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The Necessary Ingredient

Posted on How Communities Awaken (2021) by vivian Hutchinson · June 13, 2021 8:44 AM

The Necessary Ingredient 

— some thoughts for the Invitation Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 18 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THERE’S A QUESTION that you often ask yourself because it is hidden behind every invitation:

How valuable do you expect this experience to be?

In terms of having expectations, it has been our experience that perhaps two-thirds of the participants on our Masterclass for Active Citizenship arrive on the first day with only a limited idea of what they have chosen to turn up to.  They have come for all sorts of reasons — only some of which coincide with what was written on our formal invitation.

We are living in a majority culture that is just not used to turning up and spending the time on deeper conversations about the things that matter to all of us. We are certainly not used to it unless the “turning up” is provoked by conflict and polarization or some sort of catastrophe.

We have lost the simple building blocks of a community literacy that enables us to have these slower talks with one another. And it is within this illiteracy that an invitation to a community education programme like our Masterclass might seem to be an alien thing, and possibly even impractical.

Some of our participants have told us that, on the first day, they had difficulty explaining to their partners just what sort of workshop they were going to, or how useful it would be to their work or their families.

Many of them had come because someone they knew had recommended it to them, or they trusted in the work of the organisations that invited them, or they were curious as to what the particular hosts were up to now.

And all that is OK, because we do get there in the end.

On the first day of the Masterclass, we usually have a welcome breakfast which is also attended by previous participants of the workshops. They immediately get to talk in small groups about what they have learned, and how their experience continues to show up in their lives and families and work and community organisations.

The new participants then start on their own unique learning journey which goes on over the next four months.  Very soon they realise they haven’t come to a programme ... they have come to a meeting place. It is a meeting place that seeks to remember and regenerate a sense of what our citizenship and what our communities are for.

The learning journey for participants starts by accepting the invitation and then really “turning up”.  And once they have come to terms with the risks and hurdles of actually turning up, they begin to notice that the unwritten question behind their invitation has changed:

How valuable do you intend this experience to be?

The Welcome Breakfast at the Masterclass for Active Citizenship —Tū Tangata Whenua — with new and past participants, at the New Plymouth Copthorne Hotel.

THERE ARE SO many community groups or organisations, or councils or government agencies and their contractors that say they are working for “community development”. But what they are really focused on is a form of event management. In doing so, they often get the process of invitation completely wrong — and a great deal of their time and trouble is wasted.

I have come to think that getting the invitation right could well be half the work that is involved in fostering real development in our communities.

The importance of the invitation has always been better understood in Māori society, especially when you see how meetings on a marae usually start with a pōwhiri.

Some pōwhiri – with the wero or challenge, followed by the welcome, lines of greetings with a hongi, and speeches made by elders of the marae as well as the guests – can take as long as half a day. And yet it would be a mistake to think that nothing much is happening, or that you are simply required to endure such a ceremony.

A pōwhiri is based on an understanding that relationships, genealogies and places all have their own way of contributing to your meeting. When the living stories of all these connections are combined with the particular agenda of why you are gathering ... then you might just recognise that a great deal of the work of the meeting is already taking place. 

This slower start to your meeting is not a distraction. It is an art. It is part of the art of how communities build trust, and take some risks in exploring unchartered territory.

It is an art that can lead to some unexpected awakenings. As the American civics activist Eric Liu says:

“Artists invite. Not just in the obvious way of inviting audiences and praying they show. But in the deeper sense of drawing us into places we wouldn’t otherwise go to because we didn’t know they were there, or we did but were too scared to enter, or we were lost in our phones, and we didn’t know that such places was the point of being.”  – Eric Liu

THE REGENERATION OF our communities is a two-fold process of awakening. On a personal level, it involves fostering a more active and engaged sense of citizenship. And on a collective level, it involves inviting your friends and colleagues and neighbours into a deeper sense of “We”.

Over the last four decades, there has been an unraveling and fraying of both the cultural structures of our citizenship and our wider sense of “We”. And the end result of this is that more and more people just don’t feel they have a real stake in our common lives.

The barest evidence of this dis-connection of citizenship can be seen in the level of participation in our democracy – the responsibility we have as citizens to make a choice about the people who will decide our common interests. 

It is hard for me to fully accept that I am living in a country where the voter participation rate is so dismal — especially when so much depends on the quality of the decisions being made around our Council and Cabinet tables.

It is the decisions being made by these bodies that determine so much of the social, environmental, economic and cultural wellbeing of our communities. Their choices are going to be particularly important in the coming decades as we address the local consequences of the global climate emergency, the extinction of so many species and collapse of biodiversity,
the continuing gaps between rich and poor, and the way that these challenges are affecting people and economies everywhere. 

Perhaps we would wish to see much more social diversity represented in our political parties and on our local councils and boards — especially to hear the voices of young people, women, and tangata whenua. But voting is not the act of a wishful consumer. It is the act of a citizen.  And we are in the middle of a slow-burning citizenship crisis.

Civic participation is a crisis that will not be solved by politicians. Nor will it be solved by better branding and marketing campaigns.  It is a question of invitation. The request to engage in our democracy is something that we need to be asking of each other.  This can only be achieved once the roles and responsibilities of our citizenship are part of the everyday conversations we are having in our workplaces, on our sports fields, our marae, our places of worship, in our hotels and all our other meeting places.

It is out of these conversations that we can reawaken a common sense of the stake we have in each other’s lives.

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IN A CONSUMER-DOMINATED society, the invitation is most commonly offered as an aspect of marketing or persuasion.

You can tell that an invitation is being offered in consumer terms, when people start to talk about the need to better “sell” their message, or for customers to “buy-in” to a particular agenda or purpose. 

The end result of this sort of invitation is that we are more likely to become passive spectators at someone else’s event — rather than active citizens who have turned up with our own ideas and contributions to make.

