Partnering with Children – My Story
Kids say the darnedest things and are often disarmingly frank.
Great Start Taita found that the ‘mouths of babes’ can lead to local improvements that are relevant and effective.
Not only that,having children involved throughout the project’s life teaches both them and the adults involved a thing or two about what it is to lead.
A Community wins with Periodic Detention
Periodic Detention (PD) workers are out in many communities every Saturday working as directed by our Justice system. At Great Start Taita, a decent dollop of respect and plenty of humour meant that a garden was rescued from the brink of going wild, PD workers started going the extra mile and community connections were nurtured.
It started with a new PD supervisor who ‘gets what Great Start is about’ and a handful of PD workers who were receptive to some warmth and the opportunity of a second chance, blend in some giving and receiving and ladle on lashings of encouragement, appreciation and opportunities for creativity. Mix well and bake in a warm oven for a few hours on a Saturday and you have the makings of a very special dish it seems.
“I don’t know what it is about this place, but there’s something here that makes them (the men and women doing community service hours) want to get stuck in….” has been a comment made by our regular Community Probation Supervisor at The Great Start House on Saturdays.
We started small by writing a letter about the list of jobs I made for the team each weekend. I kept it really chatty and not too formal, with a bit of humour. I soon found out that the most important thing though was noticing and acknowledging all their efforts from the last weekend and giving feedback – the more I did of this, the more work they did and their own initiative and creativity emerged – a win win situation!
Another secret ingredient has been food. Giving PD workers food! One week when I baked a chocolate cake, the next week one of the guys brought in some hinges and bolts from his own house to fix a gate he knew needed fixing – and I hadn’t even got around to putting the broken gate on the list yet. They raved and raved so much about the moistness of the cake that I ran off some copies of the recipe for them the following week and they snapped them up. One guy asked if he could take some of the artichokes home, as no one seemed to be using them, he told us how to cook them too. “Sure!” we said.
Variety and encouragement seem to motivate this team, they work hard but we don’t make it about breaking rocks in the hot sun. So far they have been involved in making one piece of art and I plan to give them another project to do entirely on their own. Their supervisor can’t believe how much they achieve in 3 hours at Great Start, compared to what would normally be 6 hours of work elsewhere.
A member of the PD team once commented to one of our team, “It’s for a good cause; we can see things progressing – it’s more worthwhile than clearing blackberry bushes”.
It’s amazing what good things can come out of building trusting relationships – one young guy shared that he and his partner were expecting their first baby very soon, but had concerns because they were having trouble finding a midwife (this is common in our area and many other areas). They lived in our neighbouring community of Naenae so we encouraged him to get his partner to come in the following week so that we could hook her up with our DHB midwife. She has now been seen by the midwife and all is going well!
Intent:
Connecting with some of our ‘harder to reach’ families, developing a sense of reciprocity and increasing a sense of wellbeing and belonging in your community.
Key Learnings:
- Treating people with respect and offering a positive work environment generates more good will and trust by creates a spiral of positives, transforming participation.
- Going that extra step is important as the results can be life changing for our families.
Key Outcomes: - Connecting in different ways with our community helps to ensure that as many people as possible have opportunities to find the support they need, for example a midwife.
Key Contact:
Kirsten Grenfell
Kirsten.Grenfell@barnardos.org.nz
Story by Kirsten Grenfell and Denise Bijoux.
June 2012
Read more; Community Probation wins in Taita
He Oranga o te rohe o Te Whakatōhea wellbeing survey
The time for reclaiming our iwi identity is upon us as we look forward, and at the same time, look back to the ways we once were.
To begin to do this, Whakatōhea Maori Trust Board developed and implemented a Wellbeing Survey to provide a clear and concise picture of our current position and status. 750 people who whakapapa to Whakatōhea and live in the Ōpōtiki community were interviewed.
Read more; He Oranga o te rohe o Te Whakatohea Wellbeing Survey
Ōpōtiki’s ‘Computers in Homes’ project
The importance of a skilled and work-ready community is vital for Ōpōtiki and the Eastern Bay of Plenty as aquaculture, tourism and other regional economic strategies progress.
Connectivity is a key part of this and computer skills are a “must have” for so much of the training and employment that is emerging.
