Clean Slate’s 20th anniversary in July was more than a moment to reflect. It was a reminder of how far we’ve come and how much further we must go.
Still being here two decades later is an achievement in its own right but taking stock of the changes in the world over that time, it’s a minor miracle. For our webinar, Project Reconnect, I picked out a few landmark moments that have made a profound impact alongside our own journey. As I share those here, it’s a chance to reflect on how our mission to help those on low incomes has remained consistent despite the upheaval around us.
THE EARLY YEARS
For starters, we conceived and registered Clean Slate in 2006, the same year Twitter launched. Who knew how this, and everything that followed it, would change the way we conduct our daily conversations and even our politics? Our plan was to create and support work opportunities for people facing barriers to employment and this started when we recruited a team of homeless people to sell programmes at the Bristol Kite Festival in 2007. We also joined the Bristol Financial Inclusion Forum, joining the dots between financial wellbeing, poverty and employment. All this just as the global economic system began to crash.
In 2008, we launched Quids in! magazine to help low-income households stretch and grow their limited budgets. Meanwhile, America’s first black American president was elected. We opened our first information and resource centre in 2009, helping jobseekers re-organise their money and think about work. (Bitcoin launched.)
Acting as a recruitment agency, Clean Slate placed its first jobseekers into temp work with a Bath-based housing association in 2010. Working with landlords, Quids in! magazine simultaneously reached a circulation of 250,000 across the UK. And the coalition government took office, and with it a regime of austerity. Our first centre opened in London in 2011, funded by our first employment placements there – social enterprise in action. The same year, headlines were dominated by riots breaking out across the city.
GETTING TO WORK
While the country hosted the Olympics in 2012, Clean Slate recruited and trained sixty homeless people interested in stewarding work. Our partnership with Green Stewards saw them take up paid roles at the London Pleasure Garden events in the Docklands. Since inception, we enshrined the value of lived experience as a key component for engaging communities, and in 2013 we recruited our first funded ‘online champions’ as we started work from Children’s Centre in Bath and North East Somerset. People protested the new bedroom tax, penalising renters ‘over-occupying’ properties.
Our research found a large number of jobseekers had experience and aspirations to be working in the trades. In 2014, in partnership with wellbeing and housing charity DHI, we launched HandyHelp, recruiting trained jobseekers to undertake painting, decorating and minor repairs. Also that year, the equalities agenda advanced as same-sex marriage was legalised.
As Universal Credit was scaled up in 2015, Quids in! responded to the problems faced by thousands of claimants with a guide to successfully migrating to the new benefit system. We also won our first commission from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to deliver our 7 Signs employment support programme to people failed by the Work Programme. Success rates exceeded the mainstream provision, even though the majority had complex needs.
JOINING FORCES
In 2016, Clean Slate launched ‘Step Up’, in partnership with Thamesreach, to create a mutual support network for low-paid earners in London. (The UK voted for Brexit.) We entered into partnership with DHI on their Reach Housing Advice service in 2017. The same year, tragedy struck Grenfell Tower with ramifications not only for tenants whose voices had been silenced for years, but for everyone charged with housing, supporting and building safe homes for them.
In 2018, we formally launched the Quids in! Readers Club email service. Its branded content is now syndicated to a number of landlords, helping us bring money guidance to over 40,000 social renters. In the news, the Windrush scandal broke, exposing the government’s persecution of families invited to settle and help rebuild post-war Britain.
We opened our first centres in Gloucestership in 2019 with support from the Longleigh Foundation. We also launched our first advisor training programme, building capacity in the third sector organisations with no prior experience of delivering money guidance. Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, acknowledging climate as a crisis of our time.
LOCKING THINGS DOWN
As the pandemic closed business as usual across the world in 2020, we took to the phones to deliver money health-checks to thousands of people. We launched Nobody in the Dark in partnership with the Good Things Foundation, with support from Mastercard and Lloyds Bank. We provided training and access to our digital money guidance toolkit to community partners across the UK. Being able to monitor and report the impact on participants’ digital financial resilience led to extended funding. It is also the foundation of our scale-up plans right now, developing relationships with trusted services working locally to create universal access to our programme that is currently yielding gains of around £1,500.
We built a money guidance service for struggling Stonewater Housing tenants and, in 2021, entered into partnership with We Are Group to deliver something similar to renters with L&Q Housing. DWP commissioned us to step in for claimants in financial crisis and 1,100 participants undertook six or twelve weeks’ money coaching to share financial gains of £1.3 million between them. The end of the pandemic was in sight as the vaccine was approved for roll-out.
During lockdown, our team of peer workers stepped up to join our permanent workforce as money guiders, helping people ensure they could keep food on the table. Post-lockdown, we honoured the incredible work they’d done with the launch of ELE-Ments – a formal traineeship that acknowledged (and mentored) Experts through Lived Experience. Also in 2022, we penned our Community Pledge, promising people on low incomes: We see you; We hear you; We are you. As Russia attempted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, fuel prices rocketed.
EVERYTHING, MONEY-FIRST
In 2023, the UK government backed the development of our digital money health-check process with funding to transform into an adaptable money-first toolkit, tackling health inequalities, barriers to employment, and impact of the climate on low-income households. Around then, AI platforms became publicly accessible. In 2024, we delivered our money-first response to mental health, addressing financial anxieties and freeing up emotional bandwidth to cope with more than keeping on top of bills. A new Labour government promised change.
Our #TakeWhatsYours campaign was launched in 2025, led by the voices of communities blocked from services by stigma and a sense of alienation. Global uncertainty ramps up as Donald Trump takes office. Our money-first climate action programme, Rainy Day Money, was followed in 2026 by a new programme to reduce health inequalities. We also celebrated twenty years in operation… just as the prospect of the world’s first trillionaire became a possibility.
Had anyone predicted the global events, they’d have been written off as insane. They don’t exactly put Clean Slate in context but sure as hell remind us our work won’t be over for a while. If nothing else, our money-first work on climate action should remind us of the need to wake everyone up to the threat – and the cost – of social and economic upheaval still to come.
Some things change, some stay the same, I guess. It would be easy to observe that while the world would be all but unrecognisable to our 2006 selves, financial hardship has remained a constant. For all the progress, (Obama’s election, same-sex marriage, climate action), the persistence of financial hardship reminds us that systemic change is slow. At Clean Slate, we’re not waiting. Our money-first approach tackles the root causes of poverty and every injustice flowing from it.
So what’s next? The world may keep spinning, but Clean Slate will keep pushing for change from the ground upwards. As we enter our third decade, financial resilience isn’t just about surviving today’s crises, it’s about building a fairer tomorrow… money-first.
Do you work with local people struggling with the cost of living? Is there limited money guidance available at your place of work? Get in touch if you’re interested in becoming a Community Partner delivering Quids in! Money Guidance.