My colleague Moraene Roberts, who has died aged 66 of pneumonia, campaigned for people with the experience of living with poverty to have a public voice. From 2014 she was a member of the national coordination team for the anti-poverty and human rights charity ATD Fourth World.
At first, Moraene and her three children took part in activities run by ATD, particularly respite holidays that gave people a chance to get away from the stresses of daily life, and in 1990 she began volunteering for the charity. She offered peer support particularly to families coping with child protection proceedings.
Born in Liverpool, Moraene was the daughter of Patrick Nagel, an Irish immigrant who worked as a docker, and Margaret (nee Rawlinson), a nurse. She was named Maureen, and later adopted the Irish spelling Moraene. Malnutrition in infancy led her to develop rickets, which caused early onset osteoarthritis. When Moraene was 13, her mother moved with her to Hackney, east London, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Moraene’s schooling was affected by her physical disabilities and the belief, as she recalled, that “there was no point in teaching a girl who would never marry and would need to find work as a servant”. The residential special needs school Moraene attended taught her only how to carry out domestic chores and left her with weak literacy skills.
In 1976, Moraene was working in the Tiger Pub on Wick Road, Hackney, when her first child was born, during a marriage that ended in divorce – Moraene kept her married surname of Roberts. After taking a course, she was sent to manage pubs in times of crisis, usually being shifted from one pub to the next every six weeks.
When Moraene began volunteering with ATD Fourth World, at the urging of the charity’s then director, Jean-Luc Penet, she studied for GCSEs in an access to university course at Hackney Community College. She began studying sociology and psychology at the University of Greenwich, London in 1990, but had to stop when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Moraene often represented ATD at conferences and was one of those who lobbied successfully for the all-party parliamentary group on poverty, established in 1997, to hear from those with personal experience. She collaborated with academics at Royal Holloway London to bring people with experience of poverty and of child protection proceedings to teach courses to social work students. Between 2009 and 2019, Moraene helped to design the multimedia project The Roles We Play: Recognising the Contributions of People in Poverty.
She is survived by her children and eight grandchildren.
