No More Growing Up Poor: What We’re Fighting and Why

Growing up poor is not a personal failure. It is not bad luck. It is not the result of parents making the wrong choices. Growing up poor is something that is done to people, by systems that prioritise profit, property, and control over human need.

When we say No More Growing Up Poor, we are naming a political condition — not a lifestyle, not an identity, and not an inevitability.

Children grow up poor because:

rent absorbs most of a household’s income
wages do not cover the cost of living
benefits are deliberately kept below what people need to survive
public services are cut, outsourced, or made punitive
families are treated as problems to be managed, not people to be supported

Poverty shapes every part of childhood. It limits what children eat, where they live, how safe they feel, how often they move, and whether they can plan for a future at all. These outcomes are predictable. They are known. And they are tolerated.

No More Growing Up Poor is a refusal to accept this as normal.

It means recognising that poverty is produced by policy and power, not individual behaviour. It means rejecting narratives that blame parents for circumstances they did not choose. And it means organising collectively to challenge the conditions that make growing up poor so common.

This campaign is rooted in the lived experience of families in Newcastle and the wider North East — families who are organising together, supporting each other, and taking action to change the conditions they are living under.

Growing up poor is not inevitable. It is political. And it can be fought.