A Trusted Promise

— some thoughts for the Commitment Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 17 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE COMMITMENT CONVERSATION is about the promises you are making to yourself, and to your community. This conversation is the place to explore the responsibilities that you are willing to undertake to make things happen. And it is the place to build the significant relationships within your community that can help you steer your commitments into reality.

It is all very well asking yourself the question, What is my contribution to the common good? But it obviously needs to go much further than that: What are the promises you are making to ensure that this contribution is actually delivered? and, Who are you making these promises to? 

The commitments of an active citizen are not achieved alone. We need people in our lives that we trust enough to help us steer our decisions, give us feedback on our assumptions, and hold us accountable for our actions.

These are the people to whom we entrust our promises. Their trusteeship is a critical function of a healthy community.

This trusteeship is different from a formal governance appointment or a supervisory relationship you might have with an employer or someone within a community organisation. The relationship I am referring to here is much more personal and involves the level of trust and accountability that we are able to offer each other as fellow citizens and as friends.

A community trustee is your peer, and the conversations that you have together involve the promises that are made between you as peers. A friend and a fellow citizen is turned into a trustee when they are prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with receiving such a promise. Your commitments become much more real and powerful when they are made within the context of such a relationship.

The purpose of a community trustee is to pay attention, and be a voice for the common good. Their trusteeship usually involves having regular conversations with you that reflect on your goals and objectives, how things are changing, and what you are noticing and learning.

A trustee pays attention to what you are serving in the community, and then gives feedback on the impact of what you are trying to do. They pay particular attention to the everyday blind spots that all of us bring to our work and service.

Trusteeship is the way that your personal aspirations and promises are turned into a living function of community. It is this trusteeship that ensures that your commitments are not a solitary purpose, and nor are they completely dependent on matters of your own individual willpower.

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I HAVE BEEN a self-employed community organiser for most of my adult life. I have regularly taken on jobs and contracts that have paid the bills, but my real career has been an expression of the passions and commitments that come with being an active citizen.

And for most of my life, I have been fortunate that these activities have been done in the context of peer-based community trusteeship, and this has included many different associations of friends and colleagues.

They have been prepared to pay a deeper attention to my intentions, and do me the great favour of giving me feedback or intervening when they think I am getting things wrong. They have stood alongside me when my activities have required me to be more courageous and persistent or kind. And they have often commiserated with my failures and celebrated my accomplishments.

In many cases, the trusteeship in my life has been a mutual relationship as I have done the same for these friends and colleagues and their own passions and activities as active citizens.

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Some of these associations have become formal arrangements, but most of the time they have been based on very informal meet-ups. We have gathered in each other’s homes, or used spiritual Retreat Centres or camping venues at National Parks — where we can step outside our often stressful daily lives and walk and talk and reflect on the matters at hand.    

A network of trusteeship, and a culture that encourages these sorts of meetings and conversations, is a sign of a thriving community. It is important to the resilience of our shared lives, and it means we are taking seriously the commitments and accountabilities that come with our intentions to change, create or to take care of the things that matter to us all.

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SUCH COMMITMENTS MIGHT seem a strange thing in a modern society which is dominated by self-interest, short-term thinking, consumerism, and disposability. Such accountabilities do seem strange in a society where our concept of “freedom” usually means that we step back from asking the best of each other.

And yet we are clearly living with the consequences of these attitudes of self-interest, and the lack of that ask.

Our major social, economic, and environmental systems are under stress, or facing collapse, and our usual sources of authority are heavily compromised. But the everyday function of community trusteeship is also being marginalised at this stressful time. Active citizens need to rebuild this capacity with one another.

This is because we are in urgent need of a much deeper cultural binding to our better angels. This is the binding that is woven as we dare to step forward and ask the best of each other, and then hang in there as we each learn how to rise to our necessary commitments.

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COMMITMENT IS NOT just a process of resolve, or of positive thinking or clever time management. If you want to see fundamental change in your community, then you will need to recognise that the promises you are making are not matters to be taken lightly.

This is because your commitments will often be at war with a whole host of influences designed to keep things exactly the way they are right now. Your promises will find they need to navigate their way through a dense and complicated swampland.

And this is not work for the faint-hearted.

The swampland is full of over-grown pathways that make their way through your own inadequacies and incompetencies, your fears and anxieties, your procrastinations and addictions, the unexpected oppositions and dissents, the helpful and unhelpful comments of friends and families, the seductive persuasions of the status quo, and sometimes very direct threats from the powers-that-be.

There are lots of voices with reasons as to why you should never even start on your commitments. If you only listened to them ... then you never will.

This is why active citizenship is something we do together. We need the courageous conversations that community trusteeship brings to the promises we are making. We need each other to get through the swamp.

Without this level of support and accountability, an individual is in danger of isolation and surviving by their wits. You might start to imagine that you are some sort of solitary hero or changemaker. But these inflations are yet more distracting pathways in the swampland. 

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THERE ARE PLENTY of other distractions to your commitments. Some of them are quite clever. When I was first reading Peter Block’s book Community, one of the things that really struck me was where he pointed out that the greatest enemy of commitment is not opposition, but it is lip service.

In his book he describes lip service as “an agreement that is made standing next to the exit door.” He says it offers an empty step forward, and if we genuinely want movement on an issue, then “... we can move forward with a refusal; but we cannot move forward with a maybe.”

Reading this was one of those moments when I sat back in my chair with a huge sigh. This was something that had often been true in my own experience – as lip service has led me into a great many swamplands.

What I have learned is that lip service does not really want you to have the Commitment Conversation. And it is the way that our major systems are structurally kept in denial of their need for transformational change.

Lip service is so highly developed in our culture that it comes smartly dressed up as marketing messages and policy advice and political talking points. There are entire job descriptions and economies and contracts based on this avoidance of the need for real change.

Lip service is essentially an instrument of power and one of the dark arts of privilege. And it is toxic to our communities because it occupies the space we need to act and make a real difference.

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I EXPERIENCED A CURIOUS example of the nature of lip service while I was part of hosting a conference in Wellington in 2012. The event was called Doing Real Good, and it was one of the most diverse conferences I had been to in a long time. It had brought together a very unusual mix of social entrepreneurs with government leaders, local government officials, business leaders, academics, community leaders, and disability activists.

At one of our sessions, we had a top-level manager from the Ministry of Social Development giving us a speech on what was going to be a significant change in government policy relating to social service providers.

His speech focused on framing government as a “social enabler” and a provider of the resources for “building social capital”. He was blunt in his view that the current models of social service were out-of-date, and he was going to lead a fundamental change in the nature of government contracts and tenders so that they would become more “outcomes-focused”. He had already told his staff that making this change would be “... the most important work they will ever do.”

The government speaker then finished off his talk with a short video. This technique for closing a speech had recently become something of a standard at business conferences, and was designed to deliver something of an entertaining or inspiring “Hallmark moment” at the end of a presentation. I had been at some conferences where the closing video at the end had very little connection to the subject of the speech that had just been made ... but this particular video turned out to have its own unexpected results.

The video was called The Power of Words and it shows a blind beggar sitting in the middle of a city square in Scotland. The man is sitting cross-legged on a blanket while many people are briskly walking past. He has a cardboard sign propped up behind his begging tin can, and the sign says, “I’m Blind, Please Help.”

But he isn’t getting very many customers.

The Beggar in the “Power of Words” video.

Then a young woman walks by, and she is smartly dressed with some particularly stunning green leather shoes. She passes the beggar, but then stops and turns back and walks up to him.

She doesn’t talk, and neither does she place any money in the tin. Instead, she bends down and picks up the sign, turns it over and pulls out a black marker-pen that she just happened to have in her coat pocket. She writes a new message and replaces the sign, before mysteriously walking off. 

As the music builds on the video, we see a dramatic change in response to the blind beggar. The people who were previously walking briskly past are now stopping to bend over and putting plenty of coin into the beggar’s tin can.

The blind man is left sitting there somewhat bewildered.

It is now later in the day and the same woman is walking back through the square and she stops in front of the beggar to see how things have improved. The blind man recognises her because he had previously touched her distinctive green shoes. He now asks her, “What did you do to my sign?”

She crouches down and tenderly touches him on the shoulder, saying, “I wrote the same, but different words.” And then she walks off again.

The camera then slowly moves onto the new sign, which reads, “It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it.”

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SO WE ARE BACK at the conference again, and the video is finished, and the lights have come back on. Half the conference participants were sitting in their chairs, smiling to one another, and saying some version of, “Oh – that’s lovely!”

But the other half of the room were sitting there extremely grumpy.

The government manager was confused. He’d shown this video before, but this was quite a different reaction which he hadn’t been expecting.

He turned to the chairperson of the conference, who explained the reaction to him by saying, “You are showing this in a room full of community activists and social entrepreneurs. They are asking themselves, “Why is that man still begging?”

Several of the community activists later stood up at the conference to challenge the assumptions in the video and how it might well be connected to the government manager’s overall presentation. One asked, “What is the conclusion we are meant to be drawing here? Does your Ministry just want us all to become better beggars?”

This conference was being held in Wellington at a time of increasing government austerity measures aimed at the social services sector. The Minister of Social Development at the time was trumpeting changes to the welfare rules that would possibly save the government as much as $1.6 billion.

But the active citizens at this conference could see that this money was being taken out of some of our poorest communities, who could not feed their children on The Power of Words.

While the government manager may not have intended it this way, his use of the video had become an important teaching moment for the whole conference – which, after all, was called Doing Real Good.

Few of the participants were ever going to argue with the idea of common-sense outcomes contracting. Many of them had already been shaping their social services around these principles for quite some time.

But the issue here was: Who had the power to determine what those outcomes were? and, Were these outcomes a real indication of what we commonly value?

The power of words behind many government and departmental outcomes can too quickly wash up as lip service on the shores of our communities. If we are indeed going to be in the business of doing real good, then we need to better understand how to close the gap between what is said and what is really delivered.

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A GAP THAT ALSO needs closing is the one that exists between the authenticity of our intentions, and the cynicism and distrust that pervades far too much of our political and community affairs.

The paradox here is that the Commitment Conversation is definitely based upon the power of words. These are the words that weave the promises made between friends and fellow citizens. They become the infrastructure of a living and thriving culture of community trusteeship.

Our commitments grow into their authenticity when they speak of the intentions that we are inhabiting. These intentions can grow beyond our skepticism when they are entrusted to relationships which dare to keep us honest and on track.

We might have started off by trying to change the nature of the conversations we are having ... but this is just the beginning of our journey of awakening.

Our communities really do start to transform when we are capable of changing the nature of the promises we are making to one another.

