The ex-cop and the boxer battling poverty and poor health
Sunday, 8 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.
'It's a tonne of fat on the ground,' Dave 'The Brown Buttabean' Letele tells his workout class.
'Hands out, hands up, there's no excuse. Whatever it is you're moving, you're not at home on the couch.'
Three dozen-odd people are doing star jumps and squats at the sparse Buttabean Motivation base in south Auckland.
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'Come in, nice and close together. Two more drills then we're finished,' boxer and former league player Letele says.
His students reach, stand up, punch the air, all their movements aimed at shedding a collective tonne of fat.
'Trust me, you will never drink to this song again,' Letele says.
Obesity goes hand in hand with poverty. The Ministry of Health says adults living in the most deprived areas are 1.6 times more likely to be obese as those living in the least deprived areas.
For children, the stats are even more dire, with kids in the poorest suburbs more than twice as likely to be obese as those in the wealthiest.
Part of that is environmental – people living in lower socio-economic areas are surrounded by more fast food and takeaway outlets, and have more shelf space devoted to junk food in their local supermarket, than those in other areas.
Another reason for the link is that buying and preparing nutritious food requires either time or money.
Having battled depression and obesity himself, Letele says he wants his training to teach people resilience, applying lessons in the workout to the rest of life.
In 2015, he launched a weight-loss motivation website and soon after established a fresh produce bulk-buying group to help struggling families improve their health and reduce grocery spending.
As well as fitness classes, he's run six-week programmes for rangatahi (young people) in partnership with the Waipareira Trust. The course involves physical activity and healthy eating as well as work readiness skills, like CV writing and looking for jobs.
He's more interested in getting things done through social connections than relying on 'bureaucrap', he says.
With government agencies, he says there's always a demand for surveys, clinical reports, and red tape when solutions to poverty and poor health are proposed.
'Life is tough and we're faced with a lot of obstacles and battles living in these areas. So we've just got to learn to overcome them.
'That's why we train the way we do. The training is hard, but so is life.'
Letele's friend Steve Farrelly says he's also no stranger to government red tape.
He's the founder of the East Auckland Breakfast Club, which began by providing breakfast to kids at low-decile Auckland schools but now includes clothing, stationery and book donations.
He says addressing one need, such as a lack of school uniforms, can free up family income for other necessities.
That progress enables the Breakfast Club and its partner schools to move on to new initiatives, not just perpetuate a cycle where the same needs must be filled year after year, he says.
The Child Poverty Action Group has found one in six, or 174,000 New Zealand children, live 'in the deepest poverty' which included being cold, hungry, stressed, without a secure home, and often sick and struggling to learn.
And the Government's new Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy identifies regular access to nutritious food as a priority.
That's no surprise to Farrelly, who works with donors and corporate partners including Hubbards and New World Eastridge's owner-operator Kym Samuels.
Farrelly says he and his partners embrace a quote that's something of a Breakfast Club mantra: 'Find a need and fill it, find a hurt and heal it.'
He and Letele can do a lot of 'damage' together targeting social ills like child poverty and obesity, he says.
He believes realistic solutions to poverty in Auckland can emerge when NGOs and social workers identify the reasons people need help, give them the tools to be more independent, and reduce the overall demand for charity.
At some low-decile schools, the need for Breakfast Club food donations has plummeted – and Farrelly's delighted.
'We've seen that what we can do is working, and Dave has seen that what he's doing is working. But when we've both gone to ask government to help, they want surveys, they want political reports.'
Maybe that will change one day for these two. Even if it doesn't, they're undaunted, Farrelly says.
'Rather than wait for them, we just get out there and do it.'