NPC launch event of new report about child poverty in the UK

This week, UKCF attended NPC (New Philanthropy Capital)'s ‘Closing the Gap: Building better child poverty prevention systems' event. The London event brought together experts from the civic field to discuss child poverty prevention and the finding of NPC's latest report.?

Speakers highlighted the importance of long-term funding, whole-family centred approaches and early childhood interventions.?

Introducing the report, Grant Gordon OBE , Founder and Chair of Ethos Foundation (responsible for commissioning the report) said:

"29% of children living in the UK are in child poverty - one of the highest rates in any developed country. 75% of those children's families are in work, so income is not necessarily the route out of poverty. The figure that is really hard to digest is if you are born in one of those poor communities, the chances are that you're going to live ten years less than another person born in an 'ordinary' community.

"The problems that we face are complex. The question that we asked ourselves is what might an effective system for child poverty prevention look like."

Seth Reynolds , Systems Change Principal at NPC, said:

"The needs are far too complex and intrenched for one organisation working alone to meaningfully shift the problem. The support needs to be holistic enough to meet the range of complex needs of children and families who are experiencing poverty, and sustained enough to maintain that impact over time. This is why we need to work differently, through multi-agency, collective working. You need many people in many spaces."

Seth went on to explain frameworks that have been successfully implemented overseas, like the US-based 'Collective Impact' which has become the framework for multi-agencies of all kinds.?

"In the US, the Collective Impact has now transformed into the Collective Impact Forum for those wanting to work differently, that goes beyond the framework. We should think about what we can learn from this approach."

Seth expanded on a point that is talked about extensively in civic society: collaborative relationships.

"Relationships should be part of people's daily tasks. If we want anything to change - whether that's a practice, a process, a policy or a behaviour - it means persuading someone to do something differently from what they're currently doing. How does that happen? It happens mostly through relationships. We need to ask why aren't we collaborating and we need to think about the broader eco-system."

Community foundations work widely with organisations and institutions involved in supporting children experiencing child poverty. At UKCF, we agree more should be done to align philanthropic initiatives and approaches at a national level across agencies and sectors to ensure all communities are given the best tools to effect change from within.

Working alongside locally-led panels and programmes that align with the work of local authorities and national bodies will be key to driving the collective effort forwards: utilising people who understand and care about the places they live in.