Category: Rethinking Poverty

Following the closure of the Webb Memorial Trust at the end of 2017, the Rethinking Poverty blog has been relaunched as Rethinking Poverty: The Webb Legacy. The aim is to make this a hub for discussions on eradicating poverty and creating a good society, a resource for all those working in the field. We will continue to publish blogs produced and commissioned by Rethinking Poverty, but we will also include more on other blogs, research, publications and events. We want to create and sustain the narrative on a good society, to help connect promising approaches, and, most importantly, to convene key people and initiatives.

Here we feature selective posts from the Rethinking Poverty blog.

As destitution returns to the UK, what can philanthropy do?

Posted on by Barry Knight

Looking at the history of poverty, there appears to be one certainty: poverty has been a feature of every human society since time immemorial.  As the Bible says: ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Matthew 26:11). A breakthrough In the 19th century, philanthropy worked hard to overcome this, and by 1909 there was a…

How to live better together

Posted on by Barry Knight

By Barry Knight and Colin Greer I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the Attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dream’d that was the new City of Friends. Walt Whitman   The unseen driver of our troubles causes no pain. But it is quietly destroying you…

The Development Set and its role in perpetuating poverty

Posted on by Gerry Salole

Many working in the ‘development set’ have been grappling with the failure of philanthropy and development to have any significant impact on the most pressing problems facing the world including inequality and poverty. In this article Gerry Salole analyses some of the ‘conscious and unconscious vested interests in the development and philanthropic sectors’ that cause him to…

How community philanthropy shifts power and changes the world

Posted on by Global Fund for Community Foundations - GFCF

‘Every year billions of dollars are spent in aid to help the poor, the vulnerable, the excluded. But how much really changes?’ This animated film by the Global Fund for Community Foundations talks about ‘new paths’, alternative ways of doing things, i.e. the growing community philanthropy movement that challenges traditional development approaches (that often undermine the agency of…

‘How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?’

Posted on by Barry Knight

Recent books by Barry Knight and by Alan Marsh and colleagues have shown that efforts to end poverty in low-income neighbourhoods in the UK have failed to make much progress. Darren McGarvey, or Rapper Loki, in his book Poverty Safari criticises the well-meaning but fundamentally misguided behaviour of the poverty industry which behaves ‘much like an imperial power’ and is not tuned into what…

Ordinary people, extraordinary power

Posted on by India Development Review

While mainstream development practices are failing and problems of poverty, conflict and inequality endure, what alternatives are there that work? In this article on IDR Anshu Gupta talks about the importance of leveraging local agency in social change processes. By Anshu Gupta There’s a recent image that will remain etched in our collective memory for…

Addressing inequality in India

Posted on by India Development Review

India is said to be the world’s second most unequal country, after Russia. Despite tremendous progress in reducing absolute poverty in the past two decades, and despite India’s promising economic growth, 97 per cent of the country would still be considered poor or low-income by global standards. What can developed countries with high levels of poverty like the UK learn…