Challenge Poverty Week is a great opportunity to celebrate what you are doing to challenge poverty locally. This year, it’s also a great opportunity to start building a  relationship with your newly-elected MP, and explore how you can work together.

You can hold whatever kind of event you like during the week, but here’s a suggested outline:

– Plan your event well in advance – and share the details with your local partners, networks and others. Register it on the Challenge Poverty Week website, and we’ll help to spread the word too.

– Invite your new MP to join you, stressing that it’s an opportunity for them to learn about what’s happening in the community, and to explore ways they can work with you in future.

– Hold your event during Challenge Poverty Week. If possible, it should include these elements:

• • Share stories that show what you’re doing to challenge poverty locally. If at all possible, make sure that the voices of people actually experiencing poverty are heard here.
  • Talk about your hopes and dreams. What would you like to change in your community, and more widely? How is your group or project working to make that a reality
  • Challenge your MP. Ask them what their vision is for a better world, and how they could work with you to challenge poverty. (If your MP can’t attend, this could be a conversation with your supporters and local people instead.)

If this doesn’t grab you, don’t worry! Use Challenge Poverty Week to run your own event, your own way. Perhaps you’d like to have a roundtable discussion with other local groups and decision-makers? Or use creativity to reflect on the issues, with a poetry reading or art exhibition? Go for it! Just remember to let us know about it, so we can help to spread the word.

Online activities can be just as effective as offline ones, and sometimes even more so. You can reach more people as there are no travel barriers, and you may find that some people are more comfortable attending an online meeting than addressing a busy room of people. Bear in mind that not everyone has the same level of access to the internet and technology, so you’ll have to consider if an online event is suitable for your audience.

The type of events that might work well for an online event are a discussion event, storytelling event or creative event sharing poetry (read the list from ‘Host a Community Event).

Rather than having a set time and location where you invite people in the community to join you, you could meet people where they are. 

Do you have premises with a visible outside space where you can speak to people? If not, contact your local council and ask for a one-day street license for a stall in your town or city-centre.

Hosting a stall or meeting people in the streets is a good idea if you want to achieve the following:

– Collect as many signatures for a partition as possible. Maybe you have a local issue you want to raise with your local council. Sending a partition with lots of signatures is a great way to show them how many people in the community cares about your issue.

– Raise awareness about a specific issue. Maybe there is a very serious issue in your community that not many people know about yet. Having a bright stall, while sharing stories and statistics is a very good way to raise awareness.

– Ask people about what matters to them. Having staff or volunteers ask questions to people that pass by is a good way to gather information and insights. You could have people record your conversations via video to post online (make sure you get consent), capture thoughts in an anonymous box, or ask people to fill in a survey.