Cuppa with a Change Maker
Beth: People, place and poverty
☕🫖You pour the brew, I’ll provide the content
In these ‘Cuppa with a Change Maker’ blogs, I’ll feature a guest that is passionate about social justice and tackling educational inequality.
I’m especially excited about this edition of Cuppa with a Change Maker because it features someone I have the real privilege of working closely with. Beth Major is the Chief Executive of The Junction, a remarkable children, young people, and families’ charity that has been rooted in the Tees Valley since the early 1990s.
Through my own work with Tees Valley Education, I’ve come to know Beth and her incredible team well. We are fortunate to be working alongside them as part of a significant investment from the National Lottery Community Fund in Middlesbrough, supporting place-based solutions to better understand and tackle the region’s stubbornly high poverty rates. Having seen The Junction’s approach first-hand, I can say with confidence: they are not just delivering services, they are reshaping what community-rooted, poverty-informed support looks like.
So, grab a cuppa and meet Beth!
I’m Beth Major, and I’m the Chief Executive of The Junction.
We’re a locally Tees-based charity working with children, young people, and families across Tees Valley. While The Junction has existed in some form since the early nineties, it’s been in its current structure since 2008.
Our work is broad. We provide services that respond to challenges many young people face; emotional wellbeing, mental health, the responsibilities of being a young carer, barriers to activities, or struggles with employment. But beneath all of that sits a simple truth: people are not their issues.
Life in the Tees and North East can be complicated, and pretending that one programme or service will ‘fix’ everything isn’t honest or effective.
Too often people get lost in systems, lose faith, and become harder to engage.
Our commitment is to walk alongside families, not ‘do to’ them, and to empower children and young people so they don’t need us forever. In fact, one of the greatest compliments we hear is: “I don’t need you anymore”
Youth worker to Chief Exec
As a headstrong teenager, the only professional relationship that really made a difference to me was with a Youth Worker. That role model showed me what was possible and it inspired me to do the same for others.
I’ve worked with children and young people ever since, across public and charitable sectors.
At heart, I care deeply about ensuring that children, young people, and families have an equal chance in life… whether that’s opportunities, relationships, education, or simply having their needs met.
I have been leading The Junction for seven years, navigating challenges that would have tested any organisation: rapid growth, resource competition, the pandemic, a cyber-attack, a cost-of-living crisis, and spiralling demand!
Those challenges have been real.
But they’ve been nothing compared to the challenges our families face. It’s been a privilege to see our offer, our team, and our response grow stronger in that time. It’s also truly awe inspiring seeing families and young people impacted by this work. You can read more about stories such as the one below over on our website.
Confronting child poverty
For years, The Junction developed services around need. But a few years ago, something shifted:
We started asking not just, what issues do children and families present with? but what causes these issues in the first place? Again and again, the answer came back: poverty.
Poverty touches everything. It shapes opportunities, friendships, health, education, and family relationships. And crucially, for a charity like ours, it blocks engagement. If children are hungry, cold, or without basic essentials, how can they fully benefit from emotional support or skills programmes? We realised we couldn’t just ‘work around’ poverty.. we had to face it head-on.”
My own experiences have shaped my understanding and work too.
I grew up in the North East in the 1980s, in a mining family. Economic change and hardship were everywhere. We were lucky in some ways, but I saw others who weren’t. I learned early on that life is fragile. You can do everything ‘right’, work hard, act responsibly, and still find yourself in poverty.
That’s why compassion matters. I’ve never believed any of us are very far away from needing help.”
Giving dignity
Through coproduction with families, The Junction has reshaped its services to tackle poverty directly. Practical responses included:
Meeting basic needs: food at every point of contact, personal hygiene banks, clothes, transport support.
Accessibility: ensuring poverty never prevented participation.
System navigation: helping families access grants, fuel vouchers, and wider support.
Then came a breakthrough: The Junction Multibank.
Launched in November 2024, the Multibank is part of a national movement founded by Amazon and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The idea is simple but impactful: businesses have surplus goods; charities know the people who need them.
In less than a year, The Junction Multibank has distributed over 1.5 million items to more than 150,000 people across Tees Valley, working with over 1,000 referral partners including schools, social workers, and community organisations. But this is far more than distributing parcels across Teesside and the North East.
What makes it impactful is the way it combines practicality with compassion:
A child receiving trainers so they can take part in PE.
A family celebrating a birthday with dignity.
A young person returning to school with the equipment they need to belong on equal terms.
These are more than items or gestures of goodwill. They’re messages of care, hope, and belonging. It is a privilege to meet immediate need through this approach.
Place, people and provision
The Junction isn’t stopping here.
With new place-based support in Middlesbrough, shaped through partnerships and system-level collaboration, the charity is focusing on those areas of greatest need. The aim for us is clear: to move families out of crisis and begin to break the cycle of child poverty in the Tees Valley.
We’re not done… far from it.
There’s so much more to do to equalise life chances for children and young people. But we’re making an impact, and with the right partnerships and investment, I truly believe we can change the story of poverty in this region.
Thank you Beth and team!
Beth and her team at The Junction remind us that tackling poverty is not about charity; it’s about justice, dignity, and creating the conditions where every child can thrive. Their work shows what’s possible when services are rooted in compassion, shaped by coproduction, and bold enough to confront poverty directly.
This is why I’m proud to work alongside Beth and The Junction. Together, we’re building something rooted locally and through partnerships: a community-driven, place-based response to one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Find out more about the work of the Junction and some of the insightful case studies demonstrating the impact for local people and our region below.
The Junction: Case Studies of individual and collective impact
The Junction: Multibank in Teesside
Connect with Beth on LinkedIn
🫖 Fancy a cuppa?
Could you be one of my next guests?
Here's a link that will take you to a quick form about the blog series. I'll be running 1-2 a month, so I would love to add prospective authors to the schedule.
Please do pass the link on to other change makers you might know of.
Ideas for content might include:
Particular project making a difference to the lived realities of hardship for others
Innovative approaches to understanding and/or tackling inequalities
Signposts of further support, free resources etc on a specific issue
Ideas or examples do not have to be school based
I’m happy to promote approaches, strategies and ideas - but avoid using the blog as a sales pitch for a particular product or traded offer please! (Unless it makes sliced bread look like a prehistoric idea….)