Whānau Ora takes a whole-of- family approach that aims to reconnect and strengthen people and their whanau so they, themselves, can find real life solutions to improving their health and well-being.

The Honourable Tariana Turia, Minister responsible for Whanau Ora, will be presenting an update at 12 regional hui around New Zealand as per the schedule below. Her presentation will be followed by a joint one from the three Government agencies involved in the first stage of its implementation: Te Puni Kokiri, Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Health.

Each information hui will last for two hours with presentations followed by an open discussion. Community groups and people interested in finding out more about Whānau Ora are invited to attend. Full details of dates, times and venues are listed below.

Monday 10 May
10.30am-12.30pm
Kingsgate Hotel
100 Garnett Ave
Forest Lake
Hamilton

2.30pm-4.30pm
Rydges Hotel
Fenton Street
Rotorua

Tuesday 11 May
9.45am-11.45am
The Spire Pavilion
Cobham Oval
Okara Drive
Whangarei

2.30pm-4.30pm
Manurewa Marae
81 Finlayson Avenue
Manurewa
South Auckland

Wednesday 12 May
9am-11am
Tahuna Function Centre
70 Beach Road
Tahunanui
Nelson

2pm-4pm
Nga Hau e Wha National Marae
250 Pages Road
Aranui
Christchurch

Thursday 13 May
9am-11am
Ascot Park Hotel
Cnr Tay Street and Racecourse Rd
Invercargill

Friday 14 May
10am-12pm
Grand Central Hotel
42 Powderham Street
New Plymouth

Monday 17 May
8.30am-10.30am
Te Wānanga o Aotearoa
Todd Park
3 Heriot Drive
Porirua City

2pm-4pm
Gisborne Hotel
Cnr Tyndall and Huxley Roads
Gisborne

Thursday 27 May
9.45am-1145am
Shakespeare Room
HB Opera House
101 Hastings Street South
Hastings

Monday 31 May
10.30am-12.30pm
Function Centre
Whanganui Racecourse
Purnell St
Whanganui

In 2003 the Trust completed its trials, and has over the past five years launched a Community Free Bike Programme, distributing free recycled bikes to community groups and disadvantaged families in Wellington, the Earn a Bike Programme (where individual members of the public can earn a free bike through working in the Trust’s workshop), the Tertiary Rental Programme – a low cost sustainable transportation alternative for students – and the Business rental Programme for the Wellington region.

The New Zealand Green Bike Trust would like to replicate these programmes by setting up branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch and Dunedin with like-minded individuals and community groups with assistance from local councils and government agencies.

For more information and contact details visit their website.

A similar initiative exists in Palmerston North. Hosted by Massey University, the Palmerston North Green Bike Trust recycles used bikes and sells or hires out restored bikes. Demand for their refurbished bikes has grown to the point where it now outstrips supply.

About one thousand bikes a year are recycled with the main restriction being lack of supply of donated bikes. A restored adult’s bike costs $50 and a child’s bike $35 with the money going to cover costs such as mechanics wages. The Trust reaches further afield than just Palmerston North with donated bikes coming from as far away as Hawkes Bay and some restored bikes have been sent to the Pacific Islands.

You can contact the Palmerston North Green Bike Trust on 06 356 9099 ex 7105

This movement aims not only to ensure a community’s resilience against these challenges, but also to strengthen community relationships as people work together in initiatives such as community gardens.

Increased economic hardship, food security, and health concerns about industrial produce are all reasons why urban agriculture makes a lot of sense. On top of this, cities are most often built on places of fertile soil and readily available water, making them perfect sites for agriculture. There is no need for fertilisers, and organic waste can be used productively rather than sent into landfill.

So how can you get involved?

Wellington Community Gardens Network is host to several different Wellington Co-ops. For example, Common Ground is a garden in Island Bay that aims to “provide a space where Wellingtonians can learn about sustainable living, and how to practice examples of urban sustainability in their homes and neighbourhoods. We aim to be inclusive, accessible, relevant and welcoming, providing opportunities for people to work together and strengthen community relationships.”

Common Ground began in 2005 with just an empty field and has now grown to encompass a large garden space, fruit trees, a composting system, and a shed of shared tools. In addition to the large communal garden, there are small plots cared for by individuals.

Operation Green Thumb is a community garden initiative run by the Wellington City Council in council housing complexes, as well as in 3 public community gardens. Their website has information on how to get an individual plot, get involved as a volunteer, setup your own co-op, or just general gardening help.

So join your local initiative, or start your own!

Community gardening on church lawn space also helps build community resilience – preparing for upcoming challenges from a decline in cheap oil. In a small way it also begins to address one of my great sadness-es with our social services. Don’t get me wrong here. I love our social services. The more I have got to know the hearts of the people involved in running the Anglican Care and Anglican Action programmes the more impressed I have become. What makes me sad is that our professional social services (and they do have to be professional) must increasingly fill a gap that would once have been sorted out simply by a functioning healthy community. At one time if someone was hungry, lonely, struggling, needed budget advice, an advocate, or short term support, the community would rally around and support them. Not in every case at all times in any way needed, but certainly a lot more than now. We need our social services, and I am glad we are in a country with official safety nets, but making intentional steps towards re-energising healthy, resilient local communities may reduce some of their work load. Social services don’t let the rest of us off the hook. Community gardens in a myriad of forms, stretching through the back sections of suburbia, is a step in this direction.

However, there are church grounds gardens and church grounds gardens. If you dig over the church lawn, plant it out, then invite the community to come and take part, that is not really a community garden. It’s a church garden using the same attractional model we apply to our services. If we go and talk the community, our neighbours, local groups, the local Transition Town people and others already engaged in our communities, discuss our needs, offer the land, and dig the lawn over with the community, that’s a community garden. Both of these models are happening in various parts of the country at the moment. Both are better than lawn – but one is better than the other.