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 A Trusted Promise 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

The Commitment Conversation “... a promise made to peers.” see Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008) Page 137; and “...the enemy of commitment is not opposition, but it is lip service.” Page 136. This book is available at www.amazon.com/dp/1605092770. Peter Block 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: Tauhara — TAUHARA CENTRE GATHERINGS at Acacia Bay, Taupo — Since the 1970s, the Tauhara Centre has been a venue for encouraging unity and dialogue between the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. It has also fostered positive ways that we can work together as New Zealanders and as global citizens. Some of the gatherings held at the Centre have included the One Earth Gathering, The Festivals of Co-operation, Men’s Gatherings, Women’s Gatherings, the Stewardship Learning Community, and Heart Politics. (top and middle left) home discussion groups from Heart Politics gatherings and the Stewardship Learning Community (top right) Tauhara Centre Sanctuary at Dawn, August 2005. photo by vivian Hutchinson (middle left) Strategic Questioning paper by Fran Peavey with vivian Hutchinson (1997) (middle right) vivian Hutchinson in workshop at Heart Politics Kauaeranga Valley, Coromandel, Summer 2012. photo by Robin Allison. The One Earth Gathering Workshop Leaders at Taupo Airport, November 1983 (left to right) Canon Peter Spink (UK), Te Atu Rangi Nepia Clamp, vivian Hutchinson, Soozi Holbeche (UK), Brian Woodward, Bill Watson, Pamela Mathews, Aunty Marj Raumati Rau, elder Guboo Ted Thomas (Australia) (front) unknown, Grasshopper the Clown, Lynn Noonan (USA), Basil Avery, Marjorie Clark and Dorothy Maclean (Findhorn, Scotland) (bottom) Heart Politics gathering welcoming line, Summer 1990.

“The Power of Words” a video produced by the Glasgow-based marketing firm Purple Feather www.purplefeather.co.uk www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU.  This is an English version of the Spanish short film Historia de un letrero, directed by Alonso Alvarez Barreda, Wama Films (2007) which can be seen at vimeo.com/32651216. And for more background on these videos, see Jana Brech blog at webwisewording.com/the-story-of-a-sign/

ISBN 978-1-92-717639-9 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

Fierce Friendship

— some thoughts for the Dissent Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 22 min read download as Masterclass PDF

A HEALTHY COMMUNITY is one that is safe for dissent. Not only is it safe, but dissent is welcomed as part of the process of fostering genuine engagement, commitment and creativity in all our community activities. 

The choice of dissent as one of our main topics of community conversation provides us with an important re-framing of dissent as a community competency. The dissent we welcome here is understood and respected as a critical component in the art of community-building. 

This dissent challenges us to re-examine our prevailing ideas about what makes up the health and strength of our communities. It is not necessarily found in unanimity. The cohesion of our communities may be only as good as the authenticity of our invitation to dissent. 

You know that you are in a healthy community when there is a nay-sayer in the room and it is no problem whatsoever. This is because, in such a community, it is obviously safe for a diversity of opinions to be expressed.

The nay-sayer might not feel compatible with other people, and probably not comfortable to whatever status quo they are bringing into question. But the nay-sayer is not a disruption to our harmony. 

The plain fact of it is this: harmony cannot happen if we are all singing the same note. 

Dissent is the difference between cult and culture. A cult has an authoritarian mind-set that has already settled into its own form of “right” and “wrong” thinking. A dissenter within a cult can often face the threat of emotional or even physical consequences if they don’t tow the line. 

But a culture is something different. It is a much messier and rowdy place. It doesn’t bury disagreements under a sentimental call for us to “just get along”. A healthy culture knows how to welcome the doubts and criticisms and questions and ongoing inquiries – because they are also the natural expressions of friendship, family and community. 

The dissent is welcomed, because it is still part of the “We”.

Real dissent takes courage ... but so too does an authentic engagement with disagreement. This courage-on-both-sides is the basis of how we are able to live together and still agree to disagree. 

This courage enables us to grow fierce friendships –where the act of saying “No” is greeted with the respect and curiosity that it deserves. 

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I AM UNDER NO illusion that we are living within such a healthy culture. My experience as an active citizen has seen too many times when my dissent has been written off as trouble-making. My willingness to stand for a different point of view has too often been pushed to the margins, or has been aggressively met with some form of bullying. 

Of course I would have preferred to see my own activism genuinely welcomed as an embrace of diversity, or as a contribution to creativity and solution-building in our communities. But we are not living or working in such a culture. 

I have worked with many government departments, and political leaders, and local council bureaucrats, and I have often found that active citizenship was considered an unwelcome form of criticism. Our community action was seen as direct feedback on their competency as professionals, and their ability to manage our problems. 

There have been many calls over the years for community groups to engage in better partnerships with government and local authorities. While these partnerships may have led to funding contracts and formal Memorandums of Understanding ... we still have a long way to go before we have a genuinely shared understanding about how to deal with dissent. 

Yet, amidst all this, I would have to concede that the community and voluntary sector itself does not have a better track record of embracing disagreement.

I have been involved with many businesses, foundations, sports groups, spiritual associations, marae committees, political parties and pressure groups – and they all have come with plenty of examples of toxic power and control issues, and policies of “right” and “wrong” thinking. 

In this sector – often known as “civil” society – I have experienced no less a culture of bullying and the uncivil silencing of dissent. 

While this has often left me bruised and frustrated, it hasn’t made me cynical. Instead, it tells me that a real conversation about dissent is well overdue. 

We’ve got to talk about it, and begin to learn the social skills and capacities for becoming fiercer friends with one another. Having the Dissent Conversation may prove to be critical in dealing with the major challenges of our time. 

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ONE OF MY MENTORS on the subject of dissent was the former New Zealand Governor-General, Sir Paul Reeves (1932—2011). In the early days of his career, he served as the Vicar of Okato in coastal Taranaki. He was a long-time friend of Aunty Marj, and with his whakapapa links to the Puketapu hapu of Te Atiawa, he was the first Governor-General to be appointed of Māori descent. 

Paul Reeves was a passionate advocate for the importance of common ground, and the need to grow trust between people so that dissent can breathe. 

He saw common ground as not just a place where people are “nice” to one another – but were able to focus on the values and principles which underpin our mutual well-being. 

The leadership task here is to grow this common ground because, without this space, our communities just polarise into tribes of “right” and “wrong” thinking. 

The cultural anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond spoke about the importance of Sir Paul’s leadership in developing this common ground when she gave the first Reeves Memorial Lecture at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland in 2012.  

Her talk was entitled Beyond the Binary – Shifting New Zealand’s Mindset, and she called for our nation to move on from the “black and white” binary thinking that dominates so much of our public life. 

Anne Salmond argued that, in this binary mind-set, our views are abstracted and purified of any qualities they might have in common, and are opposed to each other. When we think like this, we cancel out the possibilities of a middle ground. 

She proposed that the logic behind the middle ground is neither utopian nor sentimental. Instead, it is a logic that affirms that life is about negotiation and exchange, and it recognises that such engagements often fail: 

“ Genuine differences do exist between Maori and Pakeha, men and women, Left and Right - but so do networks of interlocking relations, shared values and mutual dependency. Rather than excluding the middle ground, the challenge is to get the networks of relations across it working in ways that are mutually positive and creative, not hostile and destructive. This, I think, is the task that Sir Paul set himself, and why his life mattered so much to us all."  – Dame Anne Salmond

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AS A COMMUNITY ACTIVIST, I have learned that there is a subtle yet important distinction between the concepts of the middle ground, and the common ground. They are both critical tools to have in dealing with conflicts and disagreements, but they differ in the depth of their long-term impact. 

The middle ground is often where politicians and mediators try to settle disputes by forging a compromise. When a middle ground negotiation is done well, it is usually something that everyone can live with. The settlement might lead to a pragmatic and an immediate resolution of a disagreement, but it may not stand the test of time. 

The problem with the middle ground is that it often involves the sort of deal-making that addresses the symptoms of a conflict, rather than the underlying causes. This deal-making is still embedded in the same binary thinking that Anne Salmond was addressing in her lecture. It is the place for bi-partisan bargaining. It is the transactional space between this position, and that. 

Finding common ground is different because it is not focused on winning or losing, or creating a “deal”. It is about stepping out of this oppositional thinking and choosing to discover the places where we have common purpose. It is the place where we seek to resolve problems by focusing on the values and principles that different parties bring to a conflict. 

Finding common ground involves growing a level of trust that enables the stories of those values and principles to be shared and heard. It tries to build connections at the living level of culture. It is usually a much slower process, and for some communities, it might even involve the work of generations. 

Common ground is made possible by a genuine curiosity about the things we share, and where we agree. It starts with these connections, and then builds bridges. And it is also a place where completely fresh solutions can emerge – solutions which many of the “usual suspects” may not have thought of yet. 

Imagine two circles that overlap. The area they share is the common ground, and the place where we can build our connections and bridges. The non-overlapping areas are where our differences reside, and our disagreements are hatched. 

We can choose to focus on these disagreements and use them as wedge issues to reinforce our separate identities and drive the circles further apart. But if we really do want to live together, then we need to focus on the values and principles that we share. 

Conversation is one of the main tools for finding this common ground. For the active citizen, these conversations are warrior work – not a warrior in terms of combat and violence, or winning and losing – but a warrior in terms of the courage and bravery, the skill, the teamwork and the persistence needed to change our usual ways of talking and thinking together. 

The conversation we need is not about making an argument, or closing a deal. The point of the conversation is not even about saying something, or being heard.

The origin of the word “conversation” does not mention speaking or listening. The word comes from Latin roots that mean “an act of living with or keeping company with.” 

In this context, the point of a common ground conversation is to develop a connection. The conversation itself is the creative act of figuring out where our circles overlap.

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PAUL REEVES WAS a supporter of my work in the 1990s with The Jobs Research Trust and The Jobs Letter. He also encouraged our network of community employment trusts to get involved with the Anglican-led Hikoi for Hope in 1998. 

This was a time when many elements of New Zealand’s social and community services were starting to find themselves at breaking point. The neo-liberal revolution after 1984 had taken over the policies of both our main political parties. The consequence was that the incomes for the richest New Zealanders doubled, while the incomes of the poorest barely rose at all. 

Policy changes meant that welfare benefits to the poorest New Zealanders were cut in 1991, Housing New Zealand tenants were forced onto market-based rentals, and a new Employment Contracts Act led to an increasing casualisation of the national workforce. In this precarious climate, more and more New Zealanders found themselves struggling to make ends meet. 

The Anglican Church decided to focus their concerns about this by staging the Hikoi of Hope in the Spring of 1998. It was a call for a national conversation on the basic issues now polarising our communities: how to address poverty, create real jobs, build affordable housing, organise a health system we can trust, and guarantee access to education. 

The month-long Hikoi had teams marching on Parliament from Cape Reinga at the top of the country and from Stewart Island in the South. It is estimated that over 80,000 people joined the protest at sometime during the month. Each evening when the Hikoi stopped, public meetings were held so that local people could share their stories on the social and economic concerns of their own communities. 

At Parliament Grounds, over 10,000 people gathered for the final day of the Hikoi, making it one of the largest gatherings ever held at Parliament. The marchers were greeted with a karanga from Aunty Marj who welcomed the protestors onto what she considered to be the marae of Parliament Grounds. 

It was both surprising and troubling to see Sir Paul Reeves, our former Governor-General, standing on the back of a truck as he invited the crowd to join him in chanting, “Enough is Enough!” 

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BUT IN THE TWENTY or so years since that national protest, we have learned that “Enough” has not proven anywhere near enough. The gap between rich and poor has not been fundamentally challenged by either Labour-led or National-led governments, and the deterioration in our economic and social landscape has basically become the “new normal” of New Zealand life. 

It has also become much more of a struggle to get ordinary citizens involved in thinking and working together on the basic issues of well-being within a decent society. 

Incivility itself has become a strategy of political advancement, while continuing to feed the oppositional appetites of the mainstream media. 

