initiate steps towards convincing the government to extend its anti-child-poverty agenda to include women. The seminar included participants from the May Workshop presenting on five key areas of concern for understanding the links between women and children’s poverty:

• Housing, homelessness and children in care
• Employment and Childcare
• ‘Invisible Women’: Refugee and Asylum Seekers
• Benefits
• Mental Health
  Click here for more on these concerns.

These presentations were followed by a preliminary paper by Professor Ruth Lister (Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University), that provided a framework for discussion of the linkages between women and children’s poverty. The paper focused on links that might help make the argument that the success of the government’s child poverty strategy will be dependent in part on an explicit strategy to tackle women’s poverty; and to stimulate a discussion about the politics of using child poverty as a platform for promoting the cause of women’s poverty – and the opportunities and dangers that are part of such a strategy.

Click here to read more about the June Links meeting.

The WBG will be exploring how to take the knowledge and work from both the Voices of Experience Workshop, and the Links Between Women and Children’s Poverty meeting and paper forward. A meeting will be held on September 27th, 2004 at the Fawcett Society, from 2:30-4:30pm to discuss this and more.