2020: the year in perspective
The beginning of 2020 really does feel like ancient history. There we were in January, all shiny and fresh and bright, planning for a year that involved supporting 3000 families, proud of the scale of our ambition and hopeful that, thanks to a new five year partnership with the fantastic and supportive team at The National Lottery Community Fund, we could stabilise our operating model after four years of intense growth.
But as we all know, that’s not how things turned out. This year we’ve supported well over 6000 children; we’ve turned our operational model upside down, and flexed it more times than a bendy yoga master. We watched with fear as one of our major sources of income fell through the floor; and we cheered for joy as we saw the incredible response from individuals and businesses, who together have enabled us to keep supporting families throughout the pandemic.
We can do hard things
There is so much to be proud of in the little squares of the picture above; so much love and care poured into getting the right items out to the families who needed them most. The team make it look easy, but as all our volunteers and staff know, the achievements here have involved huge amounts of hard work and stamina, and muscles too.
This year has taught us a vital lesson: we are resourceful and creative, and, in the words of Glennon Doyle, we can do hard things. In the space of two weeks at the end of March, we had to pivot our community-based model to ‘Virtual Village’, so that we could continue to support families by delivering items directly and safely to their front doors. It involved changing every single part of our operating model:
- Securing an emergency baby essentials wholesale supplier, our lovely friends at Easho, to fulfil requests when stock in supermarkets was non-existent
- Building a network of incredible drivers to deliver and pick up donations — including the brilliant bikers at Pedal Me and van people at Zipvan; also volunteers from British Red Cross, furloughed companies like Central Moves — to enable us to support 100s of families each month.
- Developing a new network of 17 community donation points across London, and organising delivery of larger items like cots and buggies.
- Securing pro-bono warehouse space to make it possible to keep operations going while abiding to rules around social distancing, which severely curtailed how many volunteers we could have in our hubs at any one time.
- Redeveloping our referrals system and website to align with the new Virtual Village operational model.
- Setting up a totally new support system for families via phone — training our at-home team of volunteers to call families, check on what items they need and whether we can support through onwards referrals to other organisations.
- Completely redesigning most of our staff roles, to take account of those of us who needed to stay home, and those of us who had to juggle new caring responsibilities thanks to school and nursery closures.
All that before I even talk about the work we needed to do to plug the chasm in our fundraising plan that opened up as the country locked down, or the care and time spent looking after a team in a time of huge anxiety and fear.
So yes, we can do hard things and I couldn’t be prouder of the Little Village community for the flexibility, ingenuity and huge amounts of passion that have powered us through this year.
“Thank you to you and your team for the amazing work you do. I refer to your service much more frequently than I’d like to — particularly this year — it makes such a difference to vulnerable women and their families to know there is support like this available. Well done to your team for keeping these families supported through all the complications this year.” — Midwife we work with
Solidarity in the face of rising inequality
The pandemic has not hit all of us equally hard. This week, the areas where we see the most alarming rises in coronavirus cases in London are also the areas where there are high levels of poverty, coupled with poor housing and overcrowding, and large black and ethnic minority populations. Covid is exposing and amplifying inequalities that already existed: the more deprived the area, the higher the mortality rate.
Our experience at Little Village suggests that these patterns are true not only in health terms, but also in economic terms. One in four of the families we’ve supported this year are referred to us because of Covid-related hardship. Job losses and reductions in hours are hitting low paid workers harder than others, with unemployment rates twice as high in low wage sectors such as hospitality. Where better-off households have saved more this year than ever before, poorer households are falling deeper into debt to keep up with essential household bills (see this Institute for Fiscal Studies report for more on that).
But this isn’t new news. This year’s events have exposed the reality of a slow crisis that’s been unfolding for a decade now. Living standards have all but collapsed for low income households. Benefits have been cut to the bone. Key early years services, such as Sure Start centres and the health visiting system, have seen their budgets slashed.
In all this darkness there is a small glimmer of hope. One of the reasons it’s been possible for recent governments to dismantle the support around low income families is because of the dominant story we tell about poverty in this country. In this story, a parent’s economic situation is more often blamed on their own personal failings, rather than being treated as evidence of a broken system, or the result of a series of really challenging life events.
But I think Covid may just have opened up some space for a more empathetic response to people who are experiencing hardship, one which invites less judgement and more solidarity. This year, more people have realised how quickly life circumstances can change. I sense a much greater awareness now that an unexpected job loss, or a health crisis, can send people into a spiral of debt and despair alarmingly quickly.
Justice, not more charity, is our goal
2020 is the year that the phrase ‘baby bank’ has entered the public lexicon. I rarely need to explain, in the way I used to, what we do. We’ve been lucky at Little Village to have benefited from some amazing partnerships that have helped us to raise our profile. A huge highlight of the year was our work with the Duchess of Cambridge to launch an incredible initiative that connects us and two other baby banks (Aber Necessities and Baby Basics) to 19 British brands, who together have supplied us with 10,000 items (and counting!) of beautiful new kit to gift on to families.
