---
title: "Best Beginnings Episode 27: What Josephine McCartney told us about child poverty, hope and the bedroom that dared a child to dream"
description: Josephine McCartney, CEO of the Childhood Trust, on what child poverty is doing to 38% of London's children and why only 2% of council houses are
image: https://babyzone.org.uk/hubfs/JOSEPHINE%20MCCARTNEY.png
---
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# Best Beginnings Episode 27: What Josephine McCartney told us about child poverty, hope and the bedroom that dared a child to dream
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> "At what age do you start losing hope that there is something better and this is not just your lot, and you have to accept where you are in life?"
>
> **Josephine McCartney, CEO of the Childhood Trust**
A child goes to school in the morning not knowing what they are going home to. By the time they come back, a team of volunteers has been in and transformed their bedroom, every item new, nothing second hand, designed to exactly what they asked for. A desk. A play area if they are young enough to need one. The colour they chose, the theme they picked, the space arranged to make the most of every square foot.
The children whose bedrooms are transformed by the Childhood Trust are referred by social workers. The very fact that a family has a social worker is already a signal of need. These are not children on the edge of difficulty. They are children whose lives have already been marked by it.
And what stays with you, after an hour in conversation with Josephine McCartney, is not the statistics, though there are statistics here that are hard to absorb. It is the detail she returns to most: what those children say after they have seen their bedroom for the first time. That they feel proud to bring their friends back. That they dare to think about a sleepover.
**The empty box**
There are 390,000 council houses in London. There are approximately the same number of families waiting for one. And when a family finally moves in, after months or years in temporary accommodation, only 2% of those properties come with any furniture.
In London, most council houses have no flooring and no furniture at all. For a child who has waited a long time for a bedroom of their own, a room with bare floors and bare walls is not a beginning. It is just an empty box.
This is the finding at the centre of the Childhood Trust's own research, conducted with the Furniture Poverty Action Group and eight other organisations. The recommendation that emerged is not a complicated one. Furniture provision should be part of what a family receives when they are housed, not a postcode lottery, not subject to the budget of whatever local authority a family happens to fall within, but a right. A basic. Because at the moment it is none of those things.
**I am that kid**
Josephine McCartney has spent 25 years in the voluntary sector. She came to it from a 12-year career in the commercial world, at a point when the work of a corporate affairs team opened her eyes to the scale of what charities were doing, and the difference she could make by joining them. She has led organisations working with adults with disabilities, with communities at risk, with children and young people across London's boroughs. She joined the Childhood Trust 20 months ago.
She also grew up in Glasgow, adopted by her grandparents, without a coat in the winter. In her teenage years, she did the shopping and the housework every weekend. She did not identify herself as a young carer. It simply did not cross her mind. It was just her life.
When George asks what drew her to this role, her answer is three words: I am that kid.
It is a moment that stops a conversation. Not because personal experience is unusual in the voluntary sector, it is not. But because the evenness of it, the absence of performance, is its own kind of testament. She has not spent 25 years in this sector despite having lived through what the children she supports are living through now. She has spent 25 years here because of it.
**At what age do you start losing hope**
The most troubling part of this conversation is about a question nobody can fully answer.
Josephine talks about what child poverty does to a child's inner life. Not just the material realities, the absence of a bed, of carpets, of a coat. But what those absences do to a child's sense of who they are and what they can become. Children in poverty know they are different to their peers. They feel ashamed. They don't talk about it. They stop believing they are worth a teacher's attention or a charity's support. And then, at some point, hope quietly disappears.
"At what age do you start losing hope that there is something better," Josephine asks, "and this is not just your lot, and you have to accept where you are in life?"
She does not have a clean answer. Nobody does. But the question is the point. Because everything the Childhood Trust does, the 150 grassroots organisations it funds across all 33 London boroughs, the bedroom transformations, the Champions for Children campaign, the research, is an attempt to ensure that the moment of hopelessness is pushed back, or never allowed to arrive at all.
**What £1 becomes**
The Champions for Children campaign is the Childhood Trust's flagship fundraising model. The charity acts as champion funder, committing money that partner organisations then use to leverage further pledges. Every £1 donated to the Childhood Trust generates £4 in total across the campaign. Every pound is quadrupled.
The campaign runs for two weeks each June. Applications open in November. And Josephine is clear that the model is not just about raising money, it is about using the structure of matched funding to draw in donors who have been considering supporting a charity but haven't yet made the commitment. The social proof of a match triggers the gift.
That multiplier effect matters because the scale of what needs to happen is not small. 38% of London's children are growing up in poverty. Of those, 25% are in deep poverty, the kind that means no bed, no carpet, no coat. The number of children in poverty in London is not falling. It is rising. And the Childhood Trust, as Josephine says without self-pity, is still barely scratching the surface of what it would take to tackle the structural challenge in full.
But the child who comes home from school to a transformed bedroom, who dares, for the first time, to think about a sleepover, is not an abstraction. That child exists. And what happened to them today was real.
Watch or listen on [YouTube,](https://youtu.be/TE_v4FBxFIo)[Spotify,](https://open.spotify.com/show/2JtvsUqYfNDBoV5vqM5nzo)[Amazon Music,](https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e1eb6dec-97cc-46c0-8094-0cda8c67d73c/best-beginnings)[Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/best-beginnings/id1891251139)and more.
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