Cathy Brown, Barrow Cadbury Trust’s Head of Economic Justice (Birmingham) writes about the exciting and innovative ideas and solutions which arose from the Economic Justice Brum huddles  

My journey with Economic Justice Brum began at the same time as the Huddles began to form in January. 

Mine has been a journey of connection, learning and growth, and after listening to our Huddlers talk about their journeys over the last four months, I can see many of the same elements present in the paths they’ve taken. 

Seven Huddles formed, and all seven were present and celebrated at the launch event at the end of May. All started from the same point but ended up somewhere quite different. 

You might well ask, what’s a Huddle? It’s a small, time limited peer learning group. Or, in human speak, a group of people exploring and enquiring into a topic for a set amount of time.  

Our groups were exploring the three pillars of our movement: Personal Empowerment, Building Alternatives, and Challenging Dominant Institutions.  

Transformative Economics – designing infrastructures for alternative economic systems in Birmingham neighbourhoods. Our Huddlers adopted the symbol of a dandelion to represent breaking free of existing economic thinking & systems, distributing new ideas and transforming old ground. 

SEND Seen – our Huddle exploring how to harness power and redirect wealth to change the SEND system Brum from adversarial, demeaning, failing to be holistic, creative, person-centred, effective, and dignified. 

Emergency vs Emergence – this Huddle group read and analysed the book ‘Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown’ – concluding a move away from the individual to the collective is needed, and exploring the skills and actions needed to do that.  

A Life Well Lived – exploring care, connection and community in capitalist times. A group appreciating how hard we find it to explore without conclusion, to consider problems without solving, to allow ourselves to simply experience, connect & listen. 

46.4% of Birmingham’s children live in poverty. That’s over twice the national average.  

The Child Poverty Changemakers Huddle asked the question ‘How do we fix something so fundamentally broken?’ and issued seven ‘asks’ of Birmingham City Council including a play strategy, family-centred housing, and good youth work in the hope that #maybeoneday no child in Birmingham will experience poverty. 

Our huddlers explored economic liberation through the lens of creativity and culture and the question “How do you define your personal economy?”.  Their definitions included blogs, poetry and illustration. 

Mindset Matters – this Huddle was “impactful, empowering, cathartic” “economic justice served family style” – amazing black women leaders looking inside themselves to question, challenge, explore and grow.  

Some of the groups will carry on meeting and working together. Some have concrete ideas that the movement can take forward. Some have generated further connections, thoughts, enquiries and possibilities to explore. That’s the nature of a movement. I leave you with the words from our Mindset Matters Huddle: “We are going to take over the world!” 

If you are intrigued by the story of our Huddles, and if you are keen to know more about the Economic Justice Brum movement and get involved in building a fairer economy for Birmingham, then please do check out the website, find us on Bluesky or Linked In – come and join us on the journey. 

Annmarie Lewis, Criminal Justice Programme Manager, gives an update of what’s coming up for the CJ programme and the T2A Transition into Adulthood campaign

If you follow Barrow Cadbury Trust’s socials and subscribe to our enews, you may have noticed a bit of a hiatus in criminal justice programme news and about what T2A is currently working on. There’s a good reason for this – I came into the post last November, excited at the prospect of getting my teeth into the work of the programme.  In those seven months alone there have been significant events which have confirmed the need to stand back and review our direction and focus – and me being new-ish in the post is a good reason to do that.

Most of you already know what those events are so no need to list them here, but briefly the Sentencing Council’s new guidelines and the subsequent suspension of them, the publishing of two Sentencing Review reports, overcrowding in prisons and early release programmes, the shift toward  policies which might be defined as ‘retrogressive’ and knee jerk, and an incline towards negative narratives, particularly around marginalised groups in the justice system –  all good reasons to renew and refresh our programme.

Anyone working in and around the criminal justice system as I have for many years, will not be taken aback by the current lack of forward and creative thinking.  However, it is not all doom and gloom.  Gauke’s Sentencing Review had some positive elements – though the lack of reference to young adults and the work of T2A was disappointing (see our response to the review).  And of course we are used to working in adversity – whoever’s in government and whoever is Justice or Prisons Minister.  Over the last 20+ years of T2A, and more than 100 years of Barrow Cadbury Trust, this hasn’t stopped us from making and proposing changes and we are committed to carrying on in this vein.

