Bonus | Our project Are We Human has launched!
The latest Paranting project is live, and we're giving you all the info you could want.
Hi paranters!
What an honour and exciting privilege it is to finally tell you that #AreWeHuman has launched! We’re bringing all our subscribers a bonus newsletter this week to tell you all about it. (So don’t worry, you’ll still get your regular Paranting fix.)
Our latest project is the micro-website arewehuman.uk—a solutions journalism project answering the question “Are we human, or are we claimants?”
At Paranting, we always aim to represent the marginalised parenting community.
As an editorial team, we wanted to use our own experiences of being on welfare to destigmatise claimants by centring the stories of marginalised paranters who have relied on Universal Credit and other forms of welfare.
You can see our lovely mugs explaining more about why we chose to embark on this project in a video on the homepage.
In creating this microsite, we spoke to some incredible people whose stories reflect both the wildly varying circumstances leading to relying on welfare as well as the litany of issues with the Universal Credit and welfare system.
We heard from Kae who experienced financial domestic abuse. She explains how her escape routes were cut off because she was so financially insecure on insufficient Universal Credit payments.
Lilly explains how claiming disability benefits is both traumatising and arduous, made more difficult by a lack of step-free accessibility in the room assessing mobility for wheelchair users.
For Dave, being an unpaid carer had consequences, as leaving employment to become an unpaid carer was less of a choice and more of a necessity, done out of love and care for someone else.
Young school-leaver Jason told us about his experiences of the Kickstart employment scheme, but also why there should be more opportunities and pathways for school leavers.
Universal Credit claimants are humans too; they’re more than just a number; they have real lives.
We hope that by creating this project, available and accessible for free to everyone, we can create awareness of the flaws in the welfare system and inspire action to improve it.
Our Resources page offers you a chance to lend solidarity, with an easy-to-use template for a letter to your MP, asking them to push for an independent review of the Universal Credit and wider welfare system.
You can also sign an official parliamentary petition on our site calling for a review, as well as find links to helpful resources if you or someone you know is struggling on Universal Credit or legacy benefits.
Hopefully, you feel inspired to action by our project and, after reading our stories, we also hope that you will contribute to the costs of production if you can.
Working with our partner, Axate, we’ve enabled one-off contributions to Paranting to help fund more projects like this, as well as the option to donate more if you can.
We’re working on a video to show you why we’ve chosen to partner with Axate to help fund independent journalism projects like this, which we’ll show you very soon.
We also work with Outvoice so we can offer more work to underrepresented parent writers, illustrators, photographers and more.
As always, we welcome all feedback on our project as well as any stories of your own that you’d like to share with us to help grow #AreWeHuman.
Thank you for your continued support in our projects, paranters.
We promise: your cheerleading of our all-working class women editorial team means the world to us as we try and navigate the world of independent journalism.
Thanks for coming along on the ride!
