By Kevin Gopal
You can read this article in full on The Lead here

Both of Tonia Nixon’s phones are ringing. On the other end of the one she can answer is a father with a six-month baby in desperate need of a cot. The call she can’t respond to at the moment probably comes with a similar request.

Nixon is sitting at a table between the kitchen and the clothes racks of Tees Community Hub, which she founded in a New Skelton housing association building in 2020. But she runs a period poverty service too and a community furniture shop, and helps homeless people, addicts and ex-convicts as well – “the people that no one else wants to help”. The phones don’t stop ringing.

“People find me,” says Redcar-born Nixon, a pub licensee for 27 years before turning to full-time charity work. “I don’t go searching for homeless people. I don’t go wandering the streets trying to be a hero. People have always come to me or people are sent to me.”

Nixon tells the caller she can help, even adding on a couple of things with the cot, if he pops in in a few days. But he’ll need a referral first, maybe from a housing association, a doctor or a church. She’s a go-to person in an area with some of the worst deprivation statistics in the country and public services barely standing after years of austerity.

Figures from the English Indices of Deprivation 2019 – the most recent published – starkly set out poverty in Teesside.

Middlesbrough is one of five local authorities with the highest proportion of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England. Hartlepool is also in the top 10. Along with Blackpool, Middlesbrough has the highest child deprivation.

Newer analysis of DWP figures by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals that the wider North East has the highest proportion of people in poverty of any region. JRF’s UK Poverty 2024 report also found that the worst child poverty in the country was in Middlesbrough (41 per cent), with Redcar and Cleveland only slightly behind at 35 per cent. 

Suicide rates have risen above the English average since 2017-2019 in Redcar and Cleveland, where self-harm is also above average.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said in February it was calling on all parties to address high levels of poverty nationally by introducing an ‘Essentials Guarantee’ into Universal Credit. The policy would cost an additional £22bn per year. A Labour spokesperson said: “Labour is committed to fixing this Tory failure. Our plan to tackle the root causes of poverty will grow the economy to put money back into people’s pockets, reform social security, create well-paid jobs, and deliver a bold, new cross-government child poverty strategy.”

Nixon’s charity work began more than 50 years ago when at age six she enlisted her mum’s help to hold jumble sales in aid of the Marske Cheshire Home. It continued with support for Redcar Lifeboat, Citizen’s Advice Bureau and the Teesside Socialist Clothing Bank. She adds historical context to the stats.

“Teessiders are naturally resilient but you can only take so many knocks. Going back to the 1960s, first we lost all the pits. Then all the towns became ghost towns. You look all along the Northumberland coast downwards - all the pits that were shut down, all the communities devastated.”

The steelworks, ICI, the big ports and fishing: “We’ve lost the lot.”

Nixon, who has had personal experience of mental health issues and addiction, worked in a variety of jobs, including mobile chef, after she left Wetherspoon’s pub trade, continuing to do voluntary charity work. She noticed that poverty and homelessness were growing still further in the area in 2018, including among in-work parents forced to use food banks.

“I knew I had to get up and running as a charity.”

Marshalling her research, she chose period poverty for an incisive start. With help from Tina Leslie’s Leeds-based organisation Freedom4Girls and Redcar and Cleveland Voluntary Development Agency, Tees Period Poverty was up soon. Using stock from Hey Girls, a social enterprise that sells period products on a buy one, donate-one model, and donations, it was quickly supporting 700 women a month via a network of more than 60 charities and service providers.

“Without Hey Girls products we wouldn’t be able to support the amount of people we support across Teesside,” says Nixon, also a member of the government’s Period Poverty Taskforce. With period poverty soaring, the government ended the “tampon tax” – VAT – in 2021. VAT on period pants was scrapped earlier this year.

“I knew tackling period poverty was going to have the biggest impact. It was numbers, plus personal experience. I don’t know one woman or girl who hasn’t used loo roll.

“Now we’re trying to switch to reusables, but if you’ve got no hot water and no way of drying and no washing powder then you can’t use reusables.”

The impact is self-evidently worse for women but, she adds, extends further, contributing to family breakdown and male problems.

“When you’ve got proud men who have worked all their lives and can’t put bread on the table and their wife’s left them – it happens a lot – how’s that dad going to feel when he’s got three daughters and one of them has to steal a tampon and he finds out?”

A clothing bank was born through personal connections when she was working with the local youth drug and alcohol team. One of its clients was a pregnant woman who had nothing to look after her coming baby.

“Do you know where we can get stuff? Yeah, I can get stuff. I knew people. I knew where to get the stuff. 