Coming up …

So what’s coming up in the coming 12 months?   Strategic communications have played an important part in our migrations programme, but now a group of CJ funders, including JABBS Foundation, Lankelly Chase, Pop Culture, Chanel Foundation, Henry Smith, Joseph Rowntree, Esme Fairbairn and others have banded together to work out how to counter harmful narratives for working with the public, media, and policy makers.  The ‘two tier’ rhetoric has been unhelpful – and not just in the criminal justice sector but in other sectors as well.

Partnerships and changing narratives

We are strengthening our partnerships including the one with Corston Independent Funders Coalition, and the Harm to Healing partnership, so we can be more effective funders, reduce duplication, highlight critical gaps, and collaborate on counter narratives challenging toxic and harmful ones across criminal, racial and gender justice.  There is no doubt this will be a challenge; research has found that increasingly people aren’t worried about misinformation or disinformation.  AI is creating a whole other level of communicating that we need to get on top of if we’re not to get overwhelmed by negative content.  The Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 has found the more something is ‘red-flagged’ the more some people will share it – whether it’s damaging, incorrect, or harmful.  The media landscape is becoming more complex, more polarised, and influences from the US and other parts of the globe are making the job of changing negative narratives harder and harder.

Grassroots

But there is some amazing work being done at grassroots.  Spark Inside held a round table to talk about taking forward six months of conversations with young men and colleagues from the prison, healthcare and voluntary sectors, building on the work of their Being Well, Being Equal campaign and report.  This was a chance to bring together leading policymakers, practitioners and experts in the field of wellbeing, young adults and racial equity, talking about what health and justice colleagues can do to support and inform their work with young Black men.

Making the evidence base more accessible

We have more than 20 years of evidence around why we need a dedicated approach to young adults in the criminal justice system.  Our plan is to synthesise that evidence base to distil best practices and create a blueprint for a transformed justice system for young adults.  And that blueprint will include embedding individuals with lived and learned experience of the criminal justice system into the T2A ‘programme’, establishing a T2A advisory panel.

Finally, we will be ramping up our focus on advancing racial and gender justice within the criminal justice system, identifying and challenging systemic biases and inequalities.  We will ensure that all campaign, advocacy and influencing work is underpinned by a strong commitment to reducing disparities and enhancing fairness.

Collaboration

At the end of this month we have our first workshop in a series of four.  This first one will look at the current criminal justice ‘system’ and what we mean by that.  To what extent is it a system, and which bits of it work?  The second workshop will look at the system in more depth, the third will present our literature review, and the final one will look at narrative change.  Our plan is for all four workshops to feed into a 2026 conference – the first significant T2A conference in 10 years.  If you’d like to be kept informed about the workshops and any other activities, sign up to our enews on the T2A website, and follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

I hope you will find everything that I’ve outlined resonates with your own ambitions and focus.  Looking forward to working with you!

Annmarie Lewis, June 2025

28th April 2025 – there’s a feeling of excited tension as Fair By Design and Poverty Alliance staff log into a Teams meeting room at 9:45. It’s not often a Monday morning meeting has us excited, but this one feels a little different.

As the clock ticks over to 10:00, 15 people join the call and meet each other for the first time – these 15 people are our new lived experience advisory group. The group will draw on their experience of the poverty premium – the extra costs faced by people on low incomes – to help guide our work.

Over the course of two hours, everyone introduces themselves, we hear what has made people smile in the last week and get to know each other’s pets. Shared values and motivations for taking part come to the fore as we discuss the purpose of this group.

It’s clear there is a feeling of frustration, and sadness at other panel members’ difficulties with benefits and companies who haven’t supported them in the way they should have. But overwhelmingly, there’s a shared sense that things need to change.

Who’s around the table

The panel is made up of 15 people from across Great Britain, with representation from England, Wales and Scotland.

It includes a diverse range of people to ensure those most disproportionately affected by the poverty premium are represented. We know that some communities are particularly at risk of paying a poverty premium for household essentials, so we’ve made sure that there’s good representation from those communities on our panel.

The aim is to create a safe, supportive and collaborative environment where everyone feels empowered to contribute their experience and knowledge of poverty-related issues.

Support and training will be provided to help build confidence in speaking up – whether to politicians, the media, or in meetings.

