About the Povery Truth Community

The Poverty Truth Community (PTC) - originally launched as Scotland’s first Poverty Truth Commission - is a movement for change led by people with lived experience of poverty. Housed within Faith in Community Scotland, the PTC believes firmly that people living with poverty are the true experts, and that they must be present in the spaces where decisions about poverty are made.

As the heartbeat of their work states: “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.”

Rooted in Glasgow, the PTC has brought people experiencing poverty together with decision-makers - forming relationships, opening doors and creating change. Their work has included time-limited commissions, campaigns, vital conversations, mutual mentoring projects and the creative arts. They have built long-term professional relationships with the Scottish Government, NHS and others, opening channels for real democratic engagement. Through this approach, the PTC has successfully influenced policy in areas such as kinship care, school clothing grants, asylum and food poverty - improving lives at policy, community and individual levels. This work is special given its long-term view, commitment to supportive relationships, and ethic of love and understanding. Having nurtured this community since 2009, the PTC continues to move alongside ever-shifting issues of poverty and policy - ensuring all are welcome and no one is left behind.

This community archive is important not only for the Poverty Truth Community and all those whose lives it has touched, but also for anti-poverty organisations, activists and policy-makers. The PTC is small but mighty, and its story has national significance within a proud, powerful, and critical movement of anti-poverty activism in Scotland. The Poverty Truth Community highlights an extended example of relational activism over 16 years, grown from the first Poverty Truth Commission in the UK and influencing a raft of further work in this space. 

To hear more about the project origins, listen below to Elaine Downie, the Poverty Truth Community Co-ordinator:

Learn more

We invite you to read more about the archive, and to learn more about why we have used the quilt to help tell the story of the Poverty Truth Community Story.