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.
Finding hidden treasure in Nelson
When Nelson resident Marcia Griggs heard about the idea of a community treasure hunt at an Inspiring Communities training workshop she got excited and thought, ‘ I could do that!’
She’s not the only one. More than 20 community treasure hunts have now been held in Kiwi communities. The success of treasure hunts has been hugely assisted by Violence Free Waitakere who have created the Our Amazing Place website and an online toolkit to support people wanting to organise their own local events. They also support on online community of ‘treasure hunters’ to ensure resources, ideas and learning is shared and advice is readily at hand!
Community treasure hunts see local residents of all ages following a trail in their local community, stopping at a number of stations where a fun challenge, activity or task is completed and traded for a stamp for their ‘passport’. Treasure hunters then head to a final destination, like a local park or school for a shared picnic/BBQ and prizes. It’s all about having fun, connecting with others and discovering local treasure – special people, landscapes, resources, projects, facilities, groups, and services.
For Marcia, organising a community treasure hunt was a way to connect up and profile the many diverse community groups based in her community known locally as The Wood. “When I stopped to think about it, I realised how just many treasures we had tucked away that local residents might not even know about – like the Wood Turners Club, the Squash Club, the Bands Room, the Geneologists.”
Marcia shares her experience of organising a Treasure Hunt for 180 fellow neighbours earlier this year.
How did you get started? I looked up the Our Amazing Place website and spoke to others who had organised Treasure Hunts before to get a sense of what was involved. Then I went for a walk to map out a potential route and also discovered places I didn’t know existed though I’d lived in The Wood for 30 years. My original loop took about 1.5 hours but I had to cut that down so it would fit into the one hour walking timeframe.
Who helped make it happen?
I talked to others in my community who thought the event sounded like a great idea and everything just fell into place. I approached lots of organisations to see if they wanted to be part of it and nearly everyone said yes! I advertised for some help on the Volunteer Nelson website and the local Z Service Station owner responded straight away with 3 volunteers. My family were also great – my daughter designed the poster for the event, they helped out with registration, taking pictures and helping everyone get fed. 5+ a day gave us 300 pieces of fresh fruit and Fuji Xerox jumped on board and photocopied all the flyers.
Who came and what did they do?
I expected about 20-30 people and was totally surprised when 180 people turned up. Our trail had 13 stations and saw people having a go at squash, kite flying, trumpet blowing, 3 legged races, obstacle courses on bikes, and there were even water pistol wars at the local kindy. One station was also a photo booth and that was really popular! We all met back up at Results Gym at the end of the afternoon and there was a treasure chest draw for box of sponsored local prizes.
How did people find out about the Treasure Hunt?
Promotion happened through the local schools newsletters and we put up posters all over The Wood and dropped flyers in letter boxes. The local paper ran a great story prior to the event and we set up a face book page which was a great way to share pictures from the day and to thank everyone who’d helped out. Neighbourhood Support also helped spread the wood via local street coordinators in The Wood.
What was your highlight from the Treasure Hunt?
That everyone had so much fun – both station organisers and participants. There was such a buzz created and the feedback was incredible, the Wood really is an amazing place. Everyone wants to do it again next year!
While it was hard work, I learned a lot and that’s been helpful in planning another Treasure Hunt in the Victory Community of Nelson where I’m working.
For more information about Our Amazing Place and how to run a treasure hunt in your community go to the website or email Bronwyn Walters at oap@violencefreewaitakere.org
The Z Nail Gang – A film about Community.
The Z-Nail gangA film about community, made by community.
The feature film “The Z-Nail Gang” which was inspired by a community in the Coromandel that came together to fight for what they believed in, recently won Trustpower Supreme Community Award for its far-reaching impacts into the community of the Western Bay of Plenty.
The Z-Nail Gang had its world premiere in the community that supported it, Te Puke, on the 31 July 2014 and was then released around NZ during the months of Aug and Sept 2014.
Not only was the film about a community coming together, it was also made by a community coming together, volunteering their talents, resources and creativity towards a shared vision.