Panel members are being reimbursed for their time, with options on how they receive this. We understand not everyone wants financial compensation, so other benefits are available. This is our way of recognising the value their lived expertise brings to our work.

What we’re going to do together

Over the next year, the panel will meet five times to help shape and guide our work. It will sit alongside our existing governance structures, our steering group and the Barrow Cadbury Trust Board.

The panel’s experience will input into all areas of our work. This will include helping us set priorities by identifying which issues are affecting people most, what we should focus on, and what we might be missing.

They will also help shape our policy work by advising where further research is needed and what type of work we should undertake.

In addition, panel members will guide our research by working alongside academics and staff from other organisations to help shape individual research projects.

We’ll also support those who are comfortable sharing their voices and lived expertise through blogs, videos, social media, media interviews, or public speaking.

Conclusion

We have a strong track record of working with people with lived experience in our communications and policy work. But we want to go further – making lived experience a central part of shaping our strategic work.

Over the next year, the voices and experiences of these 15 people will be at the heart of everything we do. Keep an eye on our work to see how their insight is helping shape change.

If you’d like to learn more about the process, or how to set up a similar panel, please get in touch.

Fair By Design outlines key principles for a future energy system that is fair to those on low incomes

Today, energy prices are still around 45% higher than winter 2021-22, with an estimated 6.1 million households living in fuel poverty across the UK. This is also born out in debt statistics – consumer energy debt reached £3.82 billion at the end of Q3 2024, according to Ofgem.

As the Government looks to reform the market and support the transition to net zero, at Fair By Design we think there is an opportunity to design a system that works for everyone, especially people on low incomes who are most prominent in the statistics above.

This blog highlights our thinking on the future of energy, especially focusing on how a new system can work for low-income consumers and reduce some of those sobering numbers. With numerous consultations and calls for evidence currently taking place, not least the Government’s consultation on an update to the Fuel Poverty Strategy, here we outline key principles for a future energy system that is fair to consumers on low incomes:

1. Energy should be treated as an essential good, not a luxury.

1. Everyone should have access to the energy they need to stay safe and well at a price they can afford. This means designing a market without poverty premiums — where people on the lowest incomes aren’t charged more because they pay differently or lack the digital tools needed to access cheaper tariffs.

1. It also means reducing the amount of energy people need to use, by supporting energy efficiency.

1. Affordability must never rely on people dangerously rationing the energy they need to stay warm, cook meals, or keep the lights on.

How should the future look like?

As the domestic energy market evolves, we are calling for a commitment from Government and the regulator that there will be no new poverty premiums in the future.

More broadly, trust in the energy market must be rebuilt. That means addressing the basic affordability challenges people face today. We look forward to seeing Ofgem’s fully developed proposals for a debt matching/debt relief scheme to ensure people can escape the shackles of debt they found themselves in during the energy crisis. Crucially this must be accompanied by a social tariff to ensure energy is affordable going forward.

We would also like to see high standing charges reduced, and the premium charged to those who pay by standard credit eliminated. Practices like excessive back billing must be tackled, and the period for which suppliers can back bill should be reduced

There is also an opportunity through the Government’s consultation on a new fuel poverty strategy. We welcome the Government’s commitment to review progress towards the statutory 2030 fuel poverty target. We support retaining this target and urge the Government to fulfil its promise to invest £13.2 billion in the Warm Homes Plan at the next Spending Review. With National Energy Action identifying an £18 billion funding gap, this investment will be vital to ensuring homes are made more energy efficient and affordable to heat. Improving energy efficiency is one of the most sustainable long-term ways to bring down bills and ensure a fairer energy future for everyone.

A fair transition to net zero

We must design a system that works for everyone from the outset. That starts with building a stronger evidence base about how market reforms will impact different groups of consumers.

The rollout of smart meters is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Without one, consumers may be unable to access time-of-use tariffs or new flexibility services in the future. But the current target, to achieve a rollout to 75% of households is set to end in 2025 . Depending on if this figure is met, there is a risk of locking a significant proportion of households — including many on low incomes — out of the new energy market. The smart meter roll out must be extended before the end of this year.

In addition, the shift to net zero assumes that consumers will engage more actively with the market — by switching between tariffs or flexing their usage to take advantage of lower prices at off-peak times. But we know that many consumers do not proactively engage with the energy market.