This binary mind-set has been amplified by the new and more personal social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The new media has ironically become a commodification and parody of both “friendship” and “community”. 

The algorithms that drive the attention economy behind their “news-feeds” cleverly reflect and reinforce our existing personal, family and affiliation networks and the information filters that come with them. 

The impact of these supposedly “connecting” technologies is that there is less diversity in the voices we are hearing — and  consequently, less common ground from which we can address our complex issues. 

This is a mindscape that ends up brewing a very toxic mix of both isolation and fundamentalism. The same coarseness and indecency that we are quick to point out and reject in many political leaders is a perfect reflection of the lack of empathy that is being deliberately fostered and fermented within our own thinking.

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SO MANY OF OUR CURRENT community and national issues just feel too big, too complex, and too stuck to ever be effectively addressed by our political system. 

It is a very real question of our planetary age: when faced with the big issues such as a global pandemic, the climate emergency, the collapse of eco-systems, unresolved questions of racial justice, and continued income inequality ... can a liberal democracy ever really undertake these challenges? 

Is the current shape of our democracy fit for purpose? Or are we just destined to deteriorate into an authoritarian future that is incubated within the frustrations and desperations of political deadlock? 

I don’t think so. I just think we haven’t been investing in one of our most under-appreciated resources: the common-sense and contribution of everyday citizens.

Nor have we been investing in bringing citizens into a useful dialogue on our most pressing issues – the very challenges we all share that are big, complex, and currently stuck. 

One strategy for inviting this participation can be found in the concept of a Citizens Assembly, which is a gathering of ordinary people commissioned by the state to consider issues of national importance. 

The Citizens Assembly is not made up of politically appointed experts, or representatives of sector groups. The membership is a random selection of strangers drawn from the electoral roll, and they are chosen in such a way that reflects the age, class, regional and ethnic differences of the nation.

It is an approach towards decision-making that dates back to the early Greeks who invented democracy in the sixth century BC. The Citizens Assembly is not a replacement for an elected House of Representatives, but it is a way that we can add a completely fresh voice to the conversations that our nation needs to be having. It is based on the notion that a deeper deliberation, and not just voting, should be the primary source of legitimacy for our laws and policies. 

As the journalist and political adviser Sonia Sodha wrote in The Observer:

"What’s so attractive about Citizens Assemblies is that they enable people from different backgrounds and perspectives to find common ground. They undermine the patronising but fashionable idea we’ve become two cultural tribes who no longer know how to talk to each other. And in the right circumstances they can profoundly shift the national debate." – Sonia Sodha

In 2016, the Irish Government established a Citizens' Assembly (An Tionól Saoránach) as a strategy for deliberating on some of their most complex and polarising political questions – such as abortion, constitutional reform, issues arising from an ageing population, and climate change. 

There were 99 people chosen as members of the Assembly, and their commitment was to attend the Assembly for one weekend meeting each month over a year. There was no payment for their participation, although travel expenses were reimbursed. 

The Citizens Assembly met at a Dublin hotel, and listened to expert presentations, and to the stories of people impacted by the problems. They had debates and roundtable discussions, and convened plenary sessions. These meetings were all livestreamed on the internet. Finally, they compiled a report of conclusions, and voted on their recommendations.

At the beginning of 2018, the Assembly stunned the Irish nation by proposing a series of exceptionally liberal changes to the abortion regime. The Government was expected to bow under political pressure and water down the proposals ... but instead, the politicians (including some prominent socially conservative figures) produced a response that was broadly in line with the Assembly. 

This profound national turn-around on the abortion issue followed an earlier Citizens Assembly which was part of the Irish Constitutional Convention. These deliberations had led directly to a transformative Irish referendum on same-sex marriage. 

As Brett Henning, the co-founder of the Sortition Foundation, observed: 

"Both Assemblies opened up the political space for dramatic change – and, interestingly, politicians happily stepped into those spaces, basking in the legitimacy for their stance provided by these Assemblies populated by ‘everyday people’." – Brett Henning

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OTHER COUNTRIES have been recently exploring establishing their own Citizens Assemblies, with interesting initiatives in Spain, Belgium, Japan and Canada.

A Citizens’ Assembly in Scotland has proposed the idea of establishing a permanent assembly at the Scottish Parliament. This would be a “second chamber” for the consideration of legislation and review of government initiatives. Advocates say that this “House of Citizens” would represent a “shining example of trust in our communities” when compared to a fully-appointed House of Lords.

A New Zealand version of these Assemblies could lead to a fresh national conversation on the challenges most affecting our nation. It could prove to be a useful way to break the partisan gridlock created by funders and advisors and vested interest groups who have successfully captured so much of our everyday political process.

Imagine a national conference centre, like the one at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, turned over to a Citizens Assembly for one weekend in every month. The proceedings could be broadcast live on TV and the internet in the same way that we now follow the debates in Parliament. 

And if it was to be held at Te Papa, these conversations could be informed by the taonga and artefacts and artworks that we have preserved from our past, and can speak to us of our connections and our best intentions for the future.

Imagine the marae, on the top floor of that Wellington waterfront building, becoming the national common ground upon which a Citizens Assembly can have its more courageous conversations. 

Such an Assembly might also forge and demonstrate a more healthy culture where the Dissent Conversation is made welcome. Our disagreements would not be there to ignite the political polarisation around an issue, or to sell newspapers, or to feed the click-bait, or signal virtues to a tribalised electorate. 

Instead, our dissent would be more deeply called onto the marae of our common ground. And this could be the beginning of us thinking together and discovering where we might possibly agree on the things we need to do.

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 Fierce Friendship 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

The Hon Rt Rev Sir Paul Alfred Reeves, ONZ, GCMG, GCVO, CF, QSO (1932 - 2011) was Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand from 1980 to 1985 and the Governor-General of New Zealand from 1985 to 1990. For more, listen to Paul Reeves interviewed on Ideas National Radio 8th May 2011 at www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ideas/20110508

“Beyond the Binary - Shifting New Zealand’s Mindset” by Dame Anne Salmond, the first Bishop Sir Paul Reeves Memorial Lecture 2012, delivered at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland on Friday 17th August 2012. A video of this presentation is at vimeo.com/49300122. The Radio New Zealand Reeves Lecture page is at www.radionz.co.nz/national/lecturesandforums/reeves 

imagining of this as two circles ... thanks to ideas by David Maxfield in his 2012 article “Finding Common Ground When You Know You're Right” at www.vitalsmarts.com/crucialskills/2012/12/finding-common-ground-when-you-know-youre-right/

the origin of the word “conversation” is from 1300AD Anglo-French conversacion, from Latin conversatio, from conversari to associate with, society, intercourse, (Miriam-Webster and dictionary.com)

The Jobs Letter was produced every 2-3 weeks from 1994-2006 by The Jobs Research Trust. It was edited by vivian Hutchinson and Dave Owens, and offered “essential information on an essential issue”, covering the areas of unemployment, job creation, the future of work and related education and economic concerns. All back issues of The Jobs Letter are archived online at www.jobsletter.org.nz

The Jobs Letter was also one of the first community sector websites to be established in New Zealand (before the advent of social media technologies). For this work, the Jobs Research Trust was awarded the Premier prize in the Internet category of the 1999 Media Peace Awards, organised by The New Zealand Peace Foundation.

The 1998 Hikoi of Hope .... for more on the march and its five planks see www.jobsletter.org.nz/jbl08500.htm; also interview with Stephanie McIntyre by Steven Robinson Jan/Feb 1999 in Share International tinyurl.com/3hzayrb

vivian Hutchinson on the Hikoi of Hope ... see “Walking for Change” speech given at Parawhenua Marae, Northland on 2nd September 1998 at tinyurl.com/8345162

Photopage: Hikoi of Hope — HIKOI OF HOPE 1998 — (top) David Williams, Dave Owens and vivian Hutchinson at the start of the Hikoi of Hope at Cape Reinga, in the Far North. (middle above ) Hikoi marchers in Whangarei, Northland and New Plymouth, Taranaki, Anglican bishops leading marchers into Parliament Grounds. photographs by vivian Hutchinson (middle below) Hikoi marchers being greeted by Sir Paul Reeves outside the Beehive building, and Aunty Marj welcoming marchers onto Parliament Grounds. photographs TVNZ (bottom) Hikoi of Hope marchers at Parliament 1st October 1998.

Photopage: Peace — 2016 PEACE WALK TO PARIHAKA — A 3-day Taranaki anti-racism hikoi from the New Plymouth District Council to Parihaka Pa, led by New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd. (top) Peace hikoi on way to Parihaka with Mounga Taranaki. photograph by Glenn Jeffrey. (top middle) Walkers on way to Parihaka, Parihaka roadsign. photographs by Taranaki Daily News (middle left) front page of Taranaki Daily News Saturday 18 June 2016 (middle right) Community Conversations held at town halls during the hikoi run by Community Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson (lower middle) Race Relations commissioner Dame Susan Devoy greets Wharehoka Wano during the powhiri Parihaka. photo Andy Jackson / Taranaki Daily News (lower middle right) Peace hikoi organiser Glen Bennett (bottom) Peace hikoi arrives at Parihaka Pa, led by children. Friday 17th June 2016 photograph RNZ / Robin Martin.

Photopage: Waitara — PEACE FOR PEKAPEKA / WAITARA LAND RIGHTS 2016-2018 — (top left) Pekapeka stake in ground, next to the Carrington surveyor statue, outside New Plymouth Courthouse 2016. photograph by vivian Hutchinson (top left) Return the Stolen Land Billboard with Taranaki Troubles graphics courtesy of Cliff Whiting (top middle) Peace for Pekapeka hikoi from Te Kohia Pā to Owae Marae photographs (left) by Jane Dove Juneau and (right) Taranaki Daily News (middle and bottom) Submissions to the Māori Affairs Select Committee Waitara Lands Bill hearings at Novotel Hotel, New Plymouth, and at Owae Marae, Waitara photographs by RNZ / Robin Martin and Taranaki Daily News (bottom left) Watching the Seabirds at Waitara paper by vivian Hutchinson, July 2016.

The Citizens Assembly ... see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly

“How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens” by James Bridle, The Guardian 25 December 2018 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/25/break-brexit-deadlock-ancient-athens-sortition

“A Citizens Assembly can sort Brexit mess” by Sonia Sodha The Observer 3 March 2018 www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/03/brexit-citizensassembly-compromise

BBC Radio 4 Programme on Deliberative democracy by Sonia Sodha 10 March 2019 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002z9g

The Sortition Foundation campaigns for a world free from partisan politicking, “... where representative random samples of everyday people make decisions in informed and deliberative Citizens Assemblies.” www.sortitionfoundation.org

“How 99 strangers in a Dublin hotel broke Ireland's abortion deadlock” by Patrick Chalmers, The Guardian 8th March 2018 www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/how-99-strangers-in-a-dublin-hotel-broke-irelands-abortion-deadlock

Doing Politics Differently Report of the Citizens Assembly of Scotland (2020) https://citizensassembly.theapsgroup.scot/report/

“Revealed: Support for 'House of Citizens' second chamber at Holyrood to keep MSPs in check” by Scott Macnab, The Scotsman, 12th December 2020 www.scotsman.com/news/politics/revealed-support-house-citizens-second-chamber-holyrood-keep-msps-check-3065227

ISBN 978-1-92-717638-2 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

The Transformation of Belonging

— more thoughts for the Ownership Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 35 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE OWNERSHIP CONVERSATION doesn’t just invite us to consider a “switch in thinking” on our most difficult issues. It is also a conversation that delivers its own surprises when reconsidering the nature of ownership itself — especially that face of ownership that has to do with property and possession. 

