Birmingham Poverty Truth Commission

The council’s Public Health Division have commissioned Thrive Together to establish a Birmingham Poverty Truth Commission (Brum Poverty Truth; BTPC#2) to strengthen the connection between the council, city partners and our citizens through learning from lived experience of poverty and incorporating it into the policy and decision making. It is a citizen engagement approach to hold a mirror up to the council and our strategic partners on the impact of poverty on citizens’ lives and starts with listening to the people who really know what the sharp end of poverty looks like because they live it daily.

Integral to this is the development of relationships between people with lived experience (community commissioners) and those in positions of power and influence (civic commissioners) over a period of time.

The overall aim is to enact change across systems and develop not just a set of recommendations but a set of relationships, with the intention that those relationships will encourage those with influence to operate differently in their areas of work.

The Birmingham Poverty Truth Commission work is overseen through the Creating a City Without Inequalities Forum, which is a sub-group of the Health and Wellbeing Board and is led by the Inequalities Team in the Public Health Division.