What we mean when we say 'poverty'
There's no single way to describe poverty. It's different in every situation, but it means struggling to make ends meet and how that impacts on daily life.
Facing poverty means making devastating choices between heating your home or feeding your family. It's about having to skip on buying the essentials or paying rent. It's waking up every day and facing discrimination for even having these experiences in the first place.
We know people dealing with poverty are more likely to have a mental health problem - and people with a mental health problem are more likely to face poverty.
Dealing with this means extra stress that's always there, always building. That stress can harm your mental health, making it even harder to face the problems poverty causes too.
Read more about money and mental health
What are things like right now?
We've done some powerful work around poverty. But we know we need to do more. The next step is making sure it's a thread that runs through all our work.
That means pushing for a system that brings together financial and mental health support. It means being more confident talking about poverty. And it means campaigning even harder for changes to the welfare system in England and Wales.
How we're changing for people facing poverty
We want everyone at Mind to think about how poverty affects people. Making real change happen means all of us remembering that poverty can affect every part of someone’s life. This is how we want mental health support to look for people at risk of or facing poverty.
Better, integrated support
Going forward we'll make sure our services work for people facing poverty - that means making sure they're welcoming and easy to access. And we'll push people in power for better help that brings together financial and mental health support too.
Conversations and stories about poverty will speak to people's experiences
We're going to make sure everything we say speaks to people facing poverty. It'll be rooted in their lived experience, and what we say will reflect what those of us experiencing poverty are going through.
No stereotypes
We won't stereotype anyone experiencing poverty. Instead, we'll show people as they are. As people facing huge challenges in everyday life.
Our research told us what people facing poverty really think
We're committed to really doing more for people experiencing poverty. That's why we carried out dedicated research to find out what people with lived experience of poverty and mental health problems think. The changes that we're working toward have all been guided by this research.