For me, the Ownership Conversation has been a life-long dialogue that has challenged and transformed my understanding of the nature of belonging.

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ONE OF THE STRONGEST influences on my life as an active citizen has been Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (1913-2010), the Taranaki kuia who was popularly known as Aunty Marj. I loved her, and we had an unusual friendship that stretched over four decades.

I first met Aunty Marj in my teenage years while I was still at High School. She had known my mother’s family during the 1930s and 1940s, and during the War they had worked together when the local Scottish cultural groups and Māori cultural groups had joined to do patriotic fundraising for the troops.

Aunty Marj was a great role-model for me of an active citizen who took a deeper level of ownership of whatever community issues she wanted to address. Her life was an everyday expression of rangatiratanga. She was determined not just to be “the author of her own experience”, but she was committed to keep on turning up – even to those places where she was not always welcome, or she would be the only Māori woman in the room.

As such, she became a living bridge between the majority European culture and the Māori communities that, for most of her life, had been actively marginalised in local civic affairs.

Aunty Marj and I were both involved in land rights campaigns while supporting Dame Whina Cooper and the Matakite movement that organised the Māori Land March of 1975. So we had plenty of opportunity to talk together about the concept of ownership as it related to land, and how this concept was seen very differently in a Māori world-view.

For Aunty Marj, ownership was not centrally a question of possession. It was more a question of the kaitiakitanga or stewardship of those places where you had a deeper sense of connection. The ownership of land brought with it responsibilities to the wider life of that place. To her, these responsibilities were not just to the present health and well-being of the land, but they also included an aliveness of the legacies of its past and how this land will be serving generations yet to come.

Aunty Marj argued that, in fighting for the return of Māori land, activists were in danger of accepting a coloniser’s view of property — and that, in her view, may end up becoming a greater loss.

She explained that the Māori world-view turns the usual life of property on its head. Over time, and as connections grow, instead of the land belonging to you ... you start to recognise that you belong to that place.

And when this happens to lots of people, the life we share and the communities we create are an expression of this wider sense of belonging. 

Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) in the Brooklands Bush, New Plymouth, Taranaki. photo portrait by Margaret Bake (1981)

IT WAS AUNTY MARJ that coined the term “tū tangata whenua” to describe in te reo the concept of active citizenship. Her choice of these words reflected not just her perspective on citizenship, but also her view on the concepts of ownership and belonging.

Aunty Marj had a vision of “tangata whenua” that was not based on transactional ideas of ownership, or genealogies of blood, or the rights of “who came first”. For her, “tangata whenua” was not an identity, but a job description. It was a job description that included the responsibilities of honouring and taking care of what was not just a place, but a living being.

In the late 1970s, Aunty Marj and I were co-hosting a series of gatherings at Parihaka Marae which were introducing Pākehā people to the Māori world on their doorstep.

The gatherings featured presentations on local history, justice and cultural matters, as well as conversations about alternative lifestyles and different spiritual traditions.

The 1970s were the early days of an emerging world-wide environmental movement, and we also held workshops on pollution, waste management, organic gardening and alternative approaches to agriculture and horticulture.

At one of our evening circles, Aunty Marj was obviously frustrated with the proceedings. She suddenly stood up, and provocatively declared that Pākehā people will never solve their environmental problems until they have learnt how to become “tangata whenua”. 

She argued that a more personal and deeper understanding of the job description of “tangata whenua” would lead to a necessary transformation of what we mean by our active citizenship.

This deeper understanding comes from a transformation of your personal sense of belonging, and of home. The healing of our communities and our natural environment is built upon the re-weaving of ourselves as an integral part of these environments.

>click< for photopage

AT THE TIME of the Parihaka Festivals, I was enthusiastically embarking on my own alternative lifestyle within what was generally described in the 1970s as the hippie movement. For a few years, I lived in a caravan amidst a small rural “intentional community” that was being established on 60 acres of land and native bush on the slopes of the Pouakai Ranges of Mount Taranaki.

This community was called Ka Tika Rā, after the nearby mountain stream, and it included several huts and houses built largely from car-crates and other recycled materials, and a community house in which we had our meetings, shared meals, and could accommodate visitors.

The hippie movement was a youth-led counter-culture that was popular in Europe and the United States, and flourished in New Zealand in the late 1970s, culminating with a series of huge summer music festivals like Nambassa in the Coromandel. It was essentially a reaction (or “counter”) to the post-war consumer society and nuclear families of the 1950s and 1960s.

The counter-culture shaped many of the curiosities, inquiries and naiveties of my own youth, and it was easy to get caught up in the sense that our own generation in the 1970s could be part of a positive and creative “new age” of possibilities.

In Taranaki, there was a loosely connected network of alternative lifestyles and friendships that were influenced by the hippie movement. Some of our local initiatives included not only the Ka Tika Rā Community and the regular festivals at Parihaka, but we also produced a seasonal newsletter called Foxglove, established a large organic training garden in New Plymouth for unemployed people, and hosted regular adult education evenings at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

>click< for photopage

Right from the start, the Ka Tika Rā community members had to come to grips with the Ownership Conversation. This is because we were already the second group of people that were trying to establish an intentional community on that piece of land — and the first families were wanting to sell up and take their investments elsewhere.

So we worked out a financial scheme where those of us (who could) took out personal loans from a bank and pooled the funds in order to purchase the land. We were reimbursed from the rents paid by residents and visitors over the next several years.

At the same time, we decided to take the Ka Tika Rā land out of private ownership, and collectively invest it into a legal structure that had as its purpose

“... to care for the Earth and restore its sacred purpose of nurturing life for now and future generations.”

In line with Aunty Marj's challenge to Pākehā people that we would need to step up to the job description of “tangata whenua”, the name chosen for this new legal structure was “Taranaki People of the Land”. When the constitution was signed up, it was witnessed and endorsed by Aunty Marj and other elders from Parihaka. 

The people and families surrounding my time at Ka Tika Rā have continued to be some of the strongest friendships in my life even though our hippie days are now long over.

As for the community itself, there has been an ongoing turnover of residents, with all the conflicts, dramas, break-throughs and joys that come with any group of neighbours and friends — “intentional”, or not.

None of the original community members are still living on this particular piece of land. But most of us still have a heart-felt sense of connection to the place and to the mountain that was ever-present at our back-door.  Ka Tika Rā has proved to be a very significant part of our growing up as active citizens and as leaders and creatives now living in wider communities.

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GIVEN THE GENEROUS mentoring by Māori elders in my teenage years, and an early activism on land rights issues, I really have little excuse for a lack of curiosity about my own family history.

I am bewildered to look back now and realise that it wasn’t until my 40s that I started to dig into the details of where my own people had come from, why they came to New Zealand, and what they did when they first got here.

Amidst my passions to see justice over the theft of lands, or my embrace of an “alternative” lifestyle based on common ownership, or within my various creative contributions to solving problems in our communities ... I was totally unconscious as to how my own family histories had been woven into the problems and issues and lifestyles I was trying to address.

I can only conclude that I was the descendant of a forgetting, and I had very little understanding as to how this had been achieved. 

I eventually started to dig deeper and piece together the stories and legacies of my ancestors, and discovered that the forgetting was not an unusual characteristic of my fellow New Zealanders. It is a legacy of Empire.

Amnesia may well be one of the main organising principles of colonisation, and an important part of how power maintains its privileges across generations.

Amidst its own continuous histories of violence and oppression, forget-and-move-on had become such a deep mind-set of European culture. This mind-set can be both be a strategy for survivors of the abuse, and also a smokescreen for the victors and perpetrators. The vagueness just becomes another way of hiding from the consequences.

The forgetting also becomes another face of privilege. When Pākehā people do not to know our own histories, then we can avoid engaging with our own family participation in those events that have led to historical trauma. This collective amnesia means that the blood and dishonour and injustice in these histories simply becomes absorbed into the structural architecture of the next normal.

Awakening to our histories means interrupting the current stories that you may be telling yourself, and interrupting the privileges that come on the back of those stories.

This may also disrupt your current sense of identity — because you are being invited to take ownership of the things that many people in your community have been determined not to remember.

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MY FATHER'S FAMILY come from Northern Ireland and, in terms of the ownership story of land and property, theirs is a long history of being part of the machinery of dispossession.

The Hutchinsons were probably poor and protestant lowland Scottish farm workers who were “planted” in the Ulster province of Northern Ireland sometime during the 1550s to the 1620s. This displacement of the indigenous Catholic Irish, and the confiscation of their land, is one of the earliest acts of British colonisation.

The conflicts and trauma of this dispossession are still very much a part of the life of Irish communities today. Nevertheless, these Irish plantations (which were funded both by Crown and private interests) became a template for the global spread of the British Empire over the next few centuries.

If we skip forward nearly 300 years, the Hutchinson family were still poor tenant farmers in the Fermanagh County of Northern Ireland, barely surviving after the potato famines of the 1840s. My ancestor Robert Foster Hutchinson left his home to join the British Army and rose to the rank of sergeant in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. This army was sent to New Zealand in 1863 as part of Governor Sir George Grey's plans to invade and confiscate the rich lands of the Waikato.

Veterans of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, including Sergeant Robert Hutchinson, parade beside the statue of Queen Victoria in Albert Park, Auckland 1917 (Photo: Frank J.Denton)

Robert Hutchinson and the Irish regiment fought in many of the major battles of the Land Wars, under the command of General Duncan Cameron. This included being a participant in the atrocities of Rangiowhia, where an unfortified village of women, children and old men were attacked, and several people were burned alive in their homes. The 18th Royal Irish also fought at the siege of Ōrākau, the battleground made famous by the call of Rewi Maniapoto that he would not surrender.

In doing my research into this military history, you might imagine how I felt once I realised that I’d been walking through these same battlefields with Whina Cooper during the Māori Land March of 1975, while completely unaware of my own family connections to what had taken place.

My Hutchinson ancestor was also part of the military campaign in Taranaki that was controversially described as a “holocaust” after the release of a Waitangi Tribunal report in 1996. Under the Irish-born General Trevor Chute, the British troops engaged in a “scorched earth” campaign which destroyed seven fortified pā and 21 open villages around Taranaki mountain. The soldiers completed the devastation by stripping these communities of all they could get their hands on.

These same men were given a hero’s welcome into New Plymouth, which, by then, had become a settlement dominated by its military.

It is somewhat baffling to me that, only a hundred years later, I could grow up in a New Plymouth in the 1950s and 60s within a majority culture that had no real memory of these events. There were no stories within my own family of our participation in these acts of dispossession, and we were not taught any of the details of this history in our schools.

The fact that our communities, and our provincial farming wealth, was based on war and the confiscation of land was never a topic of conversation amongst those who were the inheritors of its privileges.

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MY MOTHER'S SIDE of the family were people who, in the 1850s, arrived in New Zealand as a result of a recent and violent experience of being dispossessed.

They were cleared from their lands in Scotland in what was not so much a decision of Empire, but a matter of business. And yet just as curiously, the details behind what had led to their migration to this country had also been lost to a culture of forget-and-move-on.