The hope is that this film will inspire other communities to discover and value their gold within. The production of The Z-Nail Gang has shown how communities can pull together and mobilize creative momentum that both empowers and unites.
Kylie DellaBarca Steel, the films producer, has been running workshops on “Asset Based Community Development” for the last three years with short- term Pacific RSE migrants through her charitable trust Fruit of the Pacific.
The workshops have been focused on the Pacific migrants identifying assets and resources in their home countries and developing plans to utilize them for community growth and empowerment. Having facilitated the implementation of a nation-wide oral health awareness programme in Vanuatu using this model, Kylie was keen to put the theory to practice in her own community. Inspired by the feature film script her husband and director Anton Steel had written about community, together they endeavored to marry feature film making with a community empowerment project.
Over the period of pre-production and production The Z-Nail Gang had over 400 individuals and organization giving their time and resources for free.
The film itself is not a typical low budget NZ feature film, but a hugely ambitious script which boasts of an ensemble cast of 10 key actors, helicopters, drill rigs, 20+ locations, stunt sequences, road blocks and hundreds of extras. With no funding to get the ball rolling, creativity, problem solving and a decisive choice to value contributions small or large, no matter how unlikely the package, were all characteristics needed as the team rallied this kind of support in the 3 months of pre-production.
The majority of key crew were local volunteers, with only a few technical roles being filled by out-of-town film professionals. Most key actors were cast from Auckland and housed beach front at Pukehina by generous home owners. Supporting and extras roles were filled by local people including the groups such as the Red Hats of Pukehina, the Highly Strung Ukelele Club and a class of kids and their parents from Pongakawa Primary.
The Wardrobe department was fitted out by tapping into the local op shops (Anglican, Methodist & Salvation Army) who provided access to all their stores of clothes, while Whakatane ITM supplied all the building resources for the Art Department.
The production catered for over 60 people every day over the 20 days of filming – and food and drink was generously provided by New World, Maketu Pies and Phoenix Organics amongst others and cooked by numerous local organizations including Rotary Club of Maketu, the Scouts, Maketu Ongatoro Wetlands Society, Tapuika Iwi Authority, Z Service stations and many more.
One of the most inspiring aspects of the filming was the value placed on learning and mentoring as part of the film crews’ kaupapa. 12 year old Rose McMahon was invited to come along as their key stills photographer and a team of children from Pongakawa Schools Film and Media Club filmed the action for behind the scenes and the making of features on the DVD.
What results from this wealth of diverse inputs, is a dynamic, highly resourced, inspirational film.
Community groups are now booking private screenings of the film and it will become available on DVD and Video on Demand in 2015 after it has been submitted to international film festivals.
It is Kylie’s hope that communities around NZ can be inspired by what can be achieved by focusing on the resources, the assets and the strengths and talents found within a community and apply this not just to feature film making, but to any project that sees people coming together identifying, building on and celebrating collective strength.
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)
People, place, reflective practice and transformational change: Makerita’s story
Initiative: Good Cents Porirua.Theme: Leading in and leaderful.
Personal journeys are interwoven with the places in which we live. Context can be critical, and this is just as important in work situations as it is in personal spaces. At Good Cents, creating an environment that supports, enables and encourages is a key aspect of the personal, relational, structural, and cultural changes that support transformational change.
The first thing you notice about Makerita Makapelu is her positivity. She’s a “the glass is half full” kinda gal. As a self-described angry person she was when she was young, Makerita has since recognised that the context in which she lived was a key part of how she presented herself, and how she was assessed by society. At that time she felt like an “invisible outsider” who was set up to fail, rather than being the recipient of compassion and support from wider society: “It was cold and non-forgiving. It was not a good space to be on that other side. And I’ve always remembered that. I learnt about compassion then by feeling the lack of it…but even back then I was wondering how to change that, and I thought ‘I’m never gonna be like that’”.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Makerita embarked on what was to be a somewhat difficult personal journey. The future did not look flash. In fact, at times, it wasn’t even considered.
However, as life unfolded Makerita’s pathway turned out not to be as was initially expected. In fact, those early experiences have provided Makerita with a very rich foundation from which to draw from in her work as team leader for the Wesley Porirua Good Cents course.