In 2016, the Competition and Markets Authority found that 56% of consumers had never switched supplier or didn’t know if they had, and 72% had never switched tariff or didn’t know it was possible. People on low incomes were even less likely to be “active” consumers. Research by the University of Bristol (2016) for Fair By Design found that 73% of low-income households had not switched supplier in the previous two years.

More recent analysis by the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) shows that low-income households gain very little from reducing demand at peak times. Innovative tariffs may be too complex or simply inaccessible to people without smart meters, digital skills, or flexible incomes. At present, the cheapest unit rates and standing charges are often only available to those who own electric vehicles — not those struggling with their bills. CSE has therefore highlighted the opportunity to support fuel-poor households to increase their usage at times of excess generation and low prices, not just encourage high-use consumers to reduce demand at peak times.

Finally, we believe Ofgem should carry out a full distributional analysis of the move to market-wide half-hourly settlement, using insights from existing pilots and building where there is evidence of disadvantage, Government and regulator must act to mitigate those disadvantages – not wait to pick up the pieces afterwards.

In conclusion, to build a fairer energy market, we must design policies around the needs of people on low incomes. That means removing poverty premiums, tackling existing inequalities, and ensuring no one is left behind in the transition to net zero. The future must be fair and affordable for all.

 ‘The starting point is not a goal but a collaboration’ – how Barrow Cadbury Trust has used systems change approaches to tackle complex issues in the justice system.  

Young adulthood 

How do you explain to people who don’t work in criminal justice about the distinct needs of young adults caught up in that system? Well, we held a mini 18th birthday party in our workshop room with balloons and birthday tunes! We then invited them to think back to when they turned 18 (or when someone they know turned 18).  

Their reflections from this exercise were revealing and we identified three main themes: 

One attendee said afterward that they ‘particularly enjoyed the visualisation exercise - I mostly forgot that overwhelming jumble of thoughts and emotions around the age of 18.’  

The group in question were attendees at the Systems Innovation Network Global Conference, mainly working in sectors such as health and sustainability, where systems thinking has taken root.  Two of Justice Futures co-directors Gemma Buckland and Nina Champion, along with Laurie Hunte from the Transition to Adulthood Alliance at Barrow Cadbury Trust and Nadine Smith, a young justice advisor, were facilitating a workshop exploring how systems thinking can help improve outcomes for young adults in the justice system, and why a systems approach to funding is necessary to tackle complex issues and see transformational shifts.  

Nadine explained the distinct needs of young adults in the criminal justice system including the fact that their brains are still developing and that the process of maturity doesn’t end at 18. She described the ‘cliff edge’ of services and support stopping and how young adults are often grouped with adults of all ages, whether in court, in custody or on probation, whereas we have a separate system for under-18s. She discussed her work with the Transition to Adulthood Alliance (T2A) and Leaders Unlocked, ensuring that young adults with lived experience are empowered to influence systems change by conducting research, designing services, and speaking to policymakers.  

She set out that this is a complex issue as there is not one solution; it’s interconnected, multi-dimensional, and involves multiple and conflicting perspectives. In systems speak, this is known as a ‘wicked challenge’

The criminal justice eco-system 

We then got attendees thinking about the different actors in the ecosystem that T2A works with and their multiple and conflicting perspectives. Using a Si Network Actor Mapping canvas, attendees were asked to imagine themselves as young adults, policymakers and practitioners to think about what values, power, mental models and incentives these actors have in the system when it comes to meeting young adults’ distinct needs.

When looking at power, attendees highlighted various types of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power dynamics including physical violence, money, the law, the power to ‘say no’, and even the power of an officer’s uniform. Incentives varied from hitting targets to ‘respect’, serving the community, to wanting a quick exit from the system. Mental models included ‘do the time, do the crime’, ‘prison works’, crime being caused by individual choice rather than societal failures and the ‘punishment v. rehabilitation’ dichotomy. Lastly, the values influencing actors in the ecosystem noted by participants were protection, risk reduction, efficiency, the rule of law, empathy, and suspicion.  

The purpose of the exercise was to better understand what’s going on ‘under the surface’ with different actors in the system, so we can then work with the systemic patterns identified productively to affect change in the system.  

As one workshop participant reflected ‘one of the most powerful exercises you can do is to step into other people’s shoes in the system.’ Another commented that ‘the ambiguities that arise are interesting.’ And one said it was ‘eye-opening. I could connect directly with some of the issues I’ve noticed in our neighbourhood. [It was] very effective in helping us look at these issues from different perspectives.’   