My mother’s family comes from the Scottish clan of McIntyre, who were part of a community of tenant crofters living on the island of Barra in the Scottish Western Isles. They were subsisting under a feudal system that had been held together over hundreds of years by war-lords and clan chiefs.

The Clearance of Barra was done on the instructions of a new owner of the island, Colonel John Gordon, of Cluny Castle in Aberdeen. This business entrepreneur was “the richest commoner” in Britain, and he had bought land on the Scottish mainland, and the outer islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Barra. He also owned six slave-based plantations in the Caribbean.

He gained a reputation as “the most hated man in Scotland” for his role in the clearing the crofting families and communities from his lands, and replacing them with sheep which would earn him much more money.

In one of the more infamous Clearances in 1851, the tenant farmers of Barra were called to a meeting to “discuss rents” and were threatened with a fine if they did not attend. In the meeting hall, over 1,500 tenants were overpowered, bound, and immediately loaded onto ships bound for Canada. One eyewitness reported that “people were seized and dragged on board. Men who resisted were felled with truncheons and handcuffed; those who escaped, including some who swam ashore from the ship, were chased by the police”.

At the time of these Clearances, the Gaelic bard Angus MacMhuirich composed a lament which referred to an earlier prophecy warning the people of the Western Isles that they would be replaced by sheep.  

The jaws of sheep have made the land rich,
But we were told by the prophecy
That sheep would scatter the warriors
And turn their homes into wilderness

The land of our love lies under bracken and heather,
every plain and every field is untilled,
and soon there will be none in the Mull of the Trees
but Lowlanders and their white sheep.

—  Angus MacMhuirich

Many of the Barra crofters did escape to Glasgow, including my own 3rd great-grand-parents Ranald and Mary McIntyre. But like so many other refugees expelled from “the land of their love”, they became paupers in the industrial city and ended their days in the Glasgow Poorhouse.

It was the children of these McIntyres who managed to emigrate to New Zealand. For them it was not so much a choice as it was a matter of survival. The indigenous crofters of the Western Isles had been forced to leave their only home — where their ancestors had lived for perhaps hundreds of years — because they had no land rights.

They were living under a feudal system where their precarious tenancy had long been stitched into their identity. And there was little opportunity for them to imagine any other framework of ownership and possession of their land, or how to achieve it.

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DURING THE FIRST HALF of the 19th century, the British Empire was trying to come to terms with reimagining the ownership and possession of something else entirely: human beings. So much of the wealth of the Empire and its commercial companies was based on the slave trade, and there had been a long process of campaigning and social change that had led to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

What is not generally known is that with the passing of this Act, the slave owners were fully compensated by the British government for the loss of their property rights. They were paid for the value of the slaves that were being freed, roughly £20 million (or about £2 billion today). No such compensation or reparation was considered for the slaves themselves.

This compensation money had a huge impact on Britain at the time as the beneficiaries of slavery made extensive purchases of land and estates throughout the nation.

Of course, these payments were also made to Colonel John Gordon, of Cluny Castle, who was given the equivalent of £2.9 million as compensation for the more than 1,300 slaves on his plantations in the Caribbean. In 2020, researchers at Coventry University and the University of Glasgow concluded that Gordon had used his compensation money to pay for the Scottish islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Barra, from which he later evicted nearly 3,000 people. 

So a perverse result of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and bringing to an end the morally-hazardous concept of the “ownership” of people ... was that it directly led to the 1851 dispossession of my ancestors on Barra, because they had no rights within the equally-hazardous concept of the “ownership” of land.

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I DO FEEL HOPEFUL that a reimagining of the ownership of land in New Zealand has the potential to transform our communities into places that will look and feel very different from how they are today. In many ways, our challenge here is very similar to the long power struggle to end slavery and reimagine the idea that people can be owned.

Out beyond our colonised mental concepts of what we currently mean by the “ownership” of land, there are many indications that this reimagining has already started to happen.

Te Urewera (photo Wikipedia Commons)

Tāmati Kruger is an iwi leader of the Tūhoe people, and he was the chief negotiator of the 2013 tribal settlement over the Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.

As far as this settlement is concerned, Kruger observes that there is an important distinction between justice and redress. He also warns that we shouldn't under-estimate the coloniser's capacity for forgetting.

In a 2018 interview for the web-magazine e-tangata, Tāmati Kruger argues that the Waitangi settlement process only delivers some redress, and Māori need to give up on the expectation that going into negotiations with the Crown will deliver justice for all the wrongs that have been done.

“ Iwi should never have that expectation. History shows that the Crown specialises in injustice. It arises from the fact that the Crown has a faulty memory. It can't remember what it promises.” — Tāmati Kruger

While the Tūhoe people have negotiated and accepted a settlement, Kruger has no illusions about the real work ahead. He believes that it may take two or three generations for his iwi to reconstitute an authentic kinship with their land. And in order to do so, he says that Tūhoe will need to fight the concept of “ownership” and the way this attitude infiltrates all our thinking.

Tāmati Kruger explains that the terms “mana whenua” and “tangata whenua” have nothing to do with ownership:

“ Mana whenua has to do with acknowledging that the land has mana, and fulfilling your obligations and your kinship relationship with the land. That’s what it is — not an ownership or property relationship. It’s you saying: “I think I kind of look like the land, and my language and my poetry and my literature and my cuisine and how I live comes from that. I am an expression of the land, and without it I will become blank. The further away I am from the land in my kinship, in my caring and my connection, the smaller I will become, until I am nothing. So I must keep that connection.”

Kruger has a vision for our nation where all of us, regardless of blood and heritage, can come to understand that we are tangata whenua.

 “ I see a time in Aotearoa when there are no Europeans or New Zealanders living here, only tangata whenua. And that means that we are of this land, that this land has made us who we are. We have let this land create us in its image, and together we are proud of who we are and where we come from.” – Tāmati Kruger

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KENNEDY WARNE IS the journalist who interviewed Tāmati Kruger for the 2018 e-tangata article. He is a former editor of the New Zealand Geographic and a frequent commentator on environmental issues for Radio New Zealand. And he has been on his own journey of awakening as to what it means to be tangata whenua.

Also writing in e-tangata, Kennedy Warne quotes the poem “The Gift Outright”, by the American poet Robert Frost. It begins with the lines:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. — Robert Frost

Kennedy Warne says the poem is about “an invitation to belonging and a reminder of the desolation that follows when land is seen as properties to be owned and not places to be loved”. While the poem is about the history of the United States, it could also be describing the history of New Zealand.

“It is the history of every settler nation. First the desire to possess, to own, to call the land “ours”. Then, later, a long time later – and for some, perhaps, never – the awareness of a need to belong, the impetus to preserve and respect. A turning away from objectification and towards subjective engagement, from resource to relationship, from land-as-commodity to land-as-identity, from foreign soil to whenua.” – Kennedy Warne

Who is invited to make this journey of belonging? We all are. 

And it is an invitation that can come at the most unexpected times. Allen Curnow, one of New Zealand’s leading poets, may well have glimpsed such an invitation as he was looking at the skeleton of a Great Moa in the Christchurch Museum:

Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.
— Allen Curnow

Kennedy Warne offers the view that the process of belonging takes place “one step at a time” as we engage with the places of our lives. Belonging comes through knowing a place, and letting the place know you. He describes this as a “conversation with landscape”. 

My own understanding is that we descendants of settlers can only enter into this conversation because the seeds of a deeper relationship with the land are already there — albeit hidden under many generations of marginalisation and forgetting.

The seeds are already there because this relationship with the earth comes built-in as part of our wholeness as human beings.

They are already there because we can still hear the names of these seeds hidden within the languages of our own elders.

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WHEN MY McINTYRE ANCESTORS first arrived in New Zealand in the 1850s, they were Gaelic speakers — it was then the primary tongue of the communities of the Western Isles. Gaelic is the language of that land. It is also a language that reaches back before the time that mental concepts such as “ownership” were forcibly redefined at the beginnings of the feudal age.

Not unlike the Māori language, Gaelic has words for many concepts that have no real equivalent in the modern English tongue. Take the word “dùthchas”, which is a Gaelic term that was widely used in Scotland before the Clearances. It has no succinct English translation, but it describes a principle of interconnectedness between people, the land, and all living creatures.

The author Madeleine Bunting was digging into the origins of this word while writing her book The Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey (2017). She describes how — compared to English — the Gaelic language provides a language of “resistance to modern capitalism”, and is “inherently counter-cultural”. The language offers a definite challenge to such concepts as the notion of private property: 

“ On the Isle of Lewis, I was told that [the word “dùthchas”] means much more. It’s a collective claim on the land which is reinforced and lived out through the shared management of that land. It is a right which is grounded in daily habits and activities and it is bound up with relationships to others, and responsibilities. It gives rise to the idea, identified by the scholar Michael Newton, that “people belong to places rather than places belonging to people”. Gaelic turns notions of ownership on their head.”  — Madeleine Bunting

In her research, Madeleine Bunting also decided to turn her attention to English words to see if they might contain the seeds of an older world-view that has largely been forgotten in their modern use.

“ I looked up “belonging” in an English dictionary; tellingly, the first definition was a matter of property as in “belongings”. The next definition was status as in “having the right personal and social qualities to be a member of a particular group”. A very English concept. But dig deeper and the word originates in the Old English term “gelang”, which means “at hand, together with”. Buried in the etymology of the word is an understanding of touch, physical closeness and how that generates solidarity.” — Madeleine Bunting

This attention to language may be much more important than we usually give it credit for. Peter Block, in his book Community, asserts that all transformation is linguistic. This is why so much of his leadership and consulting work has been focused on improving community conversations, and creating those spaces where there can be a shift in speaking and listening.

We are starting to see such a shift happen as much older, and sometimes ancient, frameworks of community life are beginning to reassert themselves within the modern nation of Scotland. The reclaiming of “dùthchas” in contemporary Scottish affairs — with its deeper ecological understanding of place and belonging — has already started to redraw the map of ownership in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. 

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IN MAY 2000, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a bill that, after nine hundred years, abolished feudal tenure. At the same time, an £11 million fund was created to assist community buy-outs of tenanted land.

The Scottish land rights campaigner, Alistair McIntosh, reports that the legislation aims to redress the inequitable ownership pattern left behind by feudalism. It offers crofting communities an automatic right to buy their land at any time based on a government valuation. A more limited provision for other rural communities gives rights of pre-emptive purchase if and when land is put on the market.

Alistair McIntosh has been at the forefront of the campaigns to put the Isle of Eigg into community land ownership, and to assert traditional land rights on the Isle of Harris while stopping a local mountain from being turned into “the gravel pit of Europe” by a multi-national road-stone company. Both these successful campaigns are outlined in his book, Soil and Soul (2004).  

The Community Flag of Barra, in the Scottish Western Isles

These land rights reforms have reached as far as the Isle of Barra. Unlike elsewhere in Scotland, where community land trusts have been diligently raising money and working with the government to be able to buy their land from the (often absentee) owners, the Barra landlords have surprisingly been very willing to hand it over. 

The traditional owners of Barra had long been Clan MacNeil, who were said to have lived on the isle for nearly 1,000 years, until it was sold in 1838 and the Clearances began. But in 1937, most of Barra was bought back by Robert Lister MacNeil, an American descendant of the original clan chiefs.

