By Alan Buckle, CPAG Chair
This year marks 55 years since CPAG 
was founded in Toynbee Hall in east London in 1965. A campaigning organisation fighting to raise awareness of and find solutions to family poverty, CPAG also started the welfare rights movement, collaborating with a new wave of campaigners to establish rights to social security.
Amid full employment and greater prosperity than ever before, those campaigners would find it unimaginable that there could be more, not less, child poverty in proportion to the population half a century on.
The social security system today, through significant cuts, has pushed more families with children into poverty. Worse still, the face of child poverty is getting younger - 53% of poor children are under 5, and there is increased in-work poverty now that 70% of children in poverty have at least one working parent.
CPAG has a vision - one where we have a fully-developed child poverty strategy for the future and a vision for a social security system that both prevents and reduces child poverty. In the 2000s, a strategy across government lifted over a million children out of poverty. And today we need a social security system that both supports and protects people, not one that punishes and mistrusts them; and one which allows people to thrive, rather than just survive.
All of us rely on publicly funded services and support at different times in our life. Social security needs to be strengthened to ensure it is there for all of us when we need it. Over the next few years, we have ambitious plans to gain support for a more effective social security system and a new child poverty strategy, so all children can have a secure future. We need your help to do this.
Leave a lasting gift for future generations of children living in poverty.
As a Child Poverty Action Group member or supporter, you’ve already made an incredible difference, offering families on low income and in poverty a chance at a better life for themselves and their children. By choosing to remember CPAG in your will, you can do the same for future generations.
Not only will you be leaving children and their families with hope for the future, you will ensure CPAG has the long-term funding needed to pave the way for more vital research, campaigning and solution-focused advocacy to make financial hardship caused by poverty a thing of the past.
For decades, people have trusted CPAG to use their gift in the best possible way to ensure it has the greatest impact for years to come. Many of our successes over the years have only been made possible thanks to these gifts.
If you would like any further information about remembering CPAG, please visit cpag.org.uk/giftinwill or contact Alice Morgan on 020 7812 5222 or [email protected]