“When I turned up at her house with a brand new cot and new clothing - everything she needed for the baby for the first year - I knew her partner from a mental health service. He knew who I was. They said to me: ‘We’ll support you. People need clothing.’”

Soon they had set up the clothes bank in premises in Loftus and others followed. Then came Furniture4Everyone, which sold donated furniture from premises in Saltburn. That’s now on Marton Road in Middlesbrough, where customers can also buy shoes and kids’ clothing, as well as new double beds for £180 and singles for £100. The shop will be financially self-sustainable this month, says Nixon.

Furniture and clothing are also at the centre of Tees Community Hub, in New Skelton’s Wykeham Court Community Centre, peppercorn-rented to it by Beyond Housing. With around 40 flats around the centre, the housing association has been supportive from day one, says Nixon. But the hub also has a community cafe and puts on activities including bingo, arts and crafts.

“What we’ve done is give it back to the community,” says Nixon. “We say to these people, what do you want? There’s no use putting on arts and crafts if they don’t want to do it. There’s no use doing armchair aerobics if they don’t want to do it. Tell us what you want and we’ll give you it.

“You’ve got do your research. The first thing a funder will say to you is, how do you know that’s relevant?”

Work continues with homeless people, the drug, alcohol and mental health charity We Are With you and NEPACS, which supports prisoners and their families. From 700 people a month in its early days, TEES Community (it stands for “together, engage, encourage, support”) is now helping 12,000 a month.

“We have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, and a lot of contacts. That’s why we’re so successful,” says Nixon.

As the kitchen closes and the last of the regulars wave their goodbyes to her, two themes emerge: don’t set people up to fail, and maintain their dignity at all costs.

She talks of one rough sleeper with mental health and relationship problems. He’d been in a vulnerable position in a hostel before she helped him find accommodation in Grangemouth. But that wasn’t enough. She helped him, through donations and free fitting, get carpets, furniture and crockery.

“A beautiful house, he has, and he’s working and thriving. You haven’t just saved his life – you’ve given him a fresh start.

“That’s where the housing associations work with me, because I provide better tenants. There’s no point setting someone up to fail. If you’re going to stick them in there and they can’t afford the rent, they’re still addicted or they’ve got rent arrears they’re always going to fail. If you’ve got to give them a fuel voucher every month for a year, give them a fuel voucher.

“‘Oh, we don’t want people to get dependent on the help,’ some people say. Too late. Society’s made them dependent.”

Often people don’t want to ask for the help they need, and Nixon has her ways to avoid a direct route to embarrassing them. During Covid her charity had a chef cooking nutritional meals for the vulnerable and elderly but not everyone would engage.

Her team knocked on the doors of those they thought were isolated, telling them they were trying to grow tomatoes and would they look after one of their plants for a while.

“All we were doing was keeping an eye on them but doing it with dignity. Then we could come back next week and say we’d just been shopping – did they need any milk or anything. That way it didn’t feel like you were checking up on them.”

Or they would say they were teaching others how to use slow cookers and they had leftover shepherd’s pie. “I’ve brought you one. You don’t mind, do you?”

Money remains tight for the charity. There’s been support from Redcar and Cleveland Council but local authorities generally have little leeway to fund services.  Nixon insists she’s a good businesswoman but admits: “I was shit at funding because I’m too passionate. Some people refuse to work with me because they see me as difficult to work with and I’ve been told more than once: ‘You’re over emotional.’ And I am over-emotional, aren’t I?”

“And difficult to work with,” jokes Vicky Pointer, sitting next to her.

Nixon and two staff members are paid at the hub. At the furniture shop there are three paid employees. Everyone else, including Pointer, is a volunteer.

She met Nixon three years ago when her daughters picked up some period products. Struggling with mental health problems, she would barely leave the house but was soon helping with the collection and delivery of furniture, then working in the kitchen, sometimes six or seven days a week.

“I love it. I would be absolutely lost without it,” says Pointer, especially valuing her relationship with the customers and local residents at the hub.

The evident bond between the two – and the other volunteers – is highlighted on the charity’s YouTube channel, particularly in scenes when Pointer was named a Teesside Hero by the Teesside Charity in January. She helped Nixon with the successful bid for £60,000 from the National Lottery that enabled the Middlesbrough furniture shop last year.

Overall, says Nixon, TEES Community is financially sustainable for core costs for the next two years. She doesn’t share the perhaps idealistic hope that charities such as hers shouldn’t have to exist if public services were better funded.

“They should always exist. It’s more about community than charity. The charity should be natural. People need dignity and pride.”

As we finish, she offers The Teesside Lead the opportunity to buy some raffle tickets. It’s hard to say no to her.