Let’s End Poverty: what comes next?
After almost two years, Let’s End Poverty finishes its work at the end of May 2025. Since October 2023, Let’s End Poverty has united a diverse range of voices behind a shared, positive, vision-filled message that poverty in the UK can and should end. A collaboration between individuals, churches, charities, trade unions and grassroots groups, Let’s End Poverty brought people together with the aim of making ending poverty a primary issue at the 2024 UK general election. Now that the election has passed, Let’s End Poverty will end, but the collaborations and action it has inspired will continue.
Church Action on Poverty has been a leading partner in the work of Let’s End Poverty to strengthen the anti-poverty movement across the UK. Together, more than 75 organisations and grassroots groups have mobilised hundreds of leaders and thousands of individual activists.
Highlights supported by Church Action on Poverty include the Dreams & Realities exhibition. On their tour across the UK, Stephen Martin’s portraits have sparked conversation and inspired action, often accompanied by community choirs and grassroots voices sharing their stories and call for change.
In the lead-up to the election, the Neighbourhood Voices programme amplified the experiences and perspectives of otherwise unheard communities, feeding them into the election debate. More than 40 people took part in six locations, demonstrating the passion and commitment of communities to building a better future.
In partnership with Church Action on Poverty, more than 20 Local Pantries, individuals and community groups received small grants through the Artists for Change fund, inspiring art projects that expressed community voices and imagined a different future.
During Challenge Poverty Week 2024, the Dear Prime Minister campaign brought the lived experiences of 15 individuals into the Houses of Parliament, and right to the doorstep of the Prime Minister himself!
As the project draws to an end, individuals and organisations who have been involved have been celebrating everything that Let’s End Poverty has achieved and reflecting on the journey so far. At the start of April, 35 leaders bringing lived and learned experiences of poverty from across the UK gathered in Manchester for a National Poverty Consultation, hosted by Church Action on Poverty.
The National Poverty Consultation provided an important opportunity to bring together leaders from grassroots groups, individuals offering their lived and living experiences of poverty into their advocacy and staff from charities and Churches. This highlights the importance of a future for the anti-poverty movement in the UK that creates space for everyone to play their part, where ‘diagonal connections’ between the right people lead to transformative change.
Acknowledging that there is still a mountain to climb when it comes to ending poverty in the UK, the 24-hour residential created a space for reflecting back on how the journey of Let’s End Poverty might equip us for the way ahead. Throughout the process, two essential qualities for an effective anti-poverty movement emerged: relationships, and anger.
Transformative relationships
At its heart, Let’s End Poverty has been a collaboration of individuals in relationship with one another, listening to each others stories and drawing on each other’s skills and gifts to create change. Crucially, when these relationships bridge the often wide gap between people in roles of leadership, whether in political and public life, or in organisations, churches or charities and individuals who bring lived experiences of the struggle against poverty, they have the potential to be deeply transformative. The movement to end poverty in the UK must create spaces to build relationships that enable solidarity, transform shame and stigma and tell a different story about what it means to live alongside one another well.
Righteous anger
It also became clear that the deep-rooted damage poverty is bringing to the lives of individuals and communities means that true relationships often lead to anger. It cannot be acceptable that poverty is holding more than 1 in 5 people in the UK back from living full lives. Living and truly understanding this reality stirs up a righteous anger that is echoed by the biblical prophets, and prophetic activists from history who have stood up and raised their voices in resistance to injustice.
This anger has to be part of a movement if it is to successfully move society from passive acceptance to active resistance. It must be the fuel for collaborations that speak loudly and clearly about the different future we believe we can build together, and the steps needed to get there. Without anger, solidarity can easily become kindness and opportunities for transformation are limited to temporary change. In the face of continuing policy changes that are reducing incomes and opportunities for people and communities living on the lowest incomes, an effective movement has to draw on their anger to motivate sustained, impactful change.
Towards the end of the event, the group reflected on the image of a dandelion clock. In this image, perhaps being a movement committed to ending poverty means being the wind that scatters the dandelion seeds, giving them energy to land in new places, take root and bring new colour into the world. An effective movement means hundreds of different activities taking root, each bringing their own skills, gifts and impact to the wider environment. As Let’s End Poverty finishes, this image and the relationships it has sparked is carrying forward energy to continue to build a strong, effective anti-poverty movement that can and will see an end to poverty in the UK.
Hannah Fremont-Brown, Let’s End Poverty Facilitator