From the CEO: The ‘Wicked Problem’ of a charity tackling child poverty
This International Women’s Day, we share a blog from our Chief Executive Leigh Elliott. Leigh’s journey to leader of Children North East, a role she has held since 2016, is an inspiring one. Previously working with Northumbria Police, Rolls Royce and John Lewis, throughout her career she has been committed to empowering the futures of babies children and young people; including as the Chair of school governors, contributing to several Northumberland County Council committees representing youth, and as vice-chair of trustees at the Ashington Learning Partnership Trust.
Growing up in Ashington in the 1970s, her childhood took place in the heart of the mining strikes. She saw first-hand how families could be thrown into poverty and the impact that could have on their lives together. She has previously shared, in a North East Times article, “It made me realise that a child never chooses to live in poverty. It’s not because they have uncaring parents, it’s forced upon them through injustice.”
In this blog, Leigh explores the ‘Wicked Problem’ of a charity tackling child poverty within our region and how the work of Children North East and our peers in the VCSE sector seek to support the first of the UN Sustainable Goals: ‘to end poverty in all forms’.
The ‘Wicked Problem’ is a complex interconnected social issue. As a leader within a North East children’s charity, I am at the heart of an organisation continually working to alleviate and eradicate poverty in the region whilst influencing meaningful change far beyond our borders.
At Children North East, we continually look at root causes of poverty in our approach and how to address the growing levels of need in our region. The North East has the second-highest statistics in England for child poverty sitting outside of London¹. This wicked problem aligns with the first of the UN Sustainable Development goal – No Poverty – a call to arms to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. This blog aims to present how difficult the wicked problem is to overcome and the barriers in the way of achieving this long-term goal.
So why is it a wicked problem to find a solution to? Firstly, it is one which requires continual monitoring and development as regional, national and international circumstances change. It is a problem that impacts on people through various social contexts and does not have a one size fits all solution. Poverty causes many social issues. Whilst charities strive to eliminate its cause, alleviate its impact and campaign to governments, we mainly exist as a failure of governments providing sufficiently for all within its society.
A key issue is that within our current system, governments aim to please the majority vote with limited resources, and therefore marginalised people in society are failed. Charities attempt to resolve this failure, which in turn is a wicked problem as they also have limited resources.
Since the financial crash in 2008 and the era of austerity charities have faced many challenges. We have seen an increased demand on our services, alongside millions of pounds in local authorities spending cuts impacting our income. Austerity also saw rapid reductions in public donations, placing greater pressure on charities to serve their communities. The impact of the pandemic hit the poorest the hardest, moving the resolve of the wicked problem further away, something which can only be expected to get worse under the pressures of the Cost of Living Crisis.
The SDG goal to end poverty outlines that one progressive objective for societies is to ‘Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable’ is very clear. The UN, like the voluntary sector, are known for their high morals, being advocates and guardians, they are important parts of encouraging social self-organisation. They both give a voice to the unheard which governments refer to as ‘hard to reach’ and the voluntary sector refer to as ‘easy to ignore’. They are both committed to the long-term plan and have ongoing resilience, commitment to the cause and extreme loyalty.
Whilst the UN advocates for these social protection systems to be well designed and in place in all countries, an important role of our charity, along with our peers, is to continually advocate to shape and mould them to become fit for purpose. The systems we aim for are fundamental to ensuring no one is left behind. Both charities and the UN recognise that leadership needs to champion inclusiveness to achieve this goal. In attempting to address the wicked problem both take bold transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift onto a sustainable resilient path.
It is a difficult truth that the voluntary sector, whilst trying to tackle a wicked problem, is absorbed with alleviating it daily. As a society, we face the reality that alleviation is a temporary solution and that without change to fundamental social structures and policies the problem remains. Impactful outcomes are difficult to prove when we are trying to power systemic change, rather than an instant fix, and we now face the challenge that the pandemic has pushed the goal of ending poverty much further away.
Voluntary sectors resources are limited and therefore tackling the wicked problem is a wicked problem in itself. The government have proven to society that their cross-party approach to eliminate child poverty by 2020 was lip service and in 2016, the Welfare Reform and Work Act abolished the Child Poverty Act, including the targets to reduce poverty and the important measure of poverty based on family income. The result of their approach has seen the rise in child poverty with figures being forecast to be an all-time high².
Without a whole collaborative approach to this wicked problem, it sadly remains that the voluntary sector continues to strive to alleviate the issue and continually campaign whilst people are being failed by government.
Lessons learned are that a wicked problem can seem so far away that we are forced to continually work on alleviating the problem to help those in need now, which can mask the seriousness of the problem overall making it less visible, less urgent of a problem to those in power.
Everyday as a charity we ask ourselves: do we allow children to suffer and take a gamble whether the government would address the problem quicker? The answer we reach, is that we must use our always limited powers to support changes to people’s lives in the short-term, but beat the drum of change on the regional, national and international stage. We must ask for a hand up, not a hand out by creating a platform for those in poverty to voice to their needs and challenge our governments to fufil their responsibility to end this wicked problem.
¹ www.nechildpoverty.org.uk/facts/
² www.actionforchildren.org.uk/blog/where-is-child-poverty-increasing-in-the-uk