In 2003, his son, Ian Roderick MacNeil, announced that nearly all his family land on Barra — including the foreshore and fishing and mineral rights — would be gifted to the Scottish Executive, with the intention of it eventually being handed over to the Barra community free of charge.

The Scottish Executive is a partially-devolved form of government which was established in 1999 following a referendum on independence. The Scottish Parliament has been determined to encourage a fundamental change in the nature of land rights, and to shift all croft land (which accounts for more than three-quarters of the Western Isles) into community or public ownership.

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WHEN THE CONCEPT of ownership is turned on its head, so too is the political geography of land rights. Once we regain a genuine relationship of interconnectedness with the Life of our place, we can also begin to understand that the land itself has rights.

In December 2017, it was announced that our local mountain, Taranaki, would be recognised as its own legal personhood. This means that in legal terms it would be owned by no one but, in practical reality, it owns itself.

Under the agreement between the government and the eight iwi of Taranaki, all of the Crown-owned land within the former Egmont National Park is vested in this new legal identity, and the job of stewardship or kaitiakitanga of the mounga is shared between local Māori and the government.

This is not an act of obscure judicial symbolism buried in the long-overdue settlements that have followed Treaty of Waitangi tribunals. It recognises the existing tikanga and mātauranga of the iwi who have long acted as kaitiaki of these places. It also reflects an international “switch in thinking” about care for the environment, and the legal rights of nature.

By recognising Taranaki mounga as having the same rights and powers as a citizen, it sets a whole new benchmark of empowerment for nature on its own terms. It crosses the line of thinking about ownership and who’s in charge. As the former Māori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples has said, “... it is a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world.”

>click< for photopage

This change in the legal status of Taranaki mounga is similar to the legal status already established for the Te Urewera homeland of the Tūhoe people in 2014, and for the Whanganui River and its tributaries, collectively known as Te Awa Tupua, in 2017. As in Taranaki, these changes were also negotiated as part of Treaty of Waitangi settlements.

Kennedy Warne describes the passing of these statutes as among the most significant geographical events of our time. The establishment of legal personhood for these sacred areas of our nation is being watched intently from around the world, and similar initiatives are being tried elsewhere.

At the announcement of the creation of a legal identity for the Whanganui River, the lead iwi negotiator Gerrard Albert told the Guardian newspaper that these measures would ensure that the river was treated as a living entity, rather than viewing it from a perspective of ownership and management.

“ We can trace our genealogy to the origins of the universe.  Therefore, rather than us being masters of the natural world, we are part of it. We want to live like that as our starting point. And that is not an anti-development, or anti-economic use of the river, but to begin with the view that it is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief.” — Gerrard Albert

Former Prime Minister Jim Bolger grew up in a Taranaki farming district close to Parihaka marae. But he concedes that his upbringing and schooling had not taught him of the unique history of this peaceful community and its prophetic leaders. He is also the descendant of a forgetting.

In more recent years, Jim Bolger has worked closely with Tāmati Kruger and the Tūhoe Board, and he has become an important advocate of the “switch in thinking” behind the concept that a significant place can have it's own legal identity, and “own itself”.

“This whole idea that the Urewera owns itself is a concept that looked totally radical and off-the-wall. Unlike the Pākehā view that everybody owns something. But we discuss the issue of the land having been there forever. So it owns itself. And our responsibility is a version of kaitiaki. [...] In a sense, it’s a matter of being humble in the face of its greatness. These are totally new concepts. In one way, I can see them fitting in quite easily to the whole environmental movement worldwide. It’s just that the human population hasn’t been respectful enough to the land, the water and the atmosphere. We’ve always just presumed it was always there, forever, and it was unlimited. In the colonial mindset, the land was unlimited. Now we all know land is limited and already severely damaged. So we have a responsibility to care for it. We have to manage things differently. We have to change.” — Jim Bolger

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In 2017, the Tūhoe Board published a statement of its priorities and direction, called Te Kawa o Te Urewera. This document is much more than a new management plan for the resources of the former Te Urewera National Park. It is a uniquely indigenous call for resolving the relationship between humans and nature. It shows that, deliberatively, the Tūhoe people are choosing to “reset” their human relationship and behaviour towards nature.

“ Our disconnection from Te Urewera has changed our humanness. We wish for its return.”

The final page of Te Kawa o Te Urewera perhaps points to the universality of this need for a transformation of belonging, and a healing between people and the only planet to which we all belong. The document ends with lines from an American-English poet:

We shall not cease
from exploration,
and the end of all our
exploring will be to
arrive where we started
and know the place
for the first time.  

   — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

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. revised 18 June 2021. 

This paper The Transformation of Belonging 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

Kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa - Aunty Marj. For more on her life and service see vivian Hutchinson - Kuia Matarena (1913-2010) at https://drive.google.com/file/d/17V7cQaMB1eBOAbgSJbwGPBpPBm786MvV/

Photopage: Matarena — MATARENA RAUMATI RAU KUPA MBE (1913-2010) Aunty Marj — (top) Taranaki Kuia at Owae Marae, Waitara, photographed during the ECO (Environmental and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand) Conference 11th August 1985. This was the first ECO Conference held on a marae. (left to right) Ina Okeroa, Mary Matewehi Turner, Ivy Werenia Papakura, Mimosa Jury, Sally Mana Te Noki Karena, Neta Wharehoka, and (front) Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) photo by Philip Simpson. (middle left) at the Tangi of Whina Cooper at Panguru, Hokianga, March 1994 (left to right) Steve Tollestrup, kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj), vivian Hutchinson and Tony Hansen. DVD cover of Parihaka - A Photographic Survey (1981) a 30-min slide-show documentary on the history of Parihaka, compiled by vivian Hutchinson and Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa for the Taranaki Museum for the centennial commemorations of the sacking of Parihaka on 5th November 1881. 2013 a digital restoration of the documentary was re-released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kuia Matarena (Aunty Marj). (middle right) kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) photographed at Te Rewa Rewa Pa, near the site of the present-day Te Rewa Rewa Bridge over the Waiwakaiho river on the New Plymouth foreshore walkway. photo by the Taranaki Daily News (bottom) Aunt Marj with friends in Te Niho o Te Atiawa meeting house, Parihaka Marae, Taranaki (1977) (left to right) Pat Brophy, Wai Uatuku, Alwyn Owen, Te Miringa Hohaia, Katerina Hohaia, Ngahina Hohaia, Dr Huirangi Waikerepuru, vivian Hutchinson, Aunty Marj Raumati Rau, and Hilary Baxter. photo vivian Hutchinson

Maunga or Mounga ... in the dialect of Taranaki iwi, the word for mountain is more often pronounced Mounga, rather than Maunga. Both pronounciations and spelling are used to refer to the mountain.

Ka Tika Rā ... See The Katikara Community Experience (2014) compiled by Sue Carter and published by the Taranaki People of the Land Inc. Society For more see “Sue Carter compiles stories from Taranaki's eco-community Katikara” by Yvette Batten Taranaki Daily News 27 August 2015 https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/midweek/71492570/sue-carter-compiles-stories-from-taranakis-eco-community-katikara

Photopage: Katikarā — KA TIKA RĀ COMMUNITY and the FOXGLOVE GROUP — (top left) The Community House at Ka Tika Rā Community on the Pouakai Ranges of Taranaki Mounga, early 1980s (top right) aerial view of the Ka Tika Rā Community on the Pouakai Ranges (middle) working bee in the Ka Tika Rā community gardens (l to r) Joy Minthorn, Rhyll Stafford, James (Chip) Dale, Ray Edward, Dieter Meier, and Daniel Joblin. Photos by Graham Brown. (middle right) participants at the Spring Equinox Festival 1981, North Egmont Camphouse, Taranaki Mounga. (bottom right) kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) answering questions on Taranaki history during the Autumn Equinox Festival 1983, Te Niho o te Atiawa, Parihaka Pa (bottom left) Foxglove, a Taranaki People's Newsletter, produced every few months (from 1978 - 1986) with the aim of fostering friendship amongst people living under the mountain. Contributions came from the readers, and the letter was edited by the Foxglove Group which shared the responsibilities of typing, layout, production and distribution.

Parihaka Earth Festivals ... see Album - The Parihaka Earth Festivals 1978-1984 compiled (2018) by vivian Hutchinson https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qAiv3uU1dbQWWRIV9uRxotSDQQnQzyga/ A Facebook album is at www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10215169840053601

for more on the forgetting, see “The Anniversaries of Our Amnesia” by vivian Hutchinson, e-tangata 8th March 2020 https://e-tangata.co.nz/history/the-anniversaries-of-our-amnesia/

Scottish land rights ... see “A Common Right: Scotland” film by the international Land Rights Now campaign https://youtu.be/fI1aNnPSIco

Angus MacMhuirich lived on the Isle of Mull and was a member of Clan Ranald's prestigious MacMhuirich bardic family. “Jaws of Sheep” is quoted from The Highland Clearances (1969) by John Prebble

“The Jaws of Sheep: The 1851 Hebridean Clearances of Gordon of Cluny” by James A. Stewart, Jr. in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium Vol. 18/19 (1998/1999) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20557342

“How Profits From Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands” by Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine, 17th November 2020 www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-investigates-how-enslavement-profits-changed-landscape-scottish-highlands-180976311/

Allen Curnow “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”, as published in O’Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press. The poem is also the source of the name of Don McGlashan's 2009 album Marvellous Year.

The Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey (2017) by Madeleine Bunting www.amazon.com/Love-Country-Hebridean-Journey-Madeleine-Bunting/dp/1847085172

“The language of resistance: Gaelic's role in community fight-back against corporate greed” by Madeleine Bunting The Herald 25th September 2016 https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14763202.language-resistance-gaelics-role-community-fight-back-corporate-greed/

“Down that way, glory waits” Tāmati Kruger interview with Kennedy Warne, e-tangata website, 9 September 2018 https://e-tangata.co.nz/korero/tamati-kruger-down-that-way-glory-waits/

“Listening to the People of the Land” by Kennedy Warne, e-tangata website 24 March 2019. https://e-tangata.co.nz/reflections/listening-to-the-people-of-the-land/ This is a chapter of the 2019 book Listening to the People of the Land: Christianity, Colonisation and the Path to Redemption (Accent Publications) www.accentpublications.co.nz/shop/listening-to-the-people-of-the-land/

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (1923) from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53013/the-gift-outright

Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (2004) by Alastair McIntosh, published by Aurum Press www.amazon.com/Soil-Soul-People-versus-Corporate/dp/1854109421

“Clan chief gives his lands to the people Historic day for crofters as Macneil hands over 9000 acres on Barra” by The Herald (Glasgow) 6th September 2003 www.heraldscotland.com/news/12533071.clan-chief-gives-his-lands-to-the-people-historic-day-for-crofters-as-macneil-hands-over-9000-acres-on-barra/

Photopage: Taranaki — TARANAKI MOUNGA — photographs by vivian Hutchinson

“A Landmark Day for Taranaki Maunga” statement by Hon Andrew Little, Minister of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations 20 December 2017 www.beehive.govt.nz/release/landmark-day-taranaki-maunga, “Iwi closer to having Taranaki Maunga become a legal person”, by Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, Te Manu Korihi Radio NZ 21 December 2017 www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/346683/iwi-closer-to-having-taranaki-maunga-become-a-legal-person

“New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being” by Eleanor Ainge Roy, The Guardian 16th March 2017 www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being

“Place as person, landscape as identity: ancestral connection and modern legislation” by Kennedy Warne, Auckland University School of Environment Cumberland Lecture 2019, delivered 22nd August 2019 https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/auckland/science/About-the-faculty/Environment/Documents/School%20of%20Environment%20Cumberland%20Lecture%202019.pdf

“Jim Bolger: Maybe the Urewera owns itself” by Wena Harawira, e-tangata web magazine 30 April 2016 https://e-tangata.co.nz/korero/jim-bolger-maybe-the-urewera-owns-itself/; “Jim Bolger and Tamati Kruger in conversation” at the Wellington City Art Gallery 20 August 2017 (audio) Radio New Zealand www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/smart_talk/collections/current-issues/audio/201852348/jim-bolger-and-tamati-kruger-in-conversation

Te Kawa o Te Urewera ... see press release from Te Urewera Board 19 May 2017 www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1705/S00487/te-kawa-o-te-urewera-draft-released.htm.
The document can be read at https://issuu.com/teurutaumatua/docs/te_kawa_o_te_urewera_-_english/60 and see also Te Ohu 4-day live-in gathering (2018) at https://issuu.com/teurutaumatua/docs/te_ohu_2018

ISBN 978-1-92-717637-5 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

Crossing the Line

— some thoughts for the Ownership Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 18 min read download as Masterclass PDF

WE’VE GOT SOME challenging things to talk about. And it’s not all going to be positivity and possibility.

