My name is Imogen Moore. I have been a community organiser with Citizens UK for the past three years. Growing up with South African parents who had ensured that from an early age I understood about the injustice that was apartheid in their country, I had early on been introduced to the debates and realties surrounding racial, political and economic inequality. A subsequent trip as a 15 year old to Ghana brought further awareness to my understanding of global inequality and sealed the deal in terms of my fledgling career plans. I later began a degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies. However arriving in London as a 19 year old what I wasn’t expecting to find was a similar picture of racial, economic and political inequality to the one I had hoped to play a part in changing in farther flung corners of the worlds.

In my second year I attended a talk by a fellow community organiser who described how member churches and mosques of the East London Alliance had by building their power and an innovative targeted campaign they had been able to get hundreds of employers to a pay a living wage (a wage substantially more than the legislated minimum wage) to low wage employers which had resulted in putting money in the back pockets of thousands of the poorest people in London. All the while community leaders for whom this was an issue had remained at the forefront of this campaign negotiating with those in power. The excitement this story sparked in me was the beginning of first a period as a volunteer with Citizens UK, an MA in Community Organising and then later a job as a community organiser. More recently I have found myself both living and working as an organiser in the London borough of Southwark.

There have been two important experiences which have led me to the conclusion that community organising has untapped potential to improve children’s health and education outcomes in a targeted and significant way. The first was my introduction to Joseph Duncan who runs a youth project called youth Futures on the Wyndham estate in Camberwell. Youth Futures has provided intensive support through weekly sessions and mentoring for young people aged 5 – 21. Many of these young people despite the hard work of the Youth Futures staff have slipped through the net of education, health and social support.

The second experience has been leading on a collaborative project between the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London and our