Challenge Poverty Week England & Wales 2024: Show your support in Cornwall

Challenge Poverty Week England & Wales 2024 is an opportunity for us all to say what needs to change to enable our own communities to thrive.

It’s a chance for voices that are too often ignored to be heard loud and clear. It’s a chance to show that it is possible to build a better, more compassionate society in which everyone can live life to the full. And it’s a chance to start that journey, together, now.

Challenging Poverty: Cornwall Independent Poverty Forum

Since 2021, Cornwall Independent Poverty Forum (CIPF), creators of the A Community Manifesto for Cornwall 2024,  have promoted Challenge Poverty Week within Cornwall which takes place in October.

Historically, CIPF have encouraged projects to invite local leaders to showcase the important work they are doing and highlight the personal stories behind the reasons that so many anti-poverty groups are necessary. In 2023, Challenge poverty week centred around a “Real Living Wage for Cornwall”, with conferences, events and MP visits condensed into a 2023 Report which was shared across the VCSE sector, to council leaders and policy makers.

Invite a Local Leader

This year Challenge Poverty Week in the South West is centred around “housing”, with CIPF encouraging local projects to invite chancellors and MPs from Cornwall Council to visit local projects and document these visits through photos.

These photos will then be placed in the Challenge Poverty Week 2024 Report and widely distributed to raise awareness of the issues and to try and influence local and central government planning and policy making, with a view to making positive changes in regard to poverty.

If you can’t find a ‘leader’ to invite… Don’t worry! A simple photo of your ‘team’ around the Challenge Poverty Week poster is another great way of sharing commitment to make Cornwall a fairer place for everyone.

The report will contain all the photos submitted as well as a series of articles on the Tackling the Housing Crisis in Cornwall.

Please email in photos of visits and a short comment on your project’s work to [email protected]

Do include the CPW 2024 Banner in the picture!

You can find more about Cornwall Independent Poverty Forum’s plans for Challenge Poverty Week 2024 HERE

What else could you do to show your support?

Whether you want to run an event or get involved digitally, we welcome any and all efforts made to get involved and challenge poverty in October. For example you could:

• Show your support and share across you media channels
• Host a discussion or storytelling event
• Fight poverty, support a campaign (see below)

Together, our combined efforts can make a much larger impact than if we acted alone.

The Challenge Poverty England & Wales website is an excellent place to find tools to help inspire your supportive actions, this includes:

• Downloadable social media resources (HERE)
• Tools to help you talk to the press
• Events idea guides and frameworks
• Case studies of what other people have done during Challenge Poverty Week

Support a Campaign

“Dear Mr Prime Minister”: Read the 15 letters to Kier Starmer from people with lived experience of poverty

To mark Starmer’s hundredth day in office, Let’s End poverty are coming together to ask the Prime Minister and key policy makers to meet with people with experience of poverty, and to include their unique insights in the plan to end poverty for good.

Get involved: Add your voices to our call to action by writing postcards to the Prime Minister. Order postcards through our e-form below, gather a group together to write your messages and send them back to us for a collective hand-in event.

For more information and to read the letters click HERE

Church Action on Poverty: Scrap the two-child policy – Letter to the Chancellor

The two-child limit means families are not allowed to access support through Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit, for more than two children, if children were born after April 2017.

Today, 1.6 million children in 440,000 households are affected, and families are being denied access to £3,455 a year. Churches around the UK are joining calls for an end to the UK’s highly controversial two-child limit

You can find more on the CAP website.