Some of our conversations will involve the bigger and longer-term issues which have become harder to address in our communities because we have been avoiding talking about them for much too long.

The “conversations that matter” don’t really need to be difficult, but we should recognise that they are not the usual day-to-day talking that we have been having with our family, our friends or our neighbours.

They are the conversations that require a level of courage that is not our usual ask of each other. This talking also requires a level of ownership of our issues that we don’t usually ask of ourselves.

And we are being called to stretch the usual boundaries of our attention ... so that these conversations can become the nurseries of new thinking. 

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MANY OF THE PEOPLE who have attended our Masterclasses have been working at the front-line of community health and welfare services. There’s great work being done here — but the overall picture of these services is also often discouraging. Once we have got to know each other a bit better in our workshops, and there is a sense of trust in the room, you would not be surprised to hear such comments as:

“I feel exhausted all the time.”

“I have grown cynical about just what is possible to change.”

“My organisation feels stuck, while the problems are obviously getting worse.”

“There’s no big picture here, and we are just processing things like we always have.”

“The funding systems are just broken, and it makes me angry.”

It is not easy to really hear these stories. They reflect much of the reality of the last two decades of working in the community sector and in public services. Our essential workers are speaking here of a vicious circle that their daily lives feel trapped in.

The political management of cutbacks and austerity measures over the last twenty years has left front-line volunteers and professionals overworking and exhausted while too much of their efforts have gone towards making ends meet.

Their personal and professional situation is not just ripe for improvement – it is long over-due for transformation.

But their comments are also pointing us towards a deeper cultural challenge: Our welfare state and most of our publicly-funded social services were just not designed for the complexities of our current challenges.  We have reached the limits of what can be managed within our existing thinking.

The reality of these limits, and how to transform the thinking behind our welfare state, is a similar predicament for so many other challenges which are also affecting our social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being.

The trouble is, we have yet to gain a shared language or understanding as to what a process of transformation actually means, or even how our current work may be contributing to the stuckness.

Albert Einstein has famously remarked that, “We don’t get to transformation by thinking at the same level that got us into our problems.”  The conversations that matter between active citizens are an opportunity to switch the levels of our thinking. As such, these conversations can become “instruments of transformation” in addressing our bigger challenges.

This is particularly true of the Ownership Conversation. It has a special role to play in helping us climb out of the vicious circles that we might feel trapped within.

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IN HIS BOOK, Community, Peter Block defines ownership as a “...decision to become the author of your own experience.” He declares that:

“ Community will be created the moment we decide to act as creators of what it can become. This is the stance of ownership, which is available to us every moment on every issue. [...] This requires us to believe that this organisation, this neighbourhood, this community is mine or ours to create.”

Peter Block suggests that an important component of the Ownership Conversation is being willing to answer the question, How have I contributed to creating the current reality?  He says that answering this question is central to how a community is transformed:

“Accountability is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through commission or omission, the conditions that we wish to see changed. If we lack this capacity to see ourselves as cause, our efforts become either coercive or wishfully dependent on the transformation of others.” – Peter Block

These comments by Peter Block have consistently proved to be controversial in our Masterclass, and have sparked much conversation and debate. Some participants have found Block's comments naive when considered against the brutality and inter-generational trauma that has come with the colonisation of New Zealand.

The Ownership Conversation is about power, the power to make the decision “to become the author of your own experience”.  Block's definition of ownership seems to presume that you do have the power to make such a decision.

This is clearly not always the case with those individuals and communities who are living with the consequences of abusive power. They may be enduring oppression and injustice, or are alienated from the resources and opportunities they need to make choices for their own well-being.

The key to unlocking this predicament is what social scientists call “agency”, which is defined as the capacity of individuals and communities to act independently and freely make their own choices.

One of the most persistent effects of colonisation — whether it is historically by Empire, or in our contemporary era by Corporations — is that it seeks to determine the shape of your “agency”, and wants to manufacture your consent about this process.

For a great many people, the thought that they do have “agency” requires a significant suspension of suspicion and disbelief that a different possibility is indeed available to them.

But Peter Block's challenge does hold its own seed of truth. The thought that the “agency” of ownership is available to us “... at every moment on every issue” is both a paradox and a radical provocation. It opens the door to the realisation that a great many of the constraints that are holding us back from real transformation are not just external forces, but have already become the internal and unwelcome inhabitants of our own hearts and minds.

De-colonisation is not just a world-weary process of rolling back the powers and privileges of Empire and wealth. It is also an internal process of transforming the hearts and minds of ourselves and our communities so we may freely choose and grow the capacities we need for a different future.

COMMUNITIES KNOW THERE is such a thing as a virtuous circle. This is the circle that invokes and creates our opportunities for “agency”. The virtuous circle is also one of the fundamental principles of our natural world.

The biologist and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has said that, in nature, “Life exists to create the conditions for Life.” In this context, the process of evolution in nature is one that builds upon its own virtuous circle.

I believe the same is true for communities – there is a common-sense circular dance going on between the tangible and the intangible elements of well-being. In this virtuous circle, one of the purposes of community is to create the conditions which make community more possible.

A virtuous circle requires us to get a lot more practical about what fosters the regeneration and resilience of our collective well-being. Regeneration means building the skills for shaping the communities that we want to live in, while also growing capacity for the resilience which enables us to address crisis and change.

For a community-builder, the doorway to a virtuous circle usually involves a process of reflection. This means giving yourself the time and space where you can make better choices that are not driven by the frustrations and conflicts and politics of your daily lives.

For some of our participants, the Masterclass has provided an opening to this reflection. Our regular workshops are a time for participants to step out of the urgencies, breathe a bit deeper, make room for quarter-thoughts, and dare to let go of the things that are holding us back.

This process of reflection enables a “switch in thinking” that is the internal starting point of the transformations that we seek.

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THERE IS A mind-mapping tool that is often used in counselling, and helps us to understand how a “switch in thinking” can open up fresh possibilities.

Wayne Morris, one of the designers of our Masterclass, has seen this tool at work where a Taranaki business leader uses it during his meetings with employees.

Wayne describes the businessman starting a meeting by asking his employee: Which side of the line are you on?

If the employee just wants to sound off, or whinge and moan, then the boss doesn’t interrupt him, except to say, “That’s OK, you’ve got five minutes.” He then listens as the person unloads.

The businessman describes this as the ‘below the line’ conversation because it is usually focused on the problems, and often full of blame, excuses and denial. Yet the boss understands that he has a job to do here, and that is to listen well so he can really appreciate the difficulties and frustrations.

At the end of the five minutes, the boss stops the conversation, and says to his employee, “You’ve had that time, now are you ready for an ‘above the line’ conversation?” 

His employees usually already know what this means.

An ‘above the line’ conversation takes much longer, and they are expected to take ownership of the situation, focus on the possibilities and solutions, and be responsible and accountable for their part in whatever issue needs to be addressed.

The businessman understands that, while there may be some superficial improvements, no real and lasting change happens ‘below the line’. He sees the workplace meeting with his employee as an opportunity to explore the possibilities that are ‘above the line’ where you can access the innovation and creativity and shape the level of change that you both are looking for.

WE ADAPTED a version of the ‘above and below the line’ mind-map for use on our Masterclass. It asks the question, “Which side of the line are you on?” and it is a useful guide for any active citizen who does not want to remain stuck in negative, reactive or victim mentality and behaviour.

Crossing the line is an act of ownership. It often starts with a personal story that leads you to the decision to step into your own agency and become “the author of your own experience.”

And when things line up, this decision can release a genuine commitment to face the consequences – a willingness to take responsibility and accountability for the different future that you want to create.

Alongside this chart, we have also created a second mind-map that speaks to the same “switch in thinking” for our communities.

It asks, “Which side of the line are we on?” It points towards the transformation of our collective activities from being focused on problem-solving, fear and blame — to focusing on how we can together reclaim our creativity and explore new possibilities. 

Crossing the line here establishes both a foundation and a direction for our work as active citizens.

You may well notice that this second chart reflects most of the same “conversations that matter” that were first offered in Peter Block’s book Community, and make up the framework of our Masterclass.

The “switch in thinking” has the same DNA.

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OWNERSHIP IS THE GROUND from which transformation is made possible. The Ownership Conversation is also the key to transforming our broken welfare state.

The changes we need are not just a matter of funding more resources, or trying to manage the existing system more efficiently. The transformation of welfare will be made possible by developing and releasing all those aspects of social security that we can provide to each other as citizens, as family members, as neighbours and as communities.

One of the leading advocates for a different vision of welfare is the British social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam. She is the author of Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state. In this book, Cottam not only outlines a persuasive argument for change, but also shows how she has been practically reinventing welfare initiatives from the ground up — in fields such as how young people gain employment, how the health system operates, and how we care for our growing population of elders.

Hilary Cottam recognises the welfare state as being perhaps the biggest social revolution humanity has ever seen. In the beginning it felt modern and visionary. The principles, laid out in 1942 by the politician William Beveridge, transformed postwar Britain by guaranteeing healthcare, good education, decent housing and support when out of work or unwell. This model of social security was quickly and universally embraced by all leading Western economies.

But it is a vision that has not kept up with changing times. Hilary Cottam argues that our welfare state is now a set of institutions and services that are clearly not fit for purpose, and are unable to deal with the complex realities of modern life. 

“ It cannot support us in an emergency, it cannot enable us to live good lives, and it is at a loss when confronted with a range of modern challenges from loneliness to entrenched poverty, from a changing world of work to epidemics of obesity and depression.” — Hilary Cottam

As we have found in our own Masterclass conversations, our welfare professionals and practitioners are as trapped in an unworkable system as much as those who are in need of the social support being administered. This is particularly true in a system where the contracting-out and privatisation of welfare services has created a vested interest in keeping things exactly the way they are right now.

