The Auckland group tackling the patchwork of poverty
Saturday, 7 September 2019
The causes of poverty are complex and solutions often elusive. But across New Zealand's biggest city, people are seeking new ways to break the cycle of dependency and empower others to lead better lives. John Weekes reports.
'If your life was a book, how far through the book are you?'
Brook Turner says he asks that of struggling clients who visit the buildings spread across the VisionWest complex in Auckland's Glen Eden.
They arrive in a steady stream, busiest about noon at the food bank each Wednesday.
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Some who come are unemployed. Some have jobs but are so poorly paid they can't afford to feed their families.
Others who arrive at the counselling, cafe and training complex are homeless, battling addictions, just out of jail, or mired in debt to loan sharks. Any one of these problems might seem insurmountable, but some of the clients at the West Auckland non-government organisation (NGO) face multiple challenges simultaneously.
Still, Turner says none of the clients tell him they're at the end of the book.
Staff and volunteers have for years here seen a steady increase in demand for emergency services. The food support service alone feeds about 150 families each week.
VisionWest has grown, but Turner, head of community services development at the NGO, says that's more an indictment of New Zealand's economic path than a cause to laud the NGO's success helping families.
'The worst thing in the world is for a charity to grow. We should grow to shrink. When business is booming in charity, the country's doing way worse.'
Children's Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft says child poverty today is intertwined with the consequences of New Zealand's neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and '90s.
'Child poverty doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its tentacles reach out in so many areas.
'This is not a debate in a vacuum. There are real-life consequences.'
He cites falling supply of state and social housing stock from the early '90s, and a 'huge' jump in inequality from the late '80s as pivotal to the current epidemic of child poverty.
Becroft says New Zealand's 'blind faith' in neoliberalism continued warping our debates and responses to poverty into the early 2000s, and child poverty took too long to dent the national consciousness into taking action.
'When people with lower incomes are prevented from realising their human capital potential, it is bad not only for them but for the economy as a whole,' the New Zealand Child and Youth Epidemiology Service wrote in the 2018 Child Poverty Monitor.
The Otago University scholars added: 'A population with high income inequality is one where human resources are wasted through a high proportion of the population out of work or trapped in low-paid and low-skilled jobs.'
Turner is more scathing: 'Our society is sick. So if our society is sick, what do you do? You pay for a doctor.'
The medicine most obviously dispensed for New Zealand's socioeconomic problems is the dole, and associated government benefits.
But the patchwork of poverty around Auckland is complex. Housing stock in many areas has failed to match demand and rents have stayed high, hitting a weekly median of $560 in July.
Some clients are tackling the consequences of setbacks faced years earlier – dysfunctional childhoods, school under-achievement, accidents or intergenerational welfare dependency.
Each new complexity and it's harder to escape the dependency trap. Each new external pressure, a rise in housing or food or fuel prices or the cost of living, can push parents over the edge.
But if one setback can trigger others, then one breakthrough can unlock others.
The change can be fast, Turner says. Some people have been sleeping in the woods or in cars but within two months turn their lives around.
'Others, it can take years. Sometimes we make assumptions as a society of the speed of recovery of people.'
VisionWest wants to change a 'dependency mindset' into what Turner calls an empowerment mindset.
He says practical, realistic solutions to poverty here include teaching people skills, helping them attain 'micro-credentials' and listening to their stories.
'We're living in a culture of dependency and handouts. Some of my contemporaries won't like this, but we don't believe in dependency and handouts. We believe in self-determination and self-sovereignty.'
Some clients are stuck in cycles of junk food dependency and poor health, but volunteers educate clients about nutrition.
This winter VisionWest supported 535 families with food parcels and donated 290 blankets to 101 families.
The centre has a Baptist affiliation with a church on site but religious adherence is no precondition for getting assistance.
But Turner and his colleagues do ask clients to be open-minded, to give the NGO a shot, and also to back themselves, despite so often having failed or been failed.
Turner says a disproportionate number of VisionWest clients are Polynesian, and that reflects broader inequality across New Zealand.
'We continue to see a discriminatory trajectory where Māori and Pasifika are on the wrong side of our statistics on just about every measure.'
He says the path forward, for VisionWest, is to set up a broad, empowerment-based practice that supports people to receive food and shelter as an immediate support.
In the long run, the NGO wants people 'to find purpose, belonging and flowing into education and employment so that they can do for themselves instead of relying on charities.
'You want people to have a journey with VisionWest and then walk out the door.'
Just because you've had a couple of bad chapters in your book doesn't mean the rest of the story goes that way, he says.
'Let's make it a good one together.'