#TakeWhatsYours, the September campaign, is breaking the shame of seeking help with money and mental health.
Quids in! Money Guidance launches its #TakeWhatsYours campaign to help struggling Londoners to cut through the stigma of accessing services on 1st September.
#TakeWhatsYours will revolve around a marketing campaign encouraging people in the capital who are experiencing financial hardship to “Go get a helping hand”. Ten boroughs are to be targeted: Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, Brent, Ealing, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham.
Messages will compare reluctance to taking financial advice and support to everyday assistance such as using an umbrella when it’s raining, taking a carrier bag when out shopping, or wearing glasses when we’re struggling to see. With an estimated £23 billion in unclaimed benefits nationwide, with £3 billion more that could have been picked up through social tariffs on utilities and broadband. Just 62.4 per cent of parents with young children are accessing the financial help from Healthy Start vouchers.
The Quids in!-branded initiative is run by community enterprise Clean Slate Training & Employment, and was commissioned by public mental health partnership Thrive LDN, supported and funded by the Mayor of London. Clean Slate’s Managing Director, Jeff Mitchell, said: “Stigma is a hidden barrier standing between people in need and the help that is available to them. They can’t change how they feel people view them but we can give them the encouragement to cut through it to take what’s on offer. By talking to many of the people affected, we found that what they really need is information about what is out there and where to find it. To this end, the campaign calls on them to take action and provides a link to a list of all the support available to them in their borough.”
Stigma takes many forms ranging from whether people feel entitled to services through to their experience of services and their providers. Different communities also influence members’ readiness to accept help from authorities or other sources outside their peer group.
Focusing on more practical barriers, #TakeWhatsYours will translate key messages into five languages, reflecting the biggest communities experiencing hardship and unemployment in the capital. The campaign will appear in English, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Somali and Spanish.
Four community consultations took place with people in hardship across the capital, who each received shopping vouchers for their time. They reviewed marketing messages and visuals and fed back on their experience of stigma and barriers to support.
Londoners can expect to see the #TakeWhatsYours campaign on mainstream social media channels through the whole of September. Postcards will be distributed through partners operating in each of the ten boroughs. A link to www.quidsinmagazine.com/take-whats-yours will appear, where visitors will find links to lists of services in their borough and more information about the campaign.
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NOTES FOR EDITORS
- Further context around stigma and service access is available in a special report published by the Quids in! Pro network. See it here.
- Contact: Jeff Mitchell at madeleine.caravaggio@cleanslateltd.co.uk or jeff.mitchell@cleanslateltd.co.uk
- Clean Slate Training & Employment is a Community Interest Company founded in 2006. It is a social enterprise in business to promote money, employment and digital skills so people can escape poverty. See www.cleanslateltd.co.uk
- Quids in! Money Guidance is run by Clean Slate and helps people on low incomes across the UK to stretch and grow a limited budget, find work (or better work), and get online. Money coaches support struggling householders one-to-one and in groups, face-to-face and working remotely. Quids in! reaches 150,000 low-income households through magazines and guides, money emails and interactive online services
- More on Quids In’s campaigning work at: https://youtu.be/ILgaLeZl9Q0
- The website, www.quidsinmagazine.com, has a growing body of content created specifically for tenants, benefit claimants and low paid earners
- Quids in! conducts research among UK social tenants every two years. In 2024/25, it found working age people who are not able to work were most at risk of financial hardship, exacerbating ill-health reported:
- 20% experienced severe financial problems, compared to 14% of working age people in work and 3% of people of retirement age
- 55% were skipping meals (all other respondents: 28%)
- 57% were turning off heating despite being cold (all other respondents: 40%)
- 61% felt frightened, anxious or depressed (all other respondents: 35%)
- 38% felt physically ill (all other respondents: 15%)
- 34% forced to rely on emergency hand-outs like foodbank, fuelbanks, crisis grants (all other respondents: 12%)
- Thrive LDN is a citywide public mental health partnership to ensure all Londoners have an equal opportunity for good mental health and wellbeing. It was launched publicly by the Mayor of London and the London Health Board partners in 2017. Thrive LDN is the regional lead for suicide prevention in London on behalf of NHS England.