An image that summarises this challenge for me comes from Annie Leonard, the creator of the excellent web series of videos called “The Story of Stuff”.  Her picture shows a human figure flexing their arm muscles.

On one side, the “consumer” muscle is fit and thriving, or perhaps even over-developed like what you would find on an extreme body-builder. But on the other side, the “citizen” muscle looks like what you would find on the comic-book 98-pound weakling.

It is an image that asks us to acknowledge the costs we are all paying for our modern consumer lives — and to recognise that these costs are way out of balance.

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ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, the invitation conversation has been a real challenge to me in my role as a community activist and a social entrepreneur. It has challenged me to consider the merits and disadvantages that come from an invitation approach versus an advocacy approach to social change.

I initially found this confronting, because most of my background and talents as an activist had been tied up in the concept of being a persuasive advocate.

Many of my social change elders in the 1970s had taught me what amounted to a “theory of change”. Looking back, I would now say that it contains some very naive notions, and yet it definitely represented a common understanding about what you needed to do in order to solve community problems.

Those elders wouldn’t have called it a “theory of change” back then, of course, as most of the elements of this theory were simply held unconsciously. But it was a meta-narrative about how we thought change happened, and it went something like this:

1. Firstly, you identify a problem that needs to be fixed.

2. Secondly, you apply all your imagination and creativity in the search for solutions to the problem ... and then you do something about it.

3. Then you learn-by-doing, as you slowly build up a better prototype or recipe that is your solution to the problem. Your goal is that your recipe can be scalable into some sort of programme or scheme.

4. You come to accept that you don’t have any money, or enough money which will enable your ideas to thrive. So you set a further goal that your programme for change will later be picked up and funded by a grateful local council or government department, or a philanthropic foundation.

5. And then you throw yourself into all sorts of opportunities for marketing, and publishing moments, where you get to tell everyone about your programme or scheme and your personal story and how your solutions will definitely solve the problem that needs to be fixed.

6. And at this point you usually uncover all the power and vested interests that many people have in keeping the problem as stuck as it is right now. But you don’t let this discourage you. In fact, you start to engage in all sorts of creative protests and pressure and political activities which draw attention to these power and control issues and point towards the solutions that you are offering.

7. And all this continues until you get to a magical day called “the tipping point”. This is when there are enough people around who see the common sense of your solution, and your recipe or programme starts to become the normal way of doing things. And then ...

8. The local council or a government department does indeed pick up your schemes and ideas and they become the way that things are actually paid to get done.

9. And meanwhile, you are given an award and pronounced a “sound” person and appointed to various statutory authorities and boards, until you ...

10... retire and enjoy your family life.


This narrative is almost like a fairy tale. It has provided the structure for many Disney movie biographies. And I confess I did try it out — with mixed successes — but while this story has many important and worthwhile elements, what I most learned along the way was that there were some major problems with it. 

The story might be described as an advocacy theory of social change.  There’s nothing wrong with the idea of advocacy ... there’s a real talent in getting your advocacy muscles into shape. But the community wisdom here is that we also need to balance our advocacy with an invitation muscle.

And to get this invitation right, we need to learn how to offer our work with a sensible degree of letting go.

Once I realised that there were some real deficiencies in an advocacy way of thinking, I came to discover that my communities already had quite a different “theory of change”.

There were even elders around me who already knew a different story — but I just wasn’t paying the right sort of attention.

The problem with the advocacy story is that you are encouraging people to join your recipe. When you are so completely tied up with getting your innovations and prototypes established, and then marketing your programmes and solutions — you very easily end up becoming blind to the wisdom and contributions that other people are able to make.

When you are selling a solution, the creativity is already done and your need becomes one of asking people to “buy into” your ideas as consumers or clients, or as volunteers, or employees of your programme. 

But when you make a change in perspective from advocacy to invitation, you are awakening in people the sense that they are an ingredient. Your leadership job is to remind them of this, and to welcome them into the mix.

Invitational leadership starts by recognising that every citizen has not just got any ingredient. They have a gift, and it is important. It is necessary. In fact, your community may even be considerably poorer if that particular gift is not in the mix.

In this context, a community “recipe” of what we collectively need to do about a problem is figured out as we go along. The recipe is not so much known, as it is performed. Our programmes and schemes unfold as we come together with others and put our different ingredients and perspectives into collective action.

Meanwhile, the job of an invitational leader is to remind people what the common endeavour is for. Their job is to step back enough to encourage and empower others to put their own gifts to work.

It is a bit like jazz music. In jazz there is a theme or melody introduced into the group of musicians. Every member of that group then has a turn at performing their take on that theme according to their own instrument and personality. The end result is that when they create music together, it is able to go well beyond the sum of their individual contributions.

Wynton Marsalis says that jazz was given birth within an American culture that has been constantly struggling to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of democracy.  He argues that the real power and innovation of jazz is found when

“... a group of people can come together and create art, improvised art, and can negotiate their agendas with each other, and that negotiation is the art.”  — Wynton Marsalis

In negotiating our very diverse community challenges, the move from an advocacy approach to an invitational approach is just such an art. It does mean a whole re-wiring of how we understand the effectiveness and sustainability of our own activism.

This process can be a bit dis-orienting if you are not used to the give-and-take of this sort of collaboration. It can be a bit like becoming aware of a style of music that you have not been used to hearing. 

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AN INVITATIONAL APPROACH to social change asks for a fundamentally different level of engagement. The invitation itself can become a demonstration of our willingness to live more collaboratively.

If you are a community organiser, an invitational approach is one that brings different rewards. When people turn up to your events, or get in alongside your activities, they do so because they are already wired into something that is larger than their own immediate self-interest.

Even if the people turning up are few, they are the few that really want to be there. They are creative and they are curious. They are picking up the challenge, and starting to build trust. And they are much more prepared to figure things out as they go along.

If the invitation is right, then one of the first things they will figure out is that they are not there to follow your recipe. They have turned up to put their own ingredient on the table.

