Family Fund Business Services: tackling poverty through HACT’s Anti-Poverty Series

What is the HACT Anti-Poverty Series?

HACT’s Anti-Poverty series is a sector-wide initiative exploring how social housing residents experience poverty. Born from a shared commitment to understanding how poverty affects individuals and communities, the series ultimately aims to design and test new approaches to combat poverty and boost financial resilience for social housing residents.

By bringing together voices from across the housing sector, alongside key partners and tenants with lived experience, the series has evolved into a valuable space for open dialogue and learning. So far, the series has allowed frontline teams to share their unique perspectives on the challenges of tackling poverty, while highlighting the systemic issues that keep residents trapped in poverty and the barriers housing providers face when supporting households. In doing so, it has encouraged participants to critically reflect on existing approaches to tackling poverty and to consider how resilience can be more intentionally embedded into policy, practice and service delivery going forward.

Why are Family Fund Business Services involved?

At the Family Fund Group, we work closely with families experiencing poverty every day, whether that’s through our parent charity, Family Fund, or via FFBS and our business partnerships. Family Fund provides essential grants and services to low-income families raising seriously ill and disabled children. Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living crisis, the demand for grant support is consistently high – but the nature of the support families require has changed over recent years. As households are pushed further into poverty and struggle to afford the basics, families are requesting more support with essentials items like furniture and white goods, rather than holistic grants like family breaks and days out.

Through FFBS’s partnerships with organisations across the benevolent, social housing and local government sectors, we have similarly seen demand for discretionary and crisis support at record highs, with the aftermath of the pandemic, energy and cost-of-living crises seeing households requiring so much more support with living costs and essential household goods.

We wanted to use our experience and insights to contribute to the Anti-Poverty Series, championing the lived experiences of the families we support and show that different forms of poverty cannot be tackled in isolation. There is significant overlap between them – for instance, households without access to basic appliances such as ovens may be pushed into food poverty, relying on expensive convenience food due to an inability to cook at home. By exploring a range of poverty issues, this series creates an

opportunity for the sector to collaborate on more joined-up solutions, and FFBS is incredibly proud to contribute to this collective effort and represent our partners and beneficiaries.

Why are we sharing this with the ACO Network?

The VCSE sector has long been at the forefront of supporting people in crisis and helping households in poverty become more financially resilient. Over time, charities in particular have increasingly focused on resilience-building rather than just crisis intervention – often progressing in this area more rapidly than housing associations or local government.

As a result, we believe the VCSE sector has valuable expertise to share with housing associations on delivering anti-poverty initiatives and supporting residents to strengthen their financial resilience. At the same time, many organisations are seeking to expand their reach within the same communities where housing associations are working to improve residents’ financial wellbeing. By connecting these charities with housing associations, we can help maximise the impact of anti-poverty initiatives, ensuring that support reaches more people and that organisations can work together more effectively to build lasting financial resilience.

We encourage you to actively engage with the series, as HACT is working to deepen and broaden the involvement of the VCSE sector. Your participation will help to ensure that the perspectives and expertise of charities and community organisations are fully represented, contributing to richer, well-rounded discussions and more impactful outcomes.

To find out more about how you can get involved in the Anti-Poverty Series, visit the website here.