Why a quilt? 

Before entering the archive, it is important to understand why the metaphor of a quilt is central to this project.

The Poverty Truth Community is made up of many people, experiences and moments that do not fit neatly into a single story. The digital quilt offers a way of holding these together without smoothing them out or forcing them into one narrative. It allows individual memories, objects and voices to sit alongside one another, connected by relationships, care and shared purpose.

In the reflections below, community researcher, Caroline Mockford and Elaine Downie, Community Co-ordinator of the Poverty Truth Community, explains how the idea of the quilt emerged, what it represents, and why it felt like the right way to tell the Community’s story. Their words speak to the messiness, practicality and strength of a quilt that is made to be used, carried and shared - not displayed at a distance.

We invite you to listen and to think about how this metaphor shapes everything you will encounter in the archive.

The warmth of the quilt supported you mentally and physically.  But when you are at your worst, you huddle in the middle, in the middle of the quilt. Thats where you get the most warmth and support. And that's where you feel safest. 

Caroline Mockford, PTC Community Researcher

When we were thinking about how to tell the story of the Poverty Truth Community, of a movement for people, it was quite difficult because for each person involved, it's something different. And although people might have been involved in similar pieces of work, they've experienced that in a different way. And if you were to ask a roomful of people for their highlights of the Community, they would come out with perhaps a whole load of different highlights.  

And I’ve not always been very good at writing down the story, and we've done so many different things that it can feel hard to keep a hold of it. And they're written on scraps of paper, on post-it notes, on little bits of film that are lost on a DVD somewhere. And it began to feel like a patchwork quilt, of lots of different pieces of fabric that are really important to people, lots of different images and pictures, all sitting side by side.  

But they don't just sit side by side. There's something about Poverty Truth that binds them together. And so it was a quilt that was sewn to be practical; it wasn't going to be a beautiful quilt that you would hang on a wall that was perfectly planned and cut out properly. It was a messy quilt that was being created as it happened, as everybody brought a different piece of material, a piece of fabric and something that they could spare and something of their own experience. It got bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger.  

And it wasn't a quilt for hanging on the wall because actually, when you look at all those moments together, all those things that important to people together, it is something very beautiful. But it wasn't sewn together in a beautiful way. And it also wasn't just for hanging on the wall because it was a practical quilt, it was about keeping people warm, about providing support, about being useful and being used.  

I remember somebody early on saying that this can’t be, what we're creating can't be another anti-poverty organisation because there are already too many of them. This has to be something useful and that creates change. So the quilt is something that gets used, that gets wrapped around you, that gets put on a bed, that gets taken out to the garden.  

So it's the layers of the quilt then become really important and the pictures that you see immediately, and then the pictures that you see when you look at it a bit closer, and then the feeling of it, the thickness of it and, the back of it with all the threads that are tied on and are messily sewn, the stitching becomes much more apparent. And I think when we when we first began talking to a few Community members about this idea, they felt that that was a really important one and it did picture really clearly what Poverty Truth was, and the best way of sharing that story.  

And particularly at this time when we were reimagining our work and trying to learn from what we'd already learnt and trying to write that down and this kind of fear that we would lose it - what if we run out of funding? We can't continue. Where does that story go? And what if we all moved away to different places? Who carries that story and what we share? So there's this real need to put it down. But sometimes when you pin something down in writing and in a report, you lose the life to it and the moments that make it strong.  

So,  the quilt for people felt like a really good way of sharing that and sharing that for ourselves to something that we can feel proud of and to say somebody remembered that thing I’d forgotten about that. Or then that's really interesting how many people mentioned a cup of tea or a show or a shell on Iona beach. But also that it tells a story for other people too, that are interested in this way of working, and to learn a little bit more, or to see how their own kind of way of working fits in with that as well. 

Elaine Downie, Community Co-ordinator Poverty Truth Community