Radical approach to lift entire Edinburgh neighbourhood out of poverty in five years

A charity has launched a radical initiative to lift an entire Edinburgh neighbourhood of 5,000 people out of poverty in just five years.
The project aims to help every household out of povertyThe project aims to help every household out of poverty
The project aims to help every household out of poverty

Community Renewal has already been working with people in Bingham and Magdalene – which is near the top of the list of deprived neighbourhoods in the city – but now plans to contact every household in the area and offer support to help them into secure employment, increase their income and improve other aspects of their lives.

Chief executive Paul McColgan said the charity had been working in this way for some time. “We draw a circle round a neighbourhood, knock on every single door, try to start a conversation with people and see whether they would be interested in getting involved with the community, or can we help them get into work or can we help them become more connected to other people."

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He said there was growing recognition that the support currently available to people in poverty was disjointed and it was difficult for them to know where to start to get help.

Paul McColgan says current support is disjointedPaul McColgan says current support is disjointed
Paul McColgan says current support is disjointed

And he hopes the project will draw existing services into adopting a similar approach.

"What we wanted to do is see if we can share our way of working with all the services – social work, primary care, other employability agencies, money advice, youth services. At the moment the way services are set up tends to be very specialist and they all operate in silos.

"We want to try an experiment which says let’s make the starting point the engagement with the family and find out is it possible to help them lift themselves out of poverty and what would they need – is in an employment issue or a housing issue or a money issue – and we would then try to co-ordinate those other services. It’s trying to get the whole system working in a different way."

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He said there would need to be stepping stones for families to get out of poverty. “The first might be to get them into a secure job, then maybe the next is to support them to progress, make a career for themselves and grow their income.

"It‘s going to be quite a long process, but at the moment no one person would hold that relationship with them the whole time – different organisations come in, do a wee bit and then send them off.

“We can’t do it city-wide at first – we have to work it out with a smaller area first. We’re going to look at the barriers to joined-up working, but we’ve had lots of meetings with different parts of the council and NHS, everyone has said yes.”

He said the success of the Lifting Neighbourhoods Together project would be measured by getting more income into households and more people into employment, as well as the community more involved in influencing key decisions and more young people getting work or a college or university place when they leave school.

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Community Renewal has been awarded a UK grant from the National Lottery Community Fund of £2.1m for the Edinburgh project and a similar one in Newcastle.

Edinburgh’s Poverty Commission, which reported in September, highlighting the key actions needed to eliminate poverty in the Capital by 2030, has endorsed the project.

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