Our communities begin to be transformed when active citizens turn up because of such an invitation.

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Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper The Necessary Ingredient is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

Eric Liu is the founder of the US-based Citizen University. The quote is taken from "The Citizen Artist" Sermon for Civic Saturday, New York 20 January 2018 http://www.citizenuniversity.us/wp-content/uploads/CS-Sermon-and-Readings_Jan-20-2018_NYC.pdf

If we look at the figures from the New Zealand 2017 general elections, we can see only a 73% voter turnout ... which means that one in four people did not turn up. For young people (under 25 years) the national participation rate is at about 50%, or half the youth electorate is refusing or not bothering to vote. It gets worse when you look at the voter participation rate in local body elections, where turnout figures have dropped to as low as 42%. You can compare this with the New Zealand voting participation rates in national elections during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, when the level was above 90%.

New Zealand Electoral Commission http://www.elections.org.nz/events/2017-general-election/2017-general-election-results/voter-turnout-statistics  See also Statistics NZ – Voter Turnout for Local Body Elections (2013 figures), Bryce Edwards, New Zealand Herald, 3rd November 2017 “Political Roundup: New contentious data shows voter turnout” at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11940333

Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff see http://storyofstuff.org/

Wynton Marsalis, trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. See Wynton Marsalis interview in Jazz: A History of America's Music (2000) by Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns.

ISBN 978-1-92-717635-1 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

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you are invited

Posted on How Communities Awaken (2021) by vivian Hutchinson · June 13, 2021 7:17 AM

you are invited

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 1 min read download as Masterclass PDF

YOU ARE INVITED to step into some conversations that matter. These are the conversations that enable our communities to awaken, heal and thrive.

They are the conversations that might offer you some ideas and questions and histories and experiences that will stretch your existing thinking. Or they may simply provoke your own memories and insights into what works in the communities to which you belong.

You are invited to these conversations not just as a reader, but as a citizen who has probably got your own book somewhere there inside you. Perhaps, in this journey, you will re-discover your own stories of experience and scraps of wisdom that can teach and restore and surprise.

It might even take you a while to process what you are reading on these pages — because you can expect to be interrupted by your own recollections and questions.

You could be surprised to find out just how many voices there are in your own head that are asking to be reclaimed. You might even be curious as to what has been the reason for your forgetting.

So you are invited.

And the first voice you may hear is a karakia, or a prayer:

Let there be peace in Aotearoa.

Let this peace be based on the goodwill between us.

Let us remember that there are things that matter

that are beyond ourselves.

 

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Growing Up Together

Posted on How Communities Awaken (2021) by vivian Hutchinson · June 12, 2021 4:40 PM

Growing Up Together

— some thoughts for the Citizenship Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 21 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE CITIZENSHIP CONVERSATION is a starting point for how we change the nature of our communities.

It is the beginning of a learning journey of further conversations that enable us to gather the skills, wisdom and accountabilities that will shape our community selves.

Active citizenship is a form of public intelligence that is constantly figuring out how to get the basic things right. And as a society, we need to be investing in this intelligence.

It is not as though an active citizen just needs to wake up and turn up. We also need to grow up ... and that’s not a conversation that we have been used to having.

✽ ✽ ✽

CITIZENSHIP IS THAT part of ourselves that we step into when we choose to serve the things that are beyond ourselves. Our citizenship becomes active when we choose to consider all the things we can do to create the communities we want to live in, and to take care of the things that we value. And sometimes our citizenship also involves the acts of creativity that are about disrupting and transforming the existing systems that are no longer fit for purpose.

Every generation thinks they are a unique generation. But perhaps in these days of climate emergency and species collapse this is a notion that is finally becoming true. Climate and biodiversity are the issues that will be changing everything for our communities. And the decisions we make and the actions we take in this generation will be determining the quality of life and well-being for many generations to come.

The trouble is our mainstream consumer culture has not prepared us for these important decisions and actions. We need to wake up and discover the ways in which we can prepare each other.

Our active citizenship is woken up once we start to answer three important questions. The main purpose of any culture is to remember these questions, and the real job description of our very best leaders, teachers and coaches is to help you answer them.

The first question is: Where is your place? This is the question that is asking you to realise what home means to you ... where do you feel that you belong?

The second question is: What is your story? This is the question that is trying to figure out the narrative that you have already started to write with your life.

And the third question is: What is your contribution to the common good? This is the question where you are challenged to pay attention to those gifts and talents that are special to you, and to find some way of weaving that contribution into your community.

In our consumer culture we are always rushing towards destinations, or towards certainty and satisfaction. But these questions do not quickly lead to arrival. Instead, they are asking you to stay longer with a sense of curiosity and wonder and discovery.

These are initiation questions for a majority culture that has forgotten how to do that job. As such, these questions can end up becoming the makers and shapers of our character and everything that we do.

They invoke a process of maturation and ripening which remakes the child and the consumer and the spectator —into a creator, a caretaker and a changemaker.

And all this happens because communities have got work to do, and this is work for grown-ups.

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OVER THE PAST DECADE there have been many initiatives in Taranaki which have been exploring how to invest in our community competencies. Many of these have been led or supported by a group of active citizens called Community Taranaki, which is an informal network of people making a creative contribution to the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of our province.

There are several significant things that Community Taranaki has been learning while creating our citizen-led initiatives, and these insights continue to shape our local strategies for community development.

They include: focusing on a citizen-led approach to community development initiatives; challenging the distortions of the business thinking that has taken over all our public institutions; and addressing the persistent questions of justice, peace and reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā, the Treaty partners of our nation.

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Community development initiatives need to be anchored in fostering the skills, resources and linkages between active citizens. And these initiatives are also an opportunity for us to change the nature of our conversations.

We live in a world where there are 1,001 major challenges that all seem to be connected and need to be addressed at once. Fostering active citizenship and generous engagement on these issues is not only an effective strategy for making a real difference, it is also probably the most sustainable strategy for learning how to get things right.

