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I've been producing work as a journalist about
inequality and poverty for almost two decades.
First, as a staffer at the Guardian,
and then as a freelancer across numerous platforms.
Building on that work, in 2018,
I began working on a new anti-poverty initiative, Project Twist-It,
a multi-platform endeavour challenging negative stereotypes about
people living in poverty in Britain and America through storytelling;
using film, audio, photography,
animation, podcasts, and much more.
Mostly, Project Twist-It is a hub for people with lived experience of impoverishment to
tell their own stories, and to share with the world
their ideas for fighting poverty and inequality.
But it is also a broad and diverse community of people in creative collaboration,
and the space to shine a light on, dissect,
and scrutinise the dominant negative poverty narrative in the US and UK,
as well as its role in, and impact on, our societies.
Partnering with people who have lived experience of poverty,
grassroots organisations, charities, academics,
and a whole range of artists,
Project Twist-It unpicks the various strands of
a narrative that deems poorer people as 'less than',
as lazy, and of being where they are because they
are somehow less responsible or able than others.
This narrative is a fallacy, a powerful one.
The short film you're about to see provides a flavour of
what Project Twist-It is, and a sample of some of the content it hosts.
"Most of my work concentrates on social issues,
poverty being one of them,
and all the interrelated issues to do with poverty.
A few years back at the beginning of austerity in Britain,
I was asked to travel the country interviewing people about what was happening,
where the damage was being done,
what the likely outcomes were going to be of those policies and those cuts down the years.
One of the things that came out of that was a sense that
people who were bearing the brunt of those policies,
people who were either in poverty or on the bread line,
felt that they were being demonised within their society.
They felt that they were being scapegoated,
that they were being used as props to justify unnecessary cuts.
We saw terms like scrounger and skiver,
and striver all begin to move into common parlance.
There was a real feeling from people that it was reducing empathy in this society.
I wanted to do more on that.
I wanted to dig a bit deeper and find out what was behind that.
We have short films,
we have video, audio, animation, poetry,
all kinds of ways of expressing a different story, that demystifies it to a degree
but also challenges some of the myths.
Project Twist-It is basically trying to unpick
that narrative that to be poor is to be at fault individually.
I wanted to find a way to challenge
that narrative because in my experience of reporting all of these years,
it doesn't stack up with the reality that I see.
I myself grew up in poverty,
so I have first hand experience of it.
I wanted to try and find a way to reintroduce
some dignity into this discussion, and to reduce stereotypes.
We've got an animation from the comedian and animator, Howard Read,
where he's taken a story of one of the women I interviewed on Skid Row in Los Angeles,
who became a mosaic artist,
and he's animated her."
"My name is June Cigar,
I'm a piece by piece artisan for the Star Apartments
on Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles, California."
"A graphic artist called Shane Pangburn,
where we imagine the typical low income family that debunks
the myths around what it's like to live in those circumstances.
I've been interviewing people in different parts of America and in the UK."
"In this peacetime country that is
somehow more fractured than it ever was during two world wars.
In the effort to please all the parties,
segregation has become the prevailing solution."
"They're trying to put me to the test,
but I dropped out of college,
I ain't ready for that yet, yeah, still.
I got my common sense,
you've got a Sports BTEC and can't butter bread,
the wheels on the bus go round."
"My name is Jameela Jamil,
and I'm an actress and an activist.
Despite my accent, which is an accent I developed at
11 so that I could fit in at my fancy secondary school,
I grew up with no money,
and I was raised by a single mother,
and we relied on the Council to provide us with housing."
"I grew up in a single-parent home.
She raised me and my brother,
and then like I said,
busted her ass every day,
never caught a break.
We almost had our home foreclosed on,
I don't know how many times,
and then she had to file for bankruptcy.
When you've got less than $20,000 a year coming in,
as opposed to other people who've got $50,000, $60,000, $80,000,
$100,000 coming in and you're going to school with
these people and they're looking at you like,
"Why don't you have a nice car?"
I'm like "You have no clue how I live, how I grew up" and that kills me."
"A few of us have grown up on council estates and stuff,
and I think when it's around music and performance,
I think that people tend to listen a bit more."
"You want to hide this feeling."
"I felt ashamed of it,
I felt ashamed of being poor."
"Hello. My name is Mahsuda Snaith.
Today, I'm doing a video for Project Twist-It,
who are challenging the way we talk about poverty.
I grew up on a council estate to a single-parent mother who was living on benefits.
There were two things that I really noticed growing up.
One was that I was very aware of being poor and separated from mainstream society.
Secondly, that there was this overriding image of council estates that were
in the media that was largely based around drugs,
gang violence, and benefit fraud.
I remember on my first day in secondary school
when I went to a school that was not in my council estate,
but in the neighbouring community,
a girl sat next to me.
When she found out I was from the estate,
the very first question she asked me was,
did I carry a knife?
That was quite shocking to me because I didn't know anybody who carried a knife."
"My name is Linda Tirado.
I'm a writer, I live in the woods
and drink whiskey in keeping with my idiom.
I write about how much it sucks to be poor.
I live in Ohio, but I live in the West Virginia bit,
my Walmart is over the Ohio River so
technically I'm an Ohioian,
but culturally West Virginian.
I'm from Utah originally,
so I'm a mountain girl.
I was a night cook in a tiny town in Utah,
and worked an overnight shift at a diner.
I told people on the internet that it sucked to be poor,
which for some reason, people considered news.
Then the very long internet comment I had
written was taken to be an essay and went very viral,
and three weeks later
I had a book deal so
then I wrote a book. Because I'm not stupid and they offered me money, so I took it.
Ever since then, I've been a writer because
my book was largely about how much the service industry sucks,
and it turns out you're not really terribly hireable in
the service industry if you famously will write books about how much your bosses suck.
There are two words that apply to my life,
and they were a perfect descriptor in their totality:
one is 'exhausted' and the other is 'hopeless'.
I worked two essentially meaningless part-time jobs because it was the work I could get,
took care of my husband and kids,
and then I'd get up the next day and do it all over again.
I'd have a 16-hour workday on an average day,
and I'd come home with 100 bucks to show for it.
With that I'm supposed to make some kind of a life, which...nope."
"When I cook occasionally,
I have to sometimes shrink
the portions for everyone to make it go round everyone because we're quite a big family."
"I started writing for myself because I couldn't find work as a director,
and I originally trained as a theatre director.
I couldn't find anything that I was passionate enough about to direct, I suppose.
There was nothing out there at that time,
and this is going back 10 years ago, that represented me.
As a Northern Irish person as well,
there was nothing from my region that represented me,
that's why I started to write
(I guess) the way that I write
and write for people from the working class minorities,
and it is a gross minority on stage."
"In The Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival,
one of the things we've been clear on is that we have to shift the narrative,
but you can't do that without shifting the narrators.
In middle-class language, middle-class, middle class,
but you have 43.5 percent of your country
poor on low income.
Then, for instance, two years ago
we go through a presidential election,
26 by my count,
maybe more, maybe a little less,
26 presidential debates primary and not one hour on poverty and low wealth,
that's impacting 43.5 percent of your country.
Whenever people call themselves progressives or whatever name,
we would be foolish to then stay in silence."