While children get some access to computers at school, for many Ōpōtiki families there are not computers in the home and families cannot easily support their children’s on-line learning or advance their own skills. Thanks to a chance meeting over dinner at Victory Village in mid 2011, things were about to change.
Read more; Opotikis Computers in Homes project
Opotiki’s Murals
The “look” of a place has a big influence on how it “feels”, for locals and for visitors alike.
The Opotiki murals have been recognised globally. The Murals not only represent those who live there now but also those who have gone before, and aspirations for the future.
Read more; Opotiki Murals – community building through creative expression
The Motu Trails Cycle Project
The test of true community leadership was trialled in the East Coast with four organisations collaboratively working to construct and develop the Motu Trails Cycle Project.
The trails, which were officially opened in May 2012, have already attracted much attention and use by a number of visitors and locals and are considered a major attraction to the Opotiki and Gisborne Districts.
Read more; The Motu Trails Cycle Project
Enabling Change at Many Levels – Diana’s Story
Initiative: Good Cents Porirua.Theme: Leading in and Leaderful
With the Good Cents course now being run from the Community Link centre in Porirua, there are now more and more referrals directly from WINZ. This has sometimes been challenging at an organisational level, and also at an individual level. In several cases, WINZ clients have felt compelled to take part and do so only to achieve their aim of getting an advance. This is not how
Good Cents works and has led to some deeply challenging situations, and ultimately significant changes for some of these people.
Many WINZ clients in Porirua are now directed to enrol in Good Cents courses instead of doing traditional budgeting. Recent regulation changes mean that should a WINZ client apply for an advance, they must complete the ‘budgeting activities’ as required by law. Essentially this means that they need to show how they are spending their money with a view to understanding why they have no money. Good Cents, on the other hand, assists course participants to develop strategies for managing their money and reducing their debt, including learning about creating their own budget. These are quite different approaches and can mean that some people arrive on day one of the Good Cents course without completely understanding what the Good Cents course does.
In fact, some individuals are irritated by the requirement to provide WINZ with a budget at all – what they are wanting is a quick fix to what is often a stressful situation, and producing a budget slows this process down. This irritation can be very much amplified when they also find out that Good Cents will not develop a budget for them, and that they have to do it themselves. Further adding fuel to that fire of irritation is that sometimes it is not until day one of the course that WINZ clients realise that the course will take 8 sessions to complete. Clearly, what Good Cents offers is not a quick fix.
From what can be a highly emotional start, however, some participants truly shine. For example, when Diane (not her real name) started the Good Cents course in early 2012 and realised all of these things she was mightily annoyed. Even so, she grumpily knuckled down to preparing her budget. In that process, and with Good Cents help, she discovered she had power to change a lot about her situation and that she could make these changes herself, instead of blaming others. Several alternative ways of managing her financial situation became apparent as Diane began to work on better understanding her situation herself. For example, she realised that instead of paying off fines, she could possibly work them off. She could certainly create the time required far easier than creating the repayment money. She then asked Good Cents if she could do those hours with the Wesley Community Action in the Porirua office (where Good Cents is also based). Good Cents did not offer Diane a place to complete her community service; she had to ask for it herself. Since then Dana has begun to repay her fines by working in the food bank and will soon also complete community service hours by providing support on the next Good Cents course.
The key shift here is that Diane is now taking responsibility for her own situation and has learnt or realised that she always had skills that have enabled her to change that. From a space of annoyance and distrust, Diane now feels believed in and empowered to take action for herself. This also means that she respects both herself and others more too.
This space is deliberately constructed – Good Cents takes a ‘light touch’ approach (Blake and Pasteur, undated; Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007) in order to create space in which course participants can learn to do things for themselves around their money and wider lives. The course strongly links with each participant’s wider life experiences and aspirations so as to sustain the learnings achieved on the course over a much longer period. By being firm about what the Good Cents course will do and flexible about how this might play out with individual participants, different styles of personal leadership are allowed to emerge and these in turn contribute to wider lifestyle changes.
In Diane’s case, her personal changes with regard to her finances have contributed to other changes in her household. Undertaking community service to pay off her fines initially contributed to an increased chaos in her home because her partner had to care for their young son and do more household related tasks than previously. With Diane’s growing confidence, these issues were worked out and her partner has begun to grow in confidence too. He is now more confident as a parent and is very supportive of her looking for paid employment as well. Both of them now have more aspiration and are actively involved in the creation of their own future.
