Poverty and Inequalities in Ageing: what it means for us

It’s Challenge Poverty Week this week, and ACRC students are out in force, organising events and raising awareness. Top of the bill is a fantastic cinema night organised by Cohort 4’s Christian Newman – taking place on Wednesday night at the Grassmarket Community Picturehouse, with a screening of the film ‘Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle’.

But why do students of ageing care so much about poverty?

It’s telling that the very first speaker in the Poverty Alliance’s daily Challenge Poverty ‘breakfast briefings’ this week was Debbie Horne from Independent Age – who highlighted the growing rates of pensioner poverty in Scotland, and the devastating impact this has on older adults’ health and quality of life.

Poverty and deprivation are some of the most fundamental determinants of health, because they affect every aspect of our lives: our homes, our neighbourhoods, our food, our heating, our education, our job opportunities, and more. These disadvantages add up over a lifetime, meaning that many people who have lived in poverty have a harder road to later life – often with more health issues, starting from a younger age, and with much greater complexity. 

In fact, in Scotland, as in many countries, people who live in the poorest communities, or who experience severe social exclusion – such as homelessness or destitution – face stark differences in life expectancy, compared to people who are more financially comfortable. So poverty doesn’t just shape our experiences of growing older – it also determines who gets to be ‘older’ at all.

As PhD students within, or affiliated to, the ACRC Academy, we’ve confronted these challenges in our research in a range of different ways – from research with older adults experiencing homelessness; to the impact of multiple health conditions (multimorbidity) or frailty in more-deprived areas; questions of access to care and community support; the impact of intersectional experiences of disadvantage … Once you start to see it, the challenges of poverty for people growing older in Scotland – and in many places around the world – become strikingly evident across so much of our work.

But these are not academic challenges – it’s about real lives, about people and communities. This demands us to respond in ways that are shaped by respect, dignity and care for each other. As Christian explains, his screening of ‘Dispossession’ is not just about sharing an important film – a documentary about the history that has led to chronic shortages of social housing in the UK and that examines the human cost of the housing crisis – but also about providing a valued community space. As he told me:

At the cinema we host a soup kitchen before the film for people to come and eat a three course hot meal – for some people this is the only hot meal they’ve had that day. This wee community cinema has a loyal group of regulars who are members of the Community Project. For this event, as people directly experiencing poverty, social isolation and homelessness, we wanted to facilitate a space for discussion after the film. The film highlights some of the ways in which people have fought for their right to adequate housing, so to make it action-oriented, we’ll discuss housing as a Human Right and various ways in which local community activists in Edinburgh have fought rights-violations in their accommodations, such as faulty lifts and excessive damp and mould – the impact of which has profound impacts on people’s health. 

Christian, like several of our ACRC Academy friends and colleagues, wears several hats – doing frontline work in the community, as well as research which aims to improve outcomes for people – and does so with considerable grace and calm! It’s a privilege to work alongside people who have a real commitment to the community, and role-model their values in practice. 

In my own research, on social prescribing for people growing older in under-served communities, I’ve had to confront some of these fundamental challenges of poverty and health inequalities. I am so grateful for my supervisory team: they care about these issues too, and address them in their own work, enabling me to see what socially-engaged academic practice can look like. As well as supporting my PhD research on a day-to-day basis, they’ve also encouraged me to take time to sit with the big ethical questions about inequalities in later life, and reflect on what kind of response that demands of us as researchers.

As part of this, I took a brief presentation on unequal experiences of ageing to the BSG Emerging Researchers in Ageing summer conference this year, where it sparked some valuable and inspiring conversations. But the best part of the process was taking the time to workshop it with seven other ACRC PhD students beforehand, opening up a shared space for us to talk about these issues that concern us all – and leading to us collaborating on a draft article that we hope will take the discussion about poverty and inequalities in ageing to a wider audience.

It has also prompted me to explore how else we might get together to share our learning, collaborate, and take action, in ways that respect lived experience and seek to have a community benefit. I’ve been working on a couple of events within the University, linked to Challenge Poverty Week, including a Poverty and Health Inequalities Forum (free and open to all!) in November – and a seminar for MPH students, last week, where Emily Adams (Cohort 1 - see below) gave an outstanding presentation shaped by her experience of doing inclusive research with older adults experiencing homelessness. I’ve also had the opportunity to do some external collaboration through the NCRM Research Methods Rendezvous – for want of a better word, a kind of incubator for very early-stage research ideas, where I’ve been looking at how to build bridges between people who work on poverty-related policy, and people who work on health. 

Above all, I’ve been so lucky to have the ACRC as a space to connect with others whose research inspires and challenges me; and, over the course of my PhD research, to be able to build a community who have a shared interest in poverty and inequality – not in the ‘ivory tower’ sense too often associated with academia; but as people who care about the real lives of others, and who want to work in respectful and sensitive ways to make a positive difference.

The connections between poverty and ageing are stark – they shape the journey towards later life, as well as the circumstances in which many older adults live. It will take persistent and collaborative work to address this. By keeping these challenges at the forefront of our minds, as we do research on ageing and care, we may be able to play some part in making that change.