Three days under the hood

Netwerk tegen Armoede is the umbrella body of 61 associations where people living in poverty speak for themselves, from Ûze Plekke in Bruges to T’ANtWOORD in Turnhout. What gets said there, the network turns into policy work: dossiers, recommendations, poverty impact assessments, campaigns. They do it alongside the Belgian and European anti-poverty networks.

The design came from DearBrand, the build and the upkeep from us. It says so at the bottom of every page: Site by Major Tom & DearBrand, since 2020.

Since 2019 the site has published 893 news items: news, dossiers, recommendations, personal stories and poverty impact assessments, each tagged with themes. Seventeen of them, from housing and debt to digitalisation and climate. The overview filters on theme and category at the same time, and every theme also has a page of its own.

For the weekly mail there is a separate page the editors fill themselves: flip an item on and it joins the week’s selection. Select, copy, send. No newsletter tool that first demands a training course.

You can give once through Stripe or monthly by direct debit. The difference with most donation forms sits in the first dropdown: you decide which association gets the money. All 61 are in there, plus the umbrella for anyone who prefers to give to the whole. So the money lands with the association in your own town, not in a big pot in Brussels.

Belgian law has required a national registry or company number for a tax certificate since December 2023, so the form asks for one. Behind the scenes the team keeps the donation list, with search, filters and an export for the bookkeeping.

The same installation runs a good deal more. A petition tool, where every signature arrives as its own page and the counter adds up by itself. Conference sign-ups, with their own list and export. And full campaign sites inside the same site: 17 October, memoranda, yearly reviews, the Yearbook on Poverty and Inequality. The team sets those up without calling us.

The directory of those 61 associations, by the way, is pulled live from their own database. When an association moves, the address on the site moves with it.

On 15 September 2026 the platform went from Kirby 3.5.6 on PHP 7.4 to Kirby 5.5.2 on PHP 8.4. The Brussels Platform Armoede subsite came along, because it sits on the same hosting account and PHP does not take sides. Backup first, verification after, zero differences.

Only then the thing the editors actually cared about. For years, making a word bold meant typing an HTML tag by hand. Every editorial field, text block and accordion row moved to a proper editor in the admin, and a migration script converted 1,132 pages along with it. The Brussels site got the same treatment, good for 461 language files in Dutch and French. Bold is a button now. Same lesson as at MethodiekFabriek, also a DearBrand design: the less an editor has to remember, the more gets written.

For years the newsletter sign-up did exactly one thing: fire a message at Mailchimp and ignore whatever came back. Everyone got “you’re subscribed”. People who already were, too. Errors, too. Bots, too.

Since 16 September the code reads Mailchimp’s answer, sends a confirmation mail for the double opt-in and says out loud when something fails. That same day the collapsible blocks started opening again after a quiet spell: one unclosed piece of HTML in a quote field. We checked 114 more fields with hand-typed HTML straight away, because that sort of thing rarely travels alone.

On 16 and 17 September the new training pages went live: a landing page with two filtered lists under it. Training sessions filter by type of offer and by who runs them, with the network’s own sessions first; past dates drop off by themselves. Products — books, films, methods, podcasts — filter by type and theme. Most of those products are made by the associations themselves, out of the voice and the knowledge of people living in poverty.

Whether the editors could handle it was settled quickly. Before we had finished admiring our own work, six products and an extra theme had appeared that we had not put there.