Intent: The Good Cents course assists course participants to create their own budget in order to develop strategies for managing their money and reducing their debt
Key Learnings:
Even when the course content has not been fully described, those who chose to participate are already making an active choice. Taking a light touch approach throughout the course means that from the get-go participants make their own decision about participating. This underpins the subsequent decisions they make about significant changes in their lives.
By not providing easy solutions, course participants must step into their own power, and this is critical for sustaining changes.
Changes in one person can influence wider changes in their lives, such as with others in their households and this helps create supportive and empowering contexts hat also help to sustain new ways of living.
Key Outcomes:
Good Cents courses utilise the emotional situations that accompany some of the WINZ-referred participants to help those people move beyond a blaming mentality and into a space of self-empowerment and respect for both self and others.
Increased confidence to imagine a different and more self determined future and begin working towards it for course graduates.
Key Contact person:
Matt Crawshaw
Good Cents Coordinator
Wesley Community Action
Email: goodcents@wesleyca.org.nz
Ph: 04 237 7923
References:
Blake, R. and Pasteur, K (undated). Learning from practice. Empowering community organisations: A ‘light touch’ approach for long term impact. http://practicalaction.org/docs/ia1/empowering-community-organizations.pdf
Taylor, M., Wilson, M., Purdue, D., and Wilde, P. (2007). Changing neighbourhoods: The impact of ‘light touch’ support in 20 communities. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/changing-neighbourhoods-impact-light-touch-support-20-communities
Story written by Denise Bijoux and Matt Crawshaw.
June 2012.
Making Good Cents in Porirua
Completing a Good Cents course has had many benefits for Kay (not her real name.) A $2,000 debt with the IRD has been cancelled; she has managed to repay outstanding debts with two loan companies that were costing her $110 per week; and, perhaps the main benefit, she has regained confidence in herself.
Wesley Porirua Team Leader, Makerita Makapelu noted that when Kay started the 8 week programme, she was by far the quietest in the group.
Life had not been easy for Kay. Her mother died when she was 12 years old, and although her working father could sustain the family financially, Kay chose to leave home at the age of 14 to go and live with a sister. Leaving home and learning to cope on her own was a huge ‘wake-up call’ for Kay and she found herself struggling. A brief attempt to return to school at 15 was unsuccessful, and by the age of 16 she found herself ‘on the benefit’. By 18 she was pregnant and living with another sister to make ends meet.
Sharing accommodation with others is not something that a much wiser Kay now recommends, “I won’t share my home again. I like to do my own thing.” Sharing accommodation back in those days often meant loaning money to help friends and family. It was perhaps during this time, that Kay developed a habit for loaning and borrowing money, without being fully aware of the consequences.
“I remember on occasions being asked by a friend for money, so I would give it to them even though I was often in debt myself,” recalls Kay. However, as Kay later realized, her friends’ money worries often occurred because their partners were “playing the pokies, or drinking,” and Kay’s loan money only served to encourage these bad habits. Kay now recognises that her priority is looking after herself and her two sons, and that loaning or borrowing money is not as easy as it seems. There are repercussions.
Over the years Kay had approached Wesley Community Action in Porirua on several occasions, either for counselling assistance, or more recently for food bank assistance. On one of these visits in 2009, she was asked if she would like to participate in the Good Cents course, and decided to take up the opportunity.
One of the first exercises she completed on the programme was to record every item she was spending money on, for a whole week. She had never done this exercise before, and was amazed at what she learned. “It really opened my eyes. I had got into the habit of short term loans and was in debt with three different loan companies,” recalls Kay. It wasn’t big debt, but she was borrowing money to spend on things like video games for her oldest son. Her loans were costing her $202 per week.
The exercise also showed her how to cut back on her unnecessary expenses, and she quickly began to pay off two of the loan companies. However it wasn’t easy to turn her back on the comparative ‘easy money’ provided by the loan companies and, during a weak moment, she re-borrowed from one of the very companies she had just paid off.
The short term joy of having ready money again was followed by the realisation that she was back on the treadmill, struggling to pay debts. This learning was shared with others in her Good Cents group, and Kay moved quickly to repay the money she had just borrowed.