In practice, this perspective has not been as obvious as it sounds. Government departments, local councils and philanthropic trusts have all preferred to fund events or launch marketing campaigns that are variously and vaguely explained as “community development”. These events and campaigns are usually prompted by local problems or issues, yet they are often disconnected from existing networks of active citizens who are also trying to make a difference on these challenges.

Community Taranaki has explored a different approach which involves fostering the skills, resources and linkages between active citizens, while also creating the places where we can pay attention to what it looks like when our communities are well, thriving and abundant. This is a perspective that has enabled us to learn from what was actually happening in our communities, focus on the assets and gifts that we share, talk about the missing elements, and explore the possibilities that are trying to emerge.

Community Taranaki’s main initiative for citizen-led community development has been the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. This has been run in collaboration with Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki, a tangata whenua development and liberation service. The four-month Masterclass learning journey brings together a diverse group of local people to awaken their involvement in civic life, or in hapū and iwi affairs, and to strengthen their skills and abilities to make things better in our communities.

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Several hundred people have been participants so far, coming from church committees, marae committees, sports clubs, service clubs, kaumātua groups, local authorities and social service and economic development agencies. They have been encouraged to turn up not as representatives of these organisations, but as citizens, friends, neighbours and family members.

The main tool of our Masterclass work has been conversation, but our workshops have not just been any old excuse to talk.

We have tried to purposely explore how to host the conversations that matter — the talking that can awaken and affirm our creative role as active citizens and community-builders.

We have been inspired by a comment by the US author Peter Block who said that

“... if we want to change the nature of our communities, then we need to change the nature of the conversations we are having with one another.” — Peter Block

The conversation topics that Block offers in his book Community – the Structure of Belonging formed the initial framework of the dialogue in our workshop sessions. The participants are invited to give a personal keynote on one of the conversation topics, drawing from their own life stories and cultural heritage. We also invite local elders and thought leaders to “stretch” the conversations with their own perspectives from tangata whenua and community development traditions.

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For many, just turning up for a conversation with people who see and think about the world differently can be an uncomfortable and challenging experience. Reaching out to strangers isn’t easy. And what may be less easy is paying attention and giving respect to what might seem to be strange ways of thinking.

But the possibilities that flow from a new conversation really do start with getting over ourselves. When we follow our curiosity and questions, and have the empathy to appreciate a different world-view, then we also get to taste one of the growing-up moments of our collective character.

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We need to address the distortions of business thinking and management processes that have taken over all our public institutions.

Our public lives have fundamentally changed over the last forty years as we have seen a steady colonisation of common assets by private interests and the widespread dominance of business thinking and management practices in all our public and community affairs.

This has come at a definite cost. Our unique cultures of community organising, and our different approaches to co-operation and collaboration on important issues, have been discarded or simply treated with disdain. Consequently, the values and vocabulary of community have faded as its advocacy has been marginalised into silence.

Those of us working in our communities have learned that there are important differences between the business of social services and the art of community development. Yet it is increasingly difficult to interrupt the business fundamentalism of our current times without ourselves falling into a polarizing narrative.

It still needs to be said: the “business model” is not a sufficient world-view to describe our aspirations as people, or to explain the complexities of the communities we create.

The chart above (Regenerating Citizenship and Community) is a way of looking at a mainstream business world-view as compared to a more traditional citizenship and community-building perspective.

It is a chart that could be seen through an oppositional lens — which is a view that would make it much less useful.

We are living in a very unusual period in history when the policies of our mainstream business, government and social institutions are being pushed up onto one side of the page in this chart. It's way out of balance.

In the social service sector, adopting a fundamentalist level of business thinking has proven to be disabling. The by-product of this mind-set is that it turns citizens into clients, and families into queues.

And as our neighbours and friends sink into becoming consumers and dependents, they start to forget the art of interfering in each other’s lives and sorting out their problems for themselves.

We know that this extreme model of doing business is also one of the most expensive ways of addressing our community problems. The economic consequence of this is that there are fewer resources available for creating alternative visions of community development.

There is a definite place for business strategies and the gifts and insights that business people have to share on how to get things done. But we also need to balance this way of thinking with the values and strategies of citizenship and community-building.

By moving our thinking towards the other side of our chart, we can begin to focus on “what’s strong” rather than “what’s wrong”. And from here, we can start to work together to shape the business of our well-being and our common good.

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Our community development initiatives need to acknowledge and address the inter-generational trauma that is still the local legacy of war and the confiscations of Māori land.

For those of us who are inheritors and beneficiaries of communities that are based on the violence and theft of colonial settlement, our sense of citizenship is inevitably linked to the troubles of this history.

It hasn't been a pretty story. It takes a mature nation to step up and act on the issues of justice and redress that are still causing trauma in our communities – so many years after the damage has been done.

We now have over thirty years of experience with formal apologies for breaches of our partnership obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, establishing co-governance arrangements on resources of national interest, the return of some land and assets, and financial settlements to various iwi and tribal authorities. These compensations have enabled many Māori to begin to repair and rebuild the foundations required for a different future.

But it is clear that the Treaty settlements process has also brought with it a continuing agenda of frustrations and obfuscations. And it has not done enough to address the dark underbelly of racism and white supremacy that still protects the privileges gained from colonial power.

The reality is that there are far too many New Zealanders who have gone through the Treaty settlement process and have been left without peace in their hearts and reconciliation in their minds.

It takes another whole level of maturity for us as citizens to work towards fair and connected communities that do not avoid the historical issues that our national leaders are still trying to resolve.

Our challenge is not just to face up to the facts and consequences of a difficult history. At the same time, we need to create the spaces where we can actively shape the healthy communities that we want to live in together. This type of collaboration requires a different set of skills and attitudes than the ones that have been asked of our leaders as they have worked to address the grievances and negotiate levels of settlement.