These insights are what these systems tools are designed to bring out – helping people see differently, think differently and then do differently … our tagline at Justice Futures! 

If we’d had more time, we would have discussed the insights the group had gained from examining the system from different actors’ perspectives and then used these to identify which leverage or intervention points would have the most long-lasting, positive impacts on the system. This is something that T2A, supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, has been navigating for the past two decades, as set out in a recent evaluation report by IVAR.  

Changing the funding paradigm 

We also used the actor mapping canvas to explore the values, power, incentives and mental models typically found in philanthropic funders, acknowledging that this is shifting (as we explore further below).  For example, traditionally philanthropic funders might value learned expertise over lived expertise, favour funding short-term ‘sticking plaster’ solutions by looking for quick fixes, lack diversity, and might use models that promote competition rather than collaboration. They also often exercise some form of power, not only in the resources they hold, but in setting the criteria, timescales, decision-making and monitoring processes of their grants and project proposals.   

Barrow Cadbury Trust is an unusual funder by taking a long-term, systemic approach to shifting paradigms. One example is their longstanding support of the Transition to Adulthood Alliance. IVAR recently evaluated this approach to systems change, and we highlighted some of the important key themes and learning from that report:  

IVAR’s findings mirror Catalyst 2030’s open letter for NGOs to sign, calling for funders to take a more systemic approach to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. One of these goals, SDG 16, relates to peaceful and inclusive societies and justice for all.  

IVAR drew attention to Barrow Cadbury’s mindset shift, seeing themselves primarily as a systems change partner, rather than a funder. The report found the distinction between ‘being a player, rather than just an enabler’ has been deliberate and intentional, as Barrow Cadbury Trust are proud to both ‘drive and serve.’ This activism is done in collaboration with alliance members and with a vital awareness of the need to ‘out the power dynamic by relational means; listening carefully, responding to challenge, showing respect, being flexible, deferring to greater expertise and building partnershiprelationships not administrative ones.’ 

We also discussed a report and system map by New Philanthropy Capital showing that advocacy activities aimed at influencing political systems get less than 2% of all money going to criminal justice-focused NGOs and system coordination activities get less than 1%. We also highlighted the findings of two other reports (by Harm 2 Healing and Rosa) which show that grassroots, ‘by and for’ organisations promoting racial and gender justice often miss out on funding due to bureaucracy, a lack of unrestricted funding to support capacity building and the instability and uncertainty of short-term funding.  

Laurie highlighted an example of partnership working between funders, where Barrow Cadbury convened a group of philanthropic funders to collaboratively help tackle racial disparities in the criminal justice system and address important issues of capacity building and leadership development for ‘by and for’ organisations. 

We used the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model to demonstrate the transition from the current dominant paradigm (in this case, funders as funders) to the new emergent paradigm (in this case, funders as systems change partners). We wanted to identify some of the ‘seeds of change’ happening globally and to start connecting and illuminating them.  

 Attendees gave examples of where they had started to see shifts from the current dominant paradigm of ‘funder’ towards ‘systems change partner’. Some interesting examples from around the world were shared, including: 

•  Children’s Investment Fund Foundation—a global funder which takes a systems change approach by investing in the long term, focusing on root causes, having a high appetite for risk, being flexible, and investing in building a thriving ecosystem and emerging leaders. 
• Viable Cities – a challenge-driven, strategic innovation programme in Sweden where people submit ideas as individual organisations and then collaborate with other applicants to design projects to create climate-neutral cities by 2030.  

• NCVO – a voluntary sector infrastructure body in the UK which is exploring the use of collaborative funding applications.  

It was clear that attendees wanted to see more of these shifts in the future. As the IVAR report found, trusts and foundations are uniquely placed to support systems change as ‘they have the money, the time, and the patience. They can afford to take risks, to shift power, to disrupt, to play a leading role, like Barrow Cadbury Trust, or to be a patient cheerleader. All of these choices are in their gift.’  

We hope the workshop gave a small taste of how systems approaches and systemic funding can help tackle complex issues, including in the criminal justice sector. As one attendee concluded, working in these ways helps bring people from ‘systems blindness to systems sight’.  

 Nina Champion, Gemma Buckland, Nadine Smith and Laurie Hunte