In this blog post we briefly recap our Poverty in Data Impact event.
Last week the UK Data Service Impact team hosted our Data Impact event, Poverty in Data. Across three connected but varied sessions we had over 200 people attend and engage with research, data and discussion on this vital topic.
We want to thank all those who contributed and attended each of the events, and we hope this will just be another part of our ongoing work to support data-driven research on this and other related topics. Our Poverty in Data theme will continue to be developed in the coming year as will our other themes.
Early Careers Research workshop
It was great to have over 20 ECR’s working or interested in the broad topic of poverty at our workshop on Tuesday in Manchester. The session opened with a thought-provoking and challenging keynote from Professor Donald Hirsch. You can view the talk below and find it and the slides on the event page.
One of the key aims of this session was to allow the ECR’s to network and make connections with others working in this space, and from the feedback it seems that it worked! Two roundtable discussion sessions, as well as informal chats over lunch, gave space to talk about poverty research, impact and the challenges of being an ECR. We were also delighted to have some of our previous Data Impact Fellows join us for a Q&A panel on their experience of being an ECR.
Thanks to (L-R) Tasos Papastylianou, Ben Brindle, Bozena Wielgoszewska, Christian Reynolds, Rachel Oldroyd and Natasha Chilman for taking part.
Keep an eye out for a video of the event that will give you a flavour of what went on!
Perspectives on Poverty
One of the key goals we had for this event was to offer a variety of views and opinions on the topic of poverty and the role data and research can play in developing interventions, impacting policy and changing lives.
This led us to develop a pre-recorded webinar which allowed several different voices to be heard that a live session wouldn’t have. The hope is this can be a resource moving forward and offer insights, inspire research and prompt discussion on this topic.
In this session, which you can view below, we heard from Christina Adane, a campaigner working in the intersection of social justice and youth culture. Professor Nissa Finney introduced the Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS) which provides novel data on experience and inequalities for ethnic and religious minorities in Britain.
One of the considerations we wanted with this event was to not focus solely on quantitative data. For every entry, row or data point we see there are real people behind those numbers. We were delighted to showcase some powerful and eye-opening contributions from Social Justice Chester and the West Cheshire Community Inspirers. They have been working together on a co-production project to highlight the voices of those with lived experience of poverty, the Inspirers.
Research, policy and next steps
Our final session was a live webinar with presentations from a panel followed by Q&A. The panel was hosted by our Deputy Director, Professor Debora Price, and we were delighted to have representatives from some of the biggest advocates and name in the poverty and research space:
- Helen Barnard, Director of Policy, Research and Impact at The Trussell Trust
- Ed Davies, Policy Director at The Centre for Social Justice
- Lalitha Try, Economist with Resolution Foundation and
- Peter Matejic, Chief Analyst at The Joseph Rowntree Foundation
They each shared a 10-minute presentation on their work and insights into the role of data in poverty research and advocacy, as well as the gaps and challenges. We then had a time of Q&A with some great questions from those in attendance. If you missed this session the video can be viewed below, and the slides are also available on our website.
Keep an eye on our website for more information and more resources coming out of this event!