Our projects

Leeds Poverty Truth works to bring those with direct experience of the struggle against poverty together with civic and business leaders from a wide range of organisations, and together to address issues of poverty in our city.

We believe that it is only when those who are directly affected by poverty are involved in decisions about poverty that lasting change will happen, working from the guiding principle that – Nothing about us, without us, is for us. 

The Leeds Poverty Truth team includes Kidist Teklemariam, Ian Mayhew, Andrew Grinnell, Jon Dorsett & Vik Perrett. Visit www.leedspovertytruth.org.uk for more information

Climate Action Leeds is a partnership of 20+ organisations in Leeds from the community and voluntary sector, local council and university, working together to bring about a zero carbon, socially just, nature friendly city by the 2030s. Our role within this coalition is to work with communities across the city to support community-led responses to climate change. We have supported a network of eight neighbourhoods to develop climate action hubs and associated action plans, through in depth community engagement.

The impact of the hubs has seen over 500 volunteers come together, to bring about initiatives such as; an energy saving campaign, plant swaps, a community fridge, planter making, retrofit skillshares, car park pocket parks, craftivist awareness campaigns, a south Leeds green film festival, a library of things, local carbon roadmaps, a repair cafe, a bike fix project, developing Leeds Community Energy project, a community buy-out of a methodist chapel in Otley, a Community Supported Agriculture scheme, a forest garden and much more. The programme has distributed £45,000 of microgrants through a participatory grantmaking process, and reached over 14,000 beneficiaries across the city.

The Climate Action Leeds Team includes Sue Hoey, Joy Justice, Alice Wallace, Debbie Purdon, Beth Bingley & Jenifer Walper Roberts. You can find out more about the partnership on the Climate Action Leeds website here.

In November 2023 we returned to our roots of hosting community festivals and produced ‘Big Up’, a multicultural festival of arts and social change that worked with artists as community catalysts to design and host the event. Here is a short video showcasing the event, which engaged over 200 people across Leeds and the surrounding region. The Team members leading and coordinating the festival included: Asher Jael, Tami Pein, Olivier Nkunzimana, Ed Carlisle, Mike Love & Sarah Autumn. Here’s a list of who took part in the festival.

‘In building networks between creatives, social change-makers and audiences, the aim is to make the voices of change too loud to ignore’

Good Deeds is a South Asian-led youth leadership project that delivers community activities with youth and families who face marginalisation, currently focused in Beeston. Good Deeds has been successful in bringing people from different cultural and faith backgrounds to share commonalities and explore differences, leading to more positive community relations. Examples of its many initiatives include; Inter-Active – using sport such as cricket, as a means for Muslim and Jewish community building; Cool 2 Care – bringing young people and their parent’s together through art & crafts to carry out a social action in a local derelict park; and Interfaith Question Time – enhancing the religious education of the City’s school pupils. Good Deeds is led by Mahbub Nazir. Find out more about the organisation on their website here.

‘Shared Knowledge is Shared Power’

Our newest project aims to develop a Community Research Network to support and develop community-led knowledge production across Leeds. In 2023, with Leeds Love It Share It, We Are Seacroft, and Otley 2030, we were successful in a bid to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to develop 2 community research pilots in Seacroft and Otley, and to develop a Leeds network to bid for Phase 2 funding (£1m over 5 years). We will hear in September if our Phase 2 bid is successful. T4P is working with the Phase 1 partners, and with Leeds Community Anchor Network, Leeds Refugee Forum, Leeds Green Activities Providers, West Yorks Racial Justice Network, LeedsACTS!, and the University of Leeds. Our ambition is to democratise knowledge production in the city by enabling communities, academics, and policy makers to learn with and from each other. We are also excited by the opportunity of sharing learning with the other successful networks across the UK and with the Young Foundation which is running the national network for UKRI. The project team currently includes Alice Wallace, Sue Balcomb, Mike Love & Irena Bauman alongside our partner organisations.

We view meaningful conversation and connection as a pathway towards systemic change. As such another area of our work is co-delivering a three-day training in ‘The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter’. This training usually takes place every 1-3 years, and offers support to a ‘community of practice’, applying the methodology beyond the course. To date we have taken over 100 local people through the training.

The impact of this has seen the approach become more widely applied across many organisations and groups, leading to more bottom up and participatory approaches to community engagement. Here are some testimonials from the training:

‘Working together, where our responses happened in real time, was extremely inspirational, especially given the ways in which institutions and some governance structures are unable or deliberately obstructive in addressing the problems in our communities and across the world.’

‘I felt that the training offered a live and reflective practice, and gave rise to hope for new ways of organising and innovating.’