We all want to live with dignity. We all want to feel safe.
So why are so many people in Britain living without these basic conditions?
In this first session of our Winter Assembly Series, we’ll come together to explore what dignity and security really mean - not as abstract ideas, but as lived experiences. We’ll hear from people with firsthand experience of poverty and insecurity, alongside experts who can help us understand the wider systems shaping these conditions.
Then, we’ll deliberate together:
- Sharing stories about when we or people close to us have struggled to meet basic needs like food, energy, or housing, and how that felt.
- Connecting the dots between those experiences and the bigger forces that keep communities dependent on foodbanks or facing constant insecurity.
- Imagining alternatives and developing concrete actions, asking what would dignity and security look like in practice, and what national interventions could help us get there?
This session builds on a series of webinars where organisers across the country examined the roots of everyday hardship. Starting from visible issues, such as foodbank use, unaffordability of essentials, grassroots climate action, and misinformation fuelling division, participants mapped the chains of causes and effects that shape people’s lives.
Now, we’ll take that learning forward into collective reflection and action.
Together, we’ll ask: what would it take for everyone to live with dignity and security and what can we do to make it real?