In many ways, this important work for peace and reconciliation cannot be left just to the business-as-usual of politicians, government contractors and tribal deal-makers. It needs the awakened engagement of ordinary citizens.

If we really want our country to heal from the conflicts of the past, then everyday people need to make their own sense of how this past is alive and connected to what is happening in the present. This awareness enables our family members, neighbours and friends to have more honest conversations about how we can transform our communities into places that might look and feel very different from how they are today.

This is a citizen-level of reconciliation, and it is worth taking the time to get it right. For it is upon this work that we get to build the authentic foundations of our future communities.

The modern renaissance of arts and culture, sport and business throughout the Māori world is challenging all New Zealanders to create a very different country than that envisaged by the colonial settlers of the 19th century.

We are continuously being invited to step up to a cross-cultural task of community-building. There is a lot to welcome here, and it is going to keep on challenging and astonishing us all.

If we get the foundations right, then our communities can start to regenerate in ways that might be seen as the natural next step for a post-grievance and post-settlement nation.

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NEARLY TWENTY YEARS ago, I was honoured by the Queen for my contributions to New Zealand as a social entrepreneur. I was awarded a Queens Service Medal in recognition of my work in race relations, in social justice, and job creation.

One of the many projects I had started was the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. At the time I was working with my friend Garry Moore who was the Mayor of Christchurch and, in 1999, he asked me to come to Christchurch to a meeting of district councils and local authorities on governance issues. At this meeting I asked the Mayors to come together and form a Taskforce for Jobs. I was proposing that our country set itself a national goal:

that all young people in our communities will have the opportunity of paid work, or to be in training or education.

To everyone’s surprise, seven Mayors immediately stood up and said: “Yes, we are going to do it!” Several months later, the first meeting of this Taskforce attracted over half the Mayors in New Zealand and, before long, over 95% of the Mayors in our country were participating members.

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Nothing like this had ever happened before in the history of our local government where so many Mayors had come together on a social and economic issue.

And I think it is significant that the call to form the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs did not come from a politician, or existing policy advisers, or from the local government organisations or institutions.

It came from a citizen. It came from someone who didn’t want to live in a country that has no use for a large number of its own young people.

I loved working with the Mayors, and did so for nearly seven years. I was contracted as a consultant and adviser and helped individual Mayors around the country develop their own strategies for taking leadership on employment issues.

Most of the Mayors had obviously different political views from me. They were usually conservative, sometimes extremely so. But they knew the value of jobs and a good livelihood to the well-being of people in their districts. Although the issue of employment was not usually considered to be a direct responsibility of local government, they could see that the issue could certainly benefit from local leadership.

This is where the Mayors and myself found immediate common ground: they also saw themselves first and foremost as active citizens. And they too did not want to be presiding over any place that had no use for a large number of its own young people.

One year, I was helping to organise the annual general meeting of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, which is held at the same time as the Local Government conference.

I found myself standing in the foyer of the Aotea Centre in Auckland during one of the coffee breaks of the conference, and there was a man walking around who was a senior partner at a prominent legal firm which had one of the city councils as a client. The law firm was sponsoring the coffee break.

This leading lawyer was talking with a group of Mayors, and he stood engrossed as they told him stories about starting up cadetships and apprenticeship schemes in their councils to employ young people, creating schemes to track young people once they leave school, holding graduation ceremonies for apprentices in order to boost the profile of the trades at a time of skill shortages, and also meeting with government departments and government ministers in order to create plans that would ensure that every young person in New Zealand is either in work or education.

And then these Mayors pointed over in my direction.

The lawyer made a bee-line for me and he asked: “How did you get the Mayors to do this? and, By whose authority do you do this work?”

I replied: “My citizenship.”

✽ ✽ ✽

THE CITIZENSHIP CONVERSATION is a catalyst for how communities awaken. It can lead us into inquiries that we haven’t been used to having.

This conversation is how we get to grow up together, and it can shape the public intelligence that helps us get the basic things right. It is the basis upon which we step up to the cross-cultural task of community-building, and it can help us regenerate the values and strategies of a common good.

It can also release a commitment to collective action that is sorely needed right now.

 

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Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper Growing Up Together is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

Community Taranaki ... Masterclass for Active Citizenship, Community Circles at the NPDC, Community Action Incubators, for more see www.taranaki.gen.nz

Community Taranaki has pursued a variety of local projects since 2011, and there has been a team of extra-ordinary Taranaki active citizens who have shaped the ideas behind them and helped to make things happen. This group has included Elaine Gill who was a long-time City Councillor and has been a driving force behind so many community groups over many decades; Dave Owens who set up the Great Fathers project which advocates nationally and locally for Dads to have a much closer emotional relationship with their kids; Ngaropi Raumati who is the founder of Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki who took our Masterclass and challenged us to make it an authentic bi-cultural learning journey; Lynne Holdem who practices as a psychotherapist and has been a driving force behind Supporting Families in Mental Illness in Taranaki and is a national leader of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists; and Wayne Morris who is a local artist and musician and an international educator in creativity.