Part of Kay’s Good Cents programme involved learning to communicate and to talk about the issues of debt. The focus is on participants taking greater ownership and control of their journey to improved financial stability rather than traditional models of a professional budget advisor who decodes a person’s financial chaos for them. There’s also a strong emphasis on understanding the underlying ‘drivers’ of their difficulties – these drivers are frequently bound up with social and emotional issues. These were skills Kay put to good use when debt collector BayCorp rang her demanding payment of overdue school fees for her son’s education; armed with her ‘good sense’ skills, Kay quickly realized BayCorp were requesting weekly repayments that were well beyond her means, and negotiated a better outcome.
In the same way Kay faced up to an old debt with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) that had been ticking away for 16 years and had now grown to a debt of over $2,000. Negotiations with the IRD followed and eventually the debt was cancelled on hardship grounds.
Kay’s leader qualities are illustrated throughout her story. She is strong in her decision making yet reflective. She can admit mistakes and do something about them. She was able to ‘fail forward’ (Maxwell, 2000) on her journey – staying focused on the destination even when faced with disappointing experiences. These leader qualities may not have always led her onto pathways that were straight forward but they have certainly helped her to learn from her experiences, and create new pathways for herself on several occasions. Leader qualities are also evident in how Kay talks about the Good Cents programme: what she liked about the programme was that, “while other courses tell you what to do; Good Cents helped to put me in charge of my money, so it was me making the decisions, not someone else.”
In the process, Kay has found her confidence, and is clearly proud of her achievements. She has regular work in a local supermarket, her family is eating cheaper and more healthy food, and life is good. Looking ahead, her first priority is paying off the remaining loan, and beyond that she plans to save enough to take her family on holiday.
Given Kay’s new found confidence and her Good Cents skills, there is little doubt she will achieve her goals.
July 2012
Getting Started – the ‘Back2Back’ experience.
The Back2Back project emerged out of a joint funding proposal to the Department of Internal Affairs in 2008. With a multi-party partners group in place from the get-go, street-level engagement and neighbourhood-led development in Ranui and Massey got a huge boost from 2009 – 2012.
This story talks about the importance of a strong foundation and skilled workers in order to hit the ground running and enable the achievement of intentional outcomes over a relatively short period of time.
Read more: Download the PDF.
Changing the Common Story around Debt: Collective and individual financial transformation in Porirua.
Helping people to help themselves also helps communities grow resilience, especially when many diverse members of a community work together to create new opportunities and new ways of doing things.
At Wesley Community Action in Porirua, there has always been a strong focus and value placed on giving people respect and empowering and enabling them to take control in their own situations. This means there is a keen focus on how we can avoid creating “dependence on a social service” and instead growing support structures that help people to create new opportunities for themselves.
It was out of this value that a conversation around the food bank arose: “Why do people still need to use our food bank, even when times are good?” From speaking with people that accessed the food bank the answer was at least partly found in the fact that approximately 80% had debt that they were not managing to keep up with. For a whole variety of reasons people were finding themselves “borrowing money from their future to pay for today” leading to an inevitable downward spiral which they struggled to stop.
This situation means that wealth and potential are being drained out of the local communities. Concerned about this, Wesley began a community-led enquiring process to understand how and where transformation could come from. This process later became the Good Cents initiative. Early on in the initiative’s development, it became clear that people tended to favour a range of proposed solutions to the problem of debt. Some said financial literacy needs to be improved or school banking reintroduced, some said that minimum wages need to be increased, while others said that churches play a key role in causing hardship or that “loan sharks” need to be regulated and interest rates capped. Yet, while none of these solutions are entirely wrong, neither are any of them entirely accurate or right. Good Cents staff observed that while pointing the finger at others may highlight aspects of the wider issue, it tends to absolve personal responsibility and ownership of the issue, and doesn’t often actually change the situation.
So, in 2007, Good Cents set out to tackle high interest indebtedness from a community-led development perspective, driven by the stories of indebted people themselves and working to engage the wider community and business interests. The course is embedded in a philosophy that encourages people to look at their own contribution to their financial situation and works to enable course participants to identify the positive actions they can take to reduce or eliminate their dependency on debt and grow their investment in their future.