Justice isn’t about giving someone a fish, or teaching them to fish. But about asking who ownes the pond? Who makes the decisions? Who has the power?

The print run for this first booklet seems to have been a little small; we have run out. However, I have the final PDF of the booklet available. Simply send an email to justice@anglican .org.nz with ‘gardening booklet’ in the subject, or down load by clicking this link: gardening-booklet. Distribute or use as you like.

To sign up for the others click on the box below titled Just Booklets with the dandelion flower picture.

The article is worth reading for anyone who didn’t catch it. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10559807

NZ has been one of the worst performers in terms of our aid contribution as a percentage of our GNI (gross domestic income), and are one of only 3 countries who have not set a timetable for honouring our .7% pledge (Australia and Japan are the other two).

However, the aid that we do give tends to be given well. That is to say the aid is not tied or linked to the donor countries political agenda. New Zealand aid was separated from Ministry or Foreign affairs seven years ago. The 2005 OECD DAC peer review report on NZAID, speaking of the 2002 changes, said “The reorientation of New Zealand’s development co-operation has been impressive… The creation of NZAID can be considered a success. In practice, its semi-autonomous status has been appropriate, allowing the agency to focus on poverty reduction and ensuring that the development programme is separate from – albeit coherent with – the foreign policy agenda.”

McCully said that poverty elimination should not be the focus of NZAid, rather it should be economic development. “You could ride around in a helicopter pushing hundred-dollar notes out the door and call that poverty elimination.” This is grossly unfair to the work of NZAid. In reality poverty elimination and economic development are always related, and getting the balance right is the work of all development and aid workers. The problem with talking of economic development in separation from poverty reduction is that it might simply be a door to assisting trade and business interest at the expense of those who are most marginalized and in need.

The role of aid is to say ‘what do you most need, and how can we help;’ the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is to ask ‘what are our goals, and how can we advance them. It is not that one is good and one bad, simply that they are conflicting goals. This is the reason some degree of independence and separation is necessary. McCully wants to make sure that NZAid is working towards Government policy. Well of course, that is not in question. All departments should work towards government policy; the question is which policy aims should they be working towards? Those of our humanitarian and aid policies, or our Trade and Foreign Affairs policies?

The Oxfam press release is well worth reading.

Van Jones is the founder and president of Green For All, and his work is a model for Christians who want to do community development in environmentally-friendly ways and for those who want to find ways out of the “environment vs. jobs” debate.

Jones points out the many ways in which solving environmental problems can be done with justice. His position is that as long as we’re going to all the trouble to create a clean energy economy, we might as well make a renewed effort to tackle discrimination and inequality, too.

He addresses the involvement of faith communities directly and challenges the “so-called progressives [who] snarl the word ‘Christian’ as if it were an insult or the name of a disease.” He presses activists to become problem-solvers, to become more about “proposition” than “opposition.” In a short list of principles for a new movement, Jones advocates fewer “issues,” more solutions; fewer “demands,” more goals; fewer “targets,” more partners; and less “accusation,” more confession.

I really like the sound of this approach. It rings true with my conviction that as Christians we have a call not to protest but to witness. Not just doing something to protest an injustice, but something that highlights another possible way of living. Turning the other cheek – or planting a garden in the parking lot of a coal power plant instead of holding a placard.

Has anyone read this book?

This morning Prime Minister John Key claimed in a Radio New Zealand
interview that the Summit involved government, business and community
organisations. Out of the nearly 200 participants, there are three
representatives from Community and Voluntary Sector organisations.

Many Community and Voluntary Sector organisations are bitterly
disappointed that the value and role of community-development and
community support is not being recognised by the National-led Government
around how our country can navigate our way through the economic
recession.

From the Summit will flow an action plan that will feed into this
year’s Budget round. Community and Voluntary Sector organisations are
not even at the table to be part of that discussion and action plan.

On Wednesday this week (25 February), about 70 representatives from
across the community and voluntary sector, philanthropy, and government
agencies met in a Sector-initiated forum. They met to collect
information about the impacts of economic recession on the community
sector and discuss strategies for managing the significant changes that
are expected ahead.

The information collected is _not_ included in the discussions at the
Job Summit today because of the lack of Sector representation.

Organisations in the 20 strong ComVoices working group are calling on
all Community and Voluntary sector organisations to make their concern
and disappointment heard loud and clear.

It is vital that social services are not just tacked on to the end of
the process.

Please distribute this email and contact your local MPs from all sides
of the House, but particularly the Prime Minister, the Minister of
Finance Bill English, Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett and
Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector Tariana Turia. Let them
know the Sector expects more from them.

We have provided a pro forma email/ letter that you can adapt to your
own organisation, and the MP contacts list to help start the process (in
word and pdf versions to take account of accessibility software).

Please also make your voice heard through the Government website set up
for the Summit http://beehive.govt.nz/feature/summit.

It is really important that Sector organisations make their collective
voice heard at this time.

The word community has many connotations, some positive, some negative. Community can make us think of a safe togetherness, shared meals, common goals, and joyful celebrations. It also can call forth images of sectarian exclusivity, in-group language, self-satisfied isolation, and romantic naïveté. However, community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own (see Philippians 2:4). The question, therefore, is not “How can we make community?” but “How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?”

Choose from goats, ducks, water and more. Not only are they fun and meaningful for recipients, Just Gifts support the life changing work of CWS partners as local people work to overcome poverty and injustice in their own communities. They give water, food, income and opportunities to people in need of a better life.

See CWS website for details