Peter Block ... is the author of “Community — The Structure of Belonging” (2008) available at www.amazon.com/dp/1605092770, and is also co-author (with John McKnight) of “The Abundant Community — Awakening the Power of Families and Neighbourhoods” (2012) at www.amazon.com/dp/1609940814. For more information on Block and McKnight’s work see www.abundantcommunity.com

Photopage: Masterclass — MASTERCLASS FOR ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP — Some of the participants in the How Communities Awaken — Tū Tangata Whenua — Masterclass for Active Citizenship in New Plymouth, Taranaki 2011-2019 photographs vivian Hutchinson, New Plymouth District Council, and Jane Dove Juneau

Photopage: Conversations — CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER — Some of the small group conversations at the How Communities Awaken — Tū Tangata Whenua — Masterclass for Active Citizenship in the Whanau Room of Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki, New Plymouth, Taranaki 2011-2019 (middle left) A Guide to the Masterclass for Active Citizenship (2020) published by Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson

chart "Regenerating Citizenship and Community" ... created by vivian Hutchinson for Community Taranaki in 2017 – many of the ideas and concepts here have been influenced by the work of John McKnight / ABCD The Asset-Based Community Development network / Paul Born and the Tamarack Institute / and Cormac Russell of Nurture Development

New Zealand Mayors Taskforce for Jobs ... an archive of the collaboration between The Jobs Research Trust and the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs from 1999 to December 2005 can be found at www.jobsletter.org.nz/mtfjobs.htm

Photopage: Taskforce — THE MAYORS TASKFORCE FOR JOBS and THE JOBS RESEARCH TRUST — (top) some of the members of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs ... working towards the “zero waste” of New Zealanders. The Taskforce was launched by Mayor Garry Moore in Christchurch on 6-7 April 2000. photos by vivian Hutchinson. (middle) The Mayors Taskforce meeting at the Beehive cabinet table 2nd October 2002 with Prime Minister Helen Clark, and the Deputy PM and Minister of Economic Development Jim Anderton. photo by NZ Government (bottom left) The Jobs Letter, essential information on an essential issue ... published fortnightly by The Jobs Research Trust from 1994-2006. (bottom right) the active citizens of The Jobs Research Trust (left to right) Rodger Smith, vivian Hutchinson, Dave Owens, and (seated) Jo Howard. photo by Penny Howard.

ISBN 978-1-92-717633-7 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

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The Feathers We Need To Fly

Posted on How Communities Awaken (2021) by vivian Hutchinson · June 12, 2021 2:12 PM

The Feathers We Need To Fly

— some thoughts for the Community Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 17 min read download as Masterclass PDF

COMMUNITY IS A state of well-being that emerges after we have got a whole lot of basic things right.

These basics include very tangible things like having access to good work and income, housing, education, health, and a thriving environment.

And the basics also include such intangible notions as a sense of safety, and a sense of connection and belonging to a particular place.

These tangible and intangible threads of “getting the basic things right” all weave together until one day we realise that it’s a community. It has become a “We”. It has become a place that we want to live in and belong to, raise our families, work and trade and create, and discover friendship with one another.

Of course, the details of just what constitutes getting things “right” can be a source of much contest and debate. That’s also the nature of community. A shared notion of what we understand to be “right” is a constantly moving target and the discussion and dissent around this becomes, in itself, part of the warp and weft of how the “We” is created.

The reality of “community” is often completely missed in the mainstream media and in political debates, largely because community is not an ideology. Communities are complex and messy and full of contradictions and paradox. They are hard to pin down because they are living things which learn, adapt and change. And if it’s a community, then it probably looks and feels a bit all over the show. You’ll be struggling if you are trying to find the person in charge. There’s certainly not a CEO.

And yet communities work ... or perhaps more precisely, they have important work to do.

Communities do this work through its active citizens — the people who are taking care of the things we value, and are also constantly trying to make things better. The active citizen makes a critical contribution that should never be disregarded, or side-lined or taken for granted.

When our communities are thriving and strong, it will usually be because we have a thriving and strong network of active citizens. These people will be making an impact on all the practical indicators of well-being that touch our social, economic, environmental and cultural lives.

And with a thriving network of active citizens, a great many of the issues and challenges that are affecting us as individuals and families, and as a nation, just become so much easier and much less expensive to sort out.

A Kereru in flight in the Brooklands Bush, New Plymouth, Taranaki

THERE IS A common whakataukī that is often heard at public meetings or at Kohanga Reo: Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu. (Without feathers, the bird cannot fly).

I see the bird in this proverb as a symbol for community. Its feathers are all those light and fluffy and subtle individual and cultural competencies, all those slowly-built personal connections, all those aspects of shape and design that are unconscious, or hidden, or under the surface, and all those matters of wisdom and insight that are a shared understanding of the best way to make things happen for the common good.

It is all these things that knit together to enable our communities to fly.

These feathers are not found in a marketplace. They cannot be bought and bolted on afterwards. They are grown.

As we all know, the ability to fly can be forgotten. Our national bird the kiwi, and many other birds of New Zealand, paid that price when they came to these islands of predator-free abundance.

I would argue that when it comes to “community”, we have also been slowly losing our abilities to fly. But, in our case, it is the abundance and comforts of our consumer culture that have become the predators of our active citizenship, and of our natural structures of sharing and belonging that underpin a thriving community.

The full price of this loss has come in our forgetting. An amnesia starts to spread and strip us of all the competencies that enabled us to grow and exercise the feathers of our community selves. We forget that communities have important work to do. And we forget that one of our jobs as citizens is to actively step up to that work.

✽ ✽ ✽

I HAVE BEEN a community activist for all of my adult life. At various times I have been described as a community adviser, or a social entrepreneur. But these days, as I grow into my own elder years, I simply prefer to be known as an active citizen.

The journey of my active citizenship began in Ponsonby, Auckland in the mid-1970s when I took my first job as a community and city council reporter for the weekly City News newspaper. I also became a member of the Ponsonby/Herne Bay Community Committee, and a volunteer at the Ponsonby Community Centre which was running New Zealand's first Citizen's Advice Bureau.

I was still a teenager at this time, and I soon fell into the friendship and guidance of two very impressive Ponsonby community activists — Betty Wark and Fred Ellis. Together, we initiated or got involved with many local campaigns on housing and homelessness, unemployment and job creation, the community care of psychiatric patients, and doing what we could to stop the police intimidation of Pacific Island immigrants.

For me, these projects became an education in the “how-to” of community activism, and the beginning of a deeper understanding of the craft of community development.