At the same time, as Peter Block (2008) writes, an aggregation of significant personal changes does not lead to community transformation and, in fact, personal changes are very difficult to sustain without environmental changes too. To move towards community transformation, Good Cents needed to bring many different individuals and small diverse groups who are doing the same thing, even when they are from very different positions and walks of life, together. As Block also notes, the value of purposeful connection with others is the beginning of the future we want to create together. From such a place, action and problem solving will follow.
And so it has been for Good Cents, both within the courses as participants learn that others are in similar situations and in how the Good Cents course engages with the wider ‘system’ and environment. This wider engagement was demonstrated in April 2010 when Wesley Community Action was supported by Porirua City Council, the Todd Foundation and Inspiring Communities to host a Beyond the Cycles of Debt: What would it look like? Forum in Porirua. At this gathering, the whole system was in the room. High paid executives, bankers and government people rubbed shoulders and shared ideas with beneficiaries, local cultural leaders and some of the local lenders: these were people who were scared of one another at the outset. Then, at mixed tables, they considered ‘What is it that we could create together for our future that we can’t create alone?’ by listening to the wide range of experiences in the room. This was accompanied by the drawings and talking and creative energy as they worked together on ideas of a community where there wasn’t a high level of debt crippling the community. And out of it all was born a core leadership group dedicated to working out ways of how to move forward together, focusing on the things in common and the goal of being beyond cycles of debt. These people were already no longer scared of one another.
Bringing many perspectives to the table means learning to rely on one another’s different strengths and builds interdependencies around what diverse parts of the community have in common. For Good Cents, this has focused particularly on the common vision of a community that is free from a spiral of uncontrolled debt and able to build a future. Such a process can lead to a change in community direction that builds power and resilience because, after all, those who have the power to bring the possible future into existence are those who create its social fabric and interdependent social capital. Just like the successful churches in the area, the possibility of community transformation around debt lies in the organisation of engagement and structure of belonging by and for local people. The belief is that by working together as a community in ways that respect diversity, communities in Porirua can move away from the common story about debt.
By the end of the day in April 2010 five themes were identified for further development to move beyond the cycle of debt: Growing community education around money management, engaging the lending sector in the conversation about responsible lending, working to shift public discourse around the debt – wealth paradigm, working with strong community groups and identifying gaps in secondary education. More importantly, perhaps, by the end of the day Good Cents had the commitment of a core group of people to develop these themes further. Plus, and perhaps this is most important, they had strengthened the social fabric of Porirua in the process.
The next steps are devising actions that are less about problem-solving and more about future generation because, as Peter Block notes, “we cannot problem-solve our way into fundamental change”. Problem solving leads to an alternative future only when it is embedded in a context based on strengths, relatedness and generosity. Not surprisingly, this stage is an evolving, emerging and groaning stage because it involves an entirely new way of thinking, talking and knowing about the role of money in our lives. It’s a shifting of the public discourse around debt, a change in conversation, language and the tasks involved. This shift means less focus on budgeting and more on creating space for people to think differently about their whole life and how their finances fit into the things that matter to them. It’s about working with what we have together as communities (including the huge knowledge local lenders have) and creating new paradigms in how we work together and with who.
Intent: Working together to make changes that generate prosperity in Porirua.
Key Learnings:
- Reducing or eliminating the negative aspects of debt is complex and involves working at multiple levels at the same time – individual responsibility needs to be contextualised within the connections, ties and trust between people and organisations, the way we do things around here and the systems and structures within the community and beyond.
- Similarly, getting the ‘the whole system in the room’ brings together diverse thinking in the same place. This highlights common ground amongst individuals, of which some had previously presumed to be little. This initiated a strong desire to work together towards newly discovered common goals.
- This way of working tends to be slower and more messy, it relies on busy people acting often out of good will, and makes good leadership really essential.
Key Outcomes
- A core group of diverse people to develop a strategic plan for Good Cents, and to contribute to auctioning that plan.
- A new and emerging model of working with and empowering people to grow financial stability and independence (through the Good Cents Course).
- Growing network of relationships across Porirua that are thinking similarly about the importance of financial stability as distinct from a primary focus on managing debt.
Key contact
Matt Crawshaw
Good Cents Coordinator
Wesley Community Action
Email: goodcents@wesleyca.org.nz
Ph: 04 237 7923
References
Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. Berret-Koehler Publishers Inc., San Francisco, Ca.
Story by Matt Crawshaw and Denise Bijoux.( June 2012)