While increased profile is great in terms of attracting more donations, and helping us to fundraise, I feel there is very little to celebrate in the growing reliance on charities like ours. I see how we and all the other ‘banks’ that have sprung up — food banks, fuel banks, period banks, as well as the 100+ baby banks that exist — are plugging the gap of a failing welfare system, and a labour market where wages and hours simple do not cover basic living costs.
That’s not right, and it’s certainly not sustainble. Child poverty is a national crisis that is happening right here and now. Any recovery plan to return us to ‘normal’ post Covid that doesn’t address this urgent problem is not worth the paper it’s written on. I will not stand by as the number of children who are growing up poor continues to rise, at the same time as the rich get richer.
That’s why the work we’ve done to shout about the need to tackle rising child poverty matters as much as the direct support we’ve provided to families this year. Thanks to our partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we will be able to grow and extend the foundations we’ve laid this year, which include:
- The research we conducted with our 500+ referral partners across London to explore the impact of Covid on low income families. You can read the results here, and my extended piece on them here. We were able to tell the story of this research on Channel 4 News and in the i-newspaper
- The survey we ran of 50+ baby banks across the UK, that featured on Newsnight and in the coverage of our involvement with the Duchess of Cambridge’s intiative. It was a brilliant opportunity to reach the wider public and invite them to respond with empathy to the challenge of rising child poverty.
- Most of all, I am incredibly excited and inspired by the work we’ve been doing to launch our Ambassadors network — a group of mums we’ve supported who want to work with us to campaign about the injustices so many families are experiencing right now. There will be a lot more from them in 2021, and I can’t wait to see how this evolves.
Love beats logistics
So it turns out running a delivery business for 6000 families, where many of them are receiving 5+ boxes of kit and often a buggy or a cot as well, involves a LOT of logistics. After 9 months of running Virtual Village, this feels a bit like our new normal rather than our emergency response. And to some extent, it has to be. We cannot safely welcome families back into our hubs until Covid has receded significantly, and we’ll continue with our Virtual Village model until that time comes.
However, given the amount of time we spend talking about delivery schedules, box sizes and labelling protocols, I can see how easy it would be to slip into a logistics mindset, depersonalised and detached from the very families we’re here to support. It would be easy to focus so much on the stuff itself, that we forget the importance of how it is gifted.
We have worked really, really hard to ensure this doesn’t happen. On our volunteers’ packing checklist, we ask them not only to check that a cot has all the parts, but also that the bundle they’ve prepared looks and feels like a gift. We package up socks and pants in pretty bags; we bind our boxes in lovely Little Village tape; we include a note in each box saying who has packed it. These things might be small but they help our team to keep the family front and centre every step of the way.
This stuff matters, because we’ve always wanted to build community at the same time as gifting on essential kit. And unless the families we support feel respected, welcomed and valued, they won’t feel part of the Little Village community. How we gift items is just one of the ways we live out our value of love. In normal times, the way we welcome families into our hubs is another form of love in action. That’s not possible right now, but this year we’ve learned loads about how to use phones to build small, warm communities of support virtually. We plan to extend and grow this work in 2021, adding new ways of connecting to families virtually and in time, I hope, in person again too.
Gratitude, always
It’s that time of year when I am more aware than ever of the incredible generosity of our supporters.
Our volunteers, all 499 of them (to be precise!), who have donated 12,000 hours to endlessly bundle, sort, package up, clean, drive, and call families. You are all superheroes and the lifeblood of our work.
Our 500+ referral partners and collaborators, who make us stronger, and who together with Little Village form a vital ‘first line of defence’ for families who are struggling.
The consultants and companies that quietly support us with their professional services, often pro-bono or at reduced charge, without whom we couldn’t keep going.
Our lovely landlords, building managers, and cleaners. We know we are not the tidiest or most contained of tenants (FYI, this is a major understatement), and we are so grateful for your patience and encouragement.
The Trusts and Foundations who have so generously stepped in with core funding, and emergency funding, and project funding, to keep our doors open.
The businesses who have volunteered, donated from their own profits, or gifted us beautiful stock so incredibly generously this year.
The schools who have shared our work with their children and parents, and inspired such generous support from within their own communities.
And finally, well over 1200 individuals have generously supported our work this year, with donations ranging from £5 to £70,000. Every single one of these contributions matters. I can’t share all your names but if you were one of those people, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. (And if you’d like to be one of them, you can donate here.)
Kindness is our currency, and this list is testament to that. Thank you to every single one of you, from me and the whole team at Little Village. Have a Merry Little Christmas (our words before the PM stole them!), and we’ll see you in the New Year.