At this time I also joined with Whina Cooper and her family to help organise the 1975 Māori Land March on Parliament. When I met Whina, it was like meeting a force of nature. She was already nearly 80 years old and had been a catalyst for social change over several generations. I, on the other hand, was young and very naïve and completely in awe of her. So it was a surprise and honour to be asked to help out with her next project.

Whina explained to me that the Land March was not going to focus on historical grievances, but would be protesting about the ongoing alienation of Māori land that was still taking place in the 1970s — through the many reinventions of land-grab legislation like the Rating Act, the Public Works Act, and the Town and Country Planning Act. Her purpose would come to be summarised in the cry of “Not One More Acre!”

PHOTOPAGE-Matakite_for_WEB2.png

It turned out that I was the only Pākehā on the organising group, which Whina had called Te Roopu o te Matakite, a name which can be interpreted as “the people who can see ahead”. Little did I realise that our month-long walk from Cape Reinga to Wellington would uncover for me many of the community themes and issues that I would continue to be working on for the rest of my life.

The Māori Land March has since come to be regarded as a pivotal moment in modern New Zealand history. I went on to contribute also to the land rights campaigns at Raglan/Whāingaroa and at Bastion Point/Takaparawhā. But I was also keen to return to my home province and mountain of Taranaki, and explore other aspects of my active citizenship.

Unemployment was just emerging as a significant national issue and I was sure that community groups would have a critical role to play in addressing it. So I began what became forty years of activities in running employment schemes, establishing training programmes, setting up job creation initiatives, and creating schemes to help unemployed people run their own businesses.

PHOTOPAGE-Jobs_for_WEB2.png

This work also included establishing the Jobs Research Trust, being editor and publisher of The Jobs Letter, and later a co-founder of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs.

All these activities saw many wins and losses over the years as schemes and programmes and alliances and colleagues came and went. But it has often felt as though we were just organising our community problems rather than healing them. And there have been many times when our advocacy for the very idea of “community” felt threadbare and marginalised.

After four decades of working on community initiatives to address unemployment, I slowly started to recognise that the thing that was most in danger of becoming unemployed was the concept of “community” itself.

So the next stage of my active citizenship became one of focusing on the craft of community development.

✽ ✽ ✽

OUR PUBLIC LIVES have changed more in the last four decades than they have in the last four generations. And these changes have not always been for the benefit of our communities.

Some of the changes have to do with the success of the neo-liberal economic project that began to take over most of our public and political lives in the mid-1980s.

Some of it has to do with the breakdown and abandonment of the social contract that had been forged between us as New Zealanders during the years following the Great Depression and World War II.

And some of it has come more recently as a result of the impact of new social technologies which have simply amplified the trend towards self-interest and isolation, and a disconnection from our sense of the common good.

The public changes have had social, economic, environmental and cultural consequences that can be seen and felt in our communities in very diverse ways — the persistent underfunding of public resources such as schools and hospitals and social housing; the privatisation of those public assets and the selling off of public spaces to developers; the infrastructure of roads, bridges, water and power networks being allowed to deteriorate; the continuing pollution of our environment, with lakes and rivers that we can’t swim in; historic low levels of trust in all sorts of established institutions; a low level of civic engagement in terms of voting rates and volunteering; and a fundamental change in the traditional role played by the media in public affairs.

Many of the community impacts of these changes have felt very close to home — there are a growing number of our young people that seem less likely (compared to their parents) to find a good job or can afford somewhere decent to live. And too many of these young people are caught up in ballooning levels of loneliness and depression and other mental health challenges.

The curious thing is that these public changes have been happening slowly enough for most of us to completely miss the important story that they are telling. We just keep adjusting to the new realities.

The changes haven't happened like the 2020 Coronovirus Pandemic where every aspect of our community and national lives had to respond to the threat of a deadly new virus in the space of a couple of months.

Instead, when it came to these fundamental changes to our public lives, we have been like the frog in the notorious 19th-century science experiment.

When they dropped the frog into a pot of boiling water, obviously it had the common sense to get out of it as soon as possible. But when they put the frog into a pot of cold water and gradually raised the temperature, the frog did not sense its calamity, and it just sat there and allowed itself to be slowly boiled alive.

I believe it is much the same as we have faced our slow-moving public transformations. At a time when we should be responding to the profound changes in our shared lives, there are just far too many citizens and institutions who find themselves stuck and immobile, or hopelessly distracted.

✽ ✽ ✽

AMIDST THE AUSTERITY policies that followed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, many of our political and government department leaders were telling community groups that, as a country, we were broke and that we needed to be much more creative with what we've got.

At this time, I was organising a fellowship of some of our leading national social entrepreneurs, and we had taken the opportunity to promote the concepts of community entrepreneurship and innovation in the face of this nation-wide belt-tightening.

But 2011 saw the rise of the international Occupy Wall Street movement, and a new and disturbing picture emerged of what had happened to the distribution of wealth in our communities. We could no longer be in denial about the consequences of the social and political changes that had been happening since the mid-1980s. And as businesses recovered from the 2008 crash, it was shown that most of the gains in new wealth were going to the top 1%.

Distribution of wealth in New Zealand (2015)

A graph that summarised the distribution of wealth in New Zealand (above) shows the systemic reconfiguration of inequality and opportunity in our country. The graph is not the picture of an ideal or fair distribution of wealth that most New Zealanders carry around with them in their heads. It is a picture of a very different New Zealand where we have clipped the wings of our own neighbours.

For over half the country, it is no longer fundamentally true that if you work hard or study, and play by the rules, then you will get ahead. This is the social contract that has changed, and it has serious implications for all of us working at the front lines of community development and social services.

The distribution of wealth graph also shows us that, contrary to what we were being told, we are not broke.

What is broken here ... is the “We”.

✽ ✽ ✽

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT is about awakening citizens so that they can play their part in getting the basic things right. It is about re-forging the fundamental connections of “We” so that a fairer picture of our common aspirations can be pursued. And it requires us to face some difficult issues, and have some courageous conversations — while also remembering and celebrating the things we are learning and getting right.