When she was young, Makerita felt the only thing she had any power over was to speak out when she saw injustice. Her leaderful qualities were already emerging, albeit with mixed results: “I had to get older to learn how to do that effectively and respectively though! I learnt, you know, you get more bees with honey and I could still show them what it was like on the other side and not get them angry about it”.
Reflecting on different situations gave Makerita insight into effecting change, and knowing when and how to step up or pull back. Learning to notice change and communicate and engage effectively has been a key foundation for the many pathways Makerita has walked, and the way she now works in Porirua. For example, understanding that environments reflect and perpetuate how life is experienced was made very clear to her when, after living elsewhere for some time, Makerita returned to Porirua. Almost immediately she noticed that the city had changed and thought “If this city can change who it is and what it looks like, then so can I.”
Looking back at that time Makerita reflects on how when she was young, those in her peer group reinforced her experiences of being out of place, angry and invisible. These relationships helped perpetuate the situation, and the systems she was involved with didn’t respond positively or constructively either. Learning to look for and see the perspectives of others has been hard going at times that’s for sure. Yet it is also those experiences that give her insight now with regard to the importance of environment, of relationships and of structures and systems. “Environment is really important to me… and I think being away for some time meant I could see things differently. It’s something about seeing what you are looking for only, and not knowing what you don’t know,” she says.
There is nothing like having been there and these experiences and insights contribute to what Good Cents is doing too. With a focus on financial wellbeing, Good Cents is working towards transformational community change in all four dimensions of the quadrants of change as described by Lederach and colleagues (2007).
At a personal level this means connecting with individuals working to identify the response and contribution that each person can make whether that is in the way they take ownership of their own finances or the way that they can support and encourage others towards greater financial stability whatever their role (from community leader to employee of a local lender). Relationally it means working to overcome the social taboo that personal finances and especially personal debt has, especially in its tendency to create shame and isolation that paralyses movement to change.
Good Cents also works to grow understanding of and influence in the structural systems that support financial stability and reduce dependence on borrowing including participating in government forums and local conversations to share perspectives and grow expertise. At a cultural level this means identifying and building trust and relationships with cultural leaders that ensure that Good Cents is appropriate and effective cross culturally while also encouraging a culture of growing financial stability. This stability could be a number of things from setting up savings accounts for children through to community based workshops.
Working in this way involves individuals, groups, organisations, and communities working together. It requires many leaders and relies on the development of a reflective practice that allows experiences to be generative, experimental and developmental. Skills develop through a range of life experiences that may not always be perceived or experienced as positive, but can be reflected on, understood as assets and channelled into constructive outcomes, at all levels.
Intent
Effecting change through reflective communication and leadership.
Key learnings:
- Some things are only learnt through experience. We each have a history and what we bring as individuals is as important to community-led development as what we create together as communities. All experience is valued, and contributes to our community ‘expertise’.
- Drawing strength from aspirations can be a significant starting point for both individuals and communities. earn to know when to lean on others. Seek them out and, working together, small steps will become exponential over time, bringing dreams into reality.
- You get more bees with honey. Rather than tackling a situation confrontationally with a head of steam, being sweet-tempered and constructive tends to create more positive changes as well as developing effective and enduring relationships along the way.
- It’s hard to see what you are not looking for, and to know what you don’t know. A period of distance can help illuminate different perspectives and support new ways of being and doing in a place.
Key outcomes:
- A personal shift from invisible outsider to compassionate community leader who is valued and recognised.
- Effective reflective practice and well-honed communication and comprehension skills, as an individual, team and organisation.
- Recognition of the importance of context and how to modify that via transformational change in all four dimensions.
- Inclusion and valuing of a range of experiences within an organisation.
Key Contact person:
Matt Crawshaw
Good Cents
Wesley Community Action Porirua
MCrawshaw@wesleyca.org.nz
Ph 04 237 7923
Reference
Lederach, J.P, Neufeld, R. and Culbertson, H. (2007). Reflective Peacebuilding: A planning, Monitoring and Learning Toolkit. The Joan B Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
Story written by Denise Bijoux. June 2012.