"Families with children in poverty are not scroungers. They are doing their very best in really difficult circumstances and it is not their fault that they are being pulled into and trapped in poverty. We all have a responsibility to help them get out of it."
Sophie Livingstone MBE, CEO of Little Village
When we talk about supporting families in poverty, the conversation tends to go to money. What Sophie Livingstone keeps coming back to is something harder to quantify.
Sophie is CEO of Little Village, London's largest network of baby banks, and Chair of the Baby Bank Alliance, which brings together over 400 baby banks across the UK. The model is straightforward: passing on great quality clothes, toys and equipment from families who no longer need them to families who do. But the way she talks about that work makes clear it has never really been about the stuff.
She tells the story of a mum who received a sling from Little Village while experiencing postnatal depression. Getting that sling meant she was able to leave the house for the first time. She could go out, join classes, build confidence and eventually feel present with her baby. She tells another story about a child who was not weaning properly because he had no high chair and was being fed in a car seat. Little Village provided one. His health visitor said immediately that he was doing much better.
"Those items are more than just the stuff. They are the ticket to the local park, the confidence to go out because your children are wearing clothes you feel proud of them being in rather than being ashamed that they are in ill fitting clothes. They are what makes you feel like you are seen as somebody who is coping as a parent."
This is the idea that runs through everything Little Village does. When Sophie and her team redesigned their hubs to feel like boutique shops rather than charity distributions, it was a deliberate decision about dignity. Families come in by appointment, browse with volunteers and choose what they need. The model came out of Covid, when Little Village was forced to try home deliveries and found that families wanted both: convenience and choice. Because that choice, Sophie points out, is something poverty takes away. The joy of picking a cute outfit for your baby, of finding the toy your child will love, of being the parent who provides those things. Little Village tries to give that back.
The conversation with George also goes somewhere harder. Sophie is direct about the stigma that surrounds child poverty in public discourse. Whenever Little Village appears in the media, she says, the comment sections fill with people saying families should not have had children if they cannot afford them. "Who can guarantee for 18 years that you are not going to get ill, lose your job or have something go wrong in life?" The children did not choose their circumstances. And we all have a responsibility to their futures, because those futures, she argues, are all of ours.
There is also something quietly ambitious in the way Sophie talks about where she wants Little Village to end up. She wants to normalise reuse and destigmatise receiving support to the point that an organisation like hers is no longer needed. Every charity, she says, should have that as its aim. Putting yourself out of business is the goal. What keeps that from feeling naive is the scale of what she is working against: 800,000 children living in poverty in London, more than in any other region in the country, demand that Little Village cannot keep up with and a cost of living crisis that has not gone away.
Little Village is a partner in every one of our London hubs. Families who walk through our doors can access not just community, play and early years support, but the practical things their children need to thrive. This conversation gave us a sharper sense of why that matters and what is at stake.
Little Village are urgently short of Moses baskets right now. If you have one to donate, visit littlevillagehq.org/donate-stuff-2023
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