One of the people who has influenced my thinking about community development is the Italian social entrepreneur Ernesto Sirolli. He visited Taranaki in the 1980s and shared his insights on how to support small businesses with a process that he called Enterprise Facilitation.

Sirolli challenged our thinking by pointing out that many of the ideas we had about “development” needed to change. Those of us running organisations and programmes needed to become a bit more humble about our own sense of agency as facilitators. We needed to understand that an economy or a community are living and complex systems. They’ve got a mind of their own.

Sirolli argued you can’t “develop” anything any more than you can “flower” a flower. But you can do a lot to create the conditions in which that flowering can occur. And when we get those conditions right, the flower quite naturally unfolds.

This is much the same with community development. The transformation of ourselves, our families and our neighbourhoods is a gardening job. If we create the right conditions — supporting a basic infrastructure of skills and intelligence for the common good — then people will awaken their own active citizenship and create the communities they want to live in.

The cultural competencies involved in active citizenship and community-building are a set of skills and tools that need to be grown and renewed with every generation. It’s not as if you are building a piece of infrastructure like a bridge that may well last for hundreds of years before you need to think about it again.

These competencies are living things. They are matters of wisdom and maturity that need to be fostered in our young people and further developed as adults. This is a continuous process of education in which every generation needs to find a way of making their own.

And if we do get it right, then we just might notice that the feathers we need to fly are starting to sprout and stretch.

 

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Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper The Feathers We Need To Fly is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

Kereru in flight ... photo from The Brooklands Zoo / Facebook page

1975 Māori Land March ... See Hikoi: The Māori Land March (2016) documentary directed by John Bates. Available to view on demand at www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/hikoi-the-land-march. This film marked the 40th anniversary of the 1975 Land March which, under the leadership of Dame Whina Cooper, travelled the length of the North Island to protest the loss of Maori Land. Made with the support of NZ On Air.

vivian Hutchinson interviewed by Kim Hill on the Māori Land March 40th anniversary, Radio NZ National Programme 10th October 2015 www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201774095/vivian-hutchinson-the-maori-land-march

Photopage: Matakite — THE 1975 MĀORI LAND MARCH and the CITY NEWS — The 1975 Māori Land March from Cape Reinga to Parliament Grounds, Wellington, organised by Te Roopu o te Matakite (top left) The start of the March in Te Hapua, in the Far North (photo by The Auckland Star) (top right) Marchers at the Paraparas near Wanganui, and on College Hill in Ponsonby, Auckland (middle right) Marchers enter Parliament Grounds (middle left) Matakite leader Whina Cooper speaking in Hamilton during the 1975 Land March. (photos by Christian Heinegg) (bottom left) vivian Hutchinson Community columnist in the City News, Auckland's inner-city independent newspaper (bottom right) vivian Hutchinson interviewing the Mayor of Auckland, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson in 1977 (photo by the City News)

Photopage: Jobs — STARTING POINT and the SKILLS OF ENTERPRISE BUSINESS COURSES — projects of the Taranaki Work Trust (top) Starting Point Employment Resource Centre, St Aubyn St, New Plymouth. The Starting Point team, with some of the Skills of Enterprise and Be Your Own Boss classes held at Starting Point. (centre) An Enterprise Facilitation interview (bottom right) free Employment Wanted advertisements in the Taranaki Daily News. The free Job Help booklet by vivian Hutchinson containing advice and support resources for Taranaki jobless.

Our public lives have changed more in the last 40 years ... this is a conclusion similar to that made by Guardian Editor Katharine Viner on the state of journalism ... see “A mission for journalism in a time of crisis” The Guardian 16 November 2017 www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/16/a-mission-for-journalism-in-a-time-of-crisis

The boiling frog ... science experiment see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

the gains in new wealth going to the top 1% ... for more see Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labour, "Inequality for All" documentary directed by Jacob Kornbluth (2013)

The picture of Wealth Distribution in New Zealand was based on the 2015 Statistics New Zealand Report "Wealth Disparities in New Zealand". Wealth inequality has only got worse since this picture was drawn (see below for the figures).

wealth inequality ... writer and artist Toby Morris has teamed up with Max Rashbrooke to imagine all the wealth in New Zealand as a ten-storey apartment building. See "The Side Eye – Inequality Tower 2018" by Toby Morris and Max Rashbrook thespinoff.co.nz/society/31-07-2018/the-side-eye-inequality-tower-2018/. The 2018 figures show that 1% now own 22% of NZ wealth (up↑ from 16.4% on the 2015 figures), 9% own 37% (down↓ 2%), the middle 40% own 39% (down↓ 4%), and the bottom 50% own 2% (down↓ 3.4%). The 2018 figures come from "Statistics New Zealand Net Worth Survey"

not the picture of an ideal or fair distribution of wealth that most New Zealanders carry around in their own heads ... see research by Peter Skilling (2014) of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law at AUT. “Attitudes to inequality in 2014: Results from a 2014 Survey”. New Zealand Sociology, 29(3), 38-50. Retrieved from https://search.informit.org/documentSummary;dn=898622121009415;res=IELNZC and “Wealth split worse than most realise” Sunday Star-Times 25 August 2014 www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/10416461/Wealth-split-worse-than-most-realise

Also see www.inequality.org.nz. This website includes a useful calculator which lets you find out how much you earn compared to everyone else – and how much better (or worse) off you’d be in a more equal New Zealand.

Dr Ernesto Sirolli ... is a legend in local economic development who has worked in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, Africa, Latin America, USA and Asia. He pioneered a system of Enterprise Facilitation a unique economic development approach based on harnessing the passion, determination, intelligence, and resourcefulness of the local people. http://sirolli.com

a matter of agency and humility ... see also Ernesto Sirolli at TEDxEQChCh Christchurch September 2012 “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_listen

ISBN 978-1-92-717632-0 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

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