Hilary Cottam points out that William Beveridge knew that there were problems with the design of the welfare state right from the start. Six years after his launch, Beveridge wrote a report in which he declared he had made a significant mistake: his design had left out people, communities, and the bonds between us. These key components of well-being had not been woven into his welfare model. 

Cottam does not believe that we can mend our broken welfare systems, but she argues that we can reinvent them “with human connection at their heart”.

“ When we make collaboration and connection feel simple and easy, people want to join in. Yet our welfare state does not try to connect us to one another, despite the abundant potential of our relationships. Most of our services – for young and old people alike – are aimed at managing risk and getting by.” — Hilary Cottam

What is common to all our modern welfare problems is that the solutions require our sense of “agency” and our generous participation. The solutions require all of us — communities, the state, business and citizens — to work together and become active creators of change.

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A MODERN WELFARE SYSTEM must create possibility rather than seek only to manage risk; it must create capability rather than dependence; it must get wiser about the inter-dependence and the generosity that exists between generations; and it must actively foster the connections and relationships that make well-being possible.

These intentions point to many of the conversations that we have not yet been having about the future of our social security.

Our broken systems will not be healed by the same level of discussion and policy-making that has kept us stuck in our existing problems.

If we are able to “cross the line” of our current thinking, then we may begin to collectively reinvent the future of how we care for one another.

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 Crossing the Line 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

Which side of the line is our community on? ... The elements of this chart were drawn from the series of conversations that Peter Block offers in his book Community, which we use as part of the structure for the Masterclass.

Peter Block’s book Community — The Structure of Belonging (Second Edition 2018) is available at www.amazon.com/dp/1523095563. Also (with John McKnight) 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

Transformation is a change in the nature of things ... this idea is also central to the work and teachings of Werner Erhard, the founder of the est Training. See the film Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard (documentary 2006) directed by Robyn Symon. See also http://wernererhardbiography.com/peter-block-on-werner-erhard/

Wayne Morris ... Which side of the line are you on? (Future Edge) report February 2011 available from Future Edge, 693 Carrington Road, RD1 New Plymouth

Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state by Hilary Cottam published June 2018 www.amazon.com/Radical-Help-relationships-between-revolutionise-ebook/dp/B077QGQRKJ/

“More money will not fix our broken welfare state. We need to reinvent it” by Hilary Cottam in The Guardian 21st June 2018 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/21/broken-welfare-state-reinvent-it

Radical Help - Hilary Cottam speaking at the RSA June 2018 (video 1hr) https://youtu.be/tV49vVMPsYo

ISBN 978-1-92-717636-8 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

The Creative Community

— some thoughts for the Possibility Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 17 min read download as Masterclass PDF

COMMUNITY-BUILDING IS an act of creativity in which we are already wise. Our fundamental need to create relationships and to inhabit places of belonging comes built in as part of our membership of the human species.

It took tens of thousands of years to build the wisdom of community into our DNA. In doing so, we evolved into a unique species of social creatures who depended on each other to survive, to learn, and to thrive.

Our ancestors bore children who always required a great deal more care and attention than most other mammals. Even when we were hunters and gatherers, our children were born into connected social groups. They arrived into communities.

Our ancestors travelled and explored and put down roots in every region of the planet. And whenever they stopped and settled, tended fields and traded goods, built homes and cooked meals, they made communities.

The fact of this is often taken for granted: human beings are community-making creatures.

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Shaping the basic structures of human belonging is an act of creativity that comes with its own skills and wisdom. The way we do this is closer to the skills of an artist, or a gardener, than the usual talents of what we think of as modern-day management.

A community is complex. You are never really going to organise or control it. It contains far too many independent motivations. And it is not trying to be efficient.

A community-builder understands that if you want to create possibilities, then you need to postpone the call for ten-point plans, five-year goals, and key performance indicators.

Just postpone. All these tools of modern management have their place, but a community-builder doesn’t let them get in the way of paying attention to what is really of value.

Pay attention. A new possibility doesn’t just arrive from nowhere. It often emerges out of the not-so-usual connections that are already unfolding right in front of you.

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A COMMUNITY-BUILDER knows that if you want to create possibilities, then you also need to stop focusing on your problems.

This doesn’t mean you are never going to address problems.

It just acknowledges that if you primarily focus on your problems, then it is going to be much more difficult for a different possibility to emerge.

This is one of the main challenges of the present-day community sector, and government or philanthropic-funded social services. All this work for the common good has been increasingly taken over by competitive and professional agencies driven by the needs and requirements of their funders and contracts whose “outcomes” are usually focused on managing community problems.

But community-builders have always had a very different mission. They are not so much interested in organising the problems — they want to heal them.  And they want to release the possibilities that not only address the deeper causes of our difficulties, but can also work to shape and sustain our well-being.

This change in focus from problems to possibilities is one of the main insights gained from the work of John McKnight, the co-founder of the ABCD movement (Asset-Based Community Development). McKnight is an important planetary elder and thought-leader in the regeneration of neighbourhood life, and the co-author of one of the most popular books on Community Development called Building Community from the Inside Out.

McKnight points out that when most institutions decide to work with vulnerable communities, they usually start with “needs surveys” that detail the various problems that those communities have, and then they point towards the programmes and professional interventions that should be funded to make a difference.  McKnight argues that, while this “needs map” may be created out of a genuine desire to help, it does bring with it some important and unintended consequences.

The people who are caught up in different problems start to define themselves by those problems. They begin to think of themselves as fundamentally deficient, or as victims who are incapable of taking charge of their own lives without the intervention of an external programme or social service. This leads to a level of dependence or stuckness that creates the raw conditions for even more social problems.

The ABCD process involves revealing a different map – one that focuses on the strengths and assets of the community, and points towards the significant local relationships that have a critical part to play in community well-being.

This is an effective strategy because it reflects the basic wisdom that most of our local problems are complex and tightly intertwined. The “asset-based” strategy is a process that works from the inside-out. By focusing on a community’s strengths and relationships and gifts and talents, you release the problem-solving capabilities that are there in every community.

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COMMUNITY TARANAKI was started in 2010, partly in response to what many of us saw as a narrowing sense of the possibilities being embraced by our civic and political leaders.

This was perhaps best illustrated for us in 2012 when the then National-led government decided to change the official purpose of local district councils. Up until then, this purpose was written into the Local Government Act as a broad-brushed affair based on the widely-accepted concept of fostering well-being. This legislation empowered local councils to work towards “the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of communities”.

The government changed this legislation and redefined the purpose of councils to be one of “providing good quality local infrastructure, public services and regulatory functions at the least possible cost to households and businesses.” 

There was some well-reasoned opposition to these changes at the time, but any controversy about getting rid of what was referred to as “the four well-beings” was never high in the public awareness, and it was generally regarded as an esoteric matter for government legislators.

But it seemed to me to be a very significant reduction of vision and of imagination for our local authorities. It certainly worried me.

And sure enough, at the local level, any serious commitment by the New Plymouth District Council to “community development” was soon sidelined, and it was not long before their whole department was disbanded. (This also happened in many other regions around New Zealand).

Reflecting on this, I began to understand that this legislative change was a symptom of a deeper cultural shift. One of the main reasons it was able to happen, was because there was not a wide network of active citizens standing up for the vision behind “the four well-beings”.

So I started to consider that perhaps this legislative change itself was an opportunity that contained its own possibilities. Instead of getting organised to complain to the government and to the council about the changes, perhaps this was a time for average citizens to get together and begin to pick up this too-easily discarded mission.

This is an area where we as citizens have our own work to do – it is our job as citizens to back these deeper goals of community well-being with the mana and respect that they deserve.

It was this commitment that led us to developing our  local community-building projects. They have been a citizen-led response to creating well-being — in contrast to making submissions or being a pressure group to change government policies.

Actually, as political seasons come and go, the policies did change. In 2019, the Labour-led government introduced the first of its Wellbeing Budgets. At the same time, the Minister of Local Government rewrote the purpose of the Local Government Act to restore “the four well-beings” back into the legislation.

This legislative reversal happened without much public fanfare or any real media interest. It was a missed opportunity to affirm how the “four well-beings” are the universal drivers of our best intentions. It is in weaving these well-beings together that we create the best possibilities for our communities.

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WHEN WE WERE drawing up our own mission statement and legal structure for our new organisation Community Taranaki, I found myself at the Puke Ariki museum, at an evening featuring the American social entrepreneur Umberto Crenca.

He was visiting from the city of Providence on Rhode Island, USA, where he had founded an organisation which provides facilities for local artists to live, work, exhibit and perform. The organisation serves thousands of artists and is a tourist destination for over 90,000 people every year.

Crenca talked passionately about creating a Manifesto which was a statement of the possibilities that their organisation wanted to see happen. The Manifesto drove their determination to work towards a just world where all people could realise their full creative potential, regardless of financial or other limitations.

This talk inspired me to go to our Community Taranaki trustee meeting with the notion that we definitely needed to create our own Manifesto. Which we did.

We came up with a statement about why we are associating, and what our projects and activities are serving. It is not written for lawyers and legislators, or for the lip service of politicians or funding agencies.

It is a description of possibility. It has been written to stretch us as citizens. And it is a call for us to stand behind the many levels of well-being that we want to see thriving in our place.

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ONE OF OUR GUIDES to the creativity we need in our communities has been the Taranaki artist and musician Wayne Morris. Wayne has been a trustee of Community Taranaki, and he helped us to design and lead the first versions of what became the Masterclass for Active Citizenship.

Wayne has been a leader in the education of creativity itself, and not just in how it applies to the arts but also in business and in civic affairs. In 2013, he was the initiator of a conference called the New Zealand Creativity Challenge which brought together people from many different sectors with experts on creativity from all around the world.

Wayne has often pointed out that when it comes to any creative enterprise, we just don’t get to the possibilities unless we first cultivate an imaginative mind. He argues that this goal should be one of the central missions of any 21st-century education system. The trouble is, our usual methods of schooling have been educating people out of their creativity — and this has long needed to change.

>click< for photopage

Cultivating an imaginative mind is one of the main motivations behind why we set up the Community Action Incubator Programme that has been run by Community Taranaki and Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki. This four-month course of workshops has been designed for people who are starting up new community projects or looking to regenerate existing ones.

The Incubator establishes a peer support group for these initiatives. It enables people to do their work for community, in community — rather than being isolated in their own separate home offices while trying to make a difference.

Besides the regular course of workshops, there are one-to-one consultation sessions which can go into the details of a participant’s project. There are also weekly appointments held between the members of the group.

In the first five years of these Incubators, we have seen the establishment or renewal of many environmental projects, health and healing initiatives, projects for the education and employment of teenagers, workshops for parenting and the care of children, a Living Wage campaign, a national Maori surf championship, and a network of emergency houses for homeless families.

The Incubator gives its participants the time and space to pay attention. The participants might start with a particular idea in mind, but they are also encouraged to follow the unfolding, and to stretch their ideas into possibilities they have not yet imagined.

During one of our Incubator sessions, we show a 1956 film of Pablo Picasso creating one of his famous Matador paintings.

The film-maker focused his camera not on Picasso himself, but on the canvas. He filmed the process of painting over many hours, and the result was an animation of how the painting emerged and changed as the artist followed his creative process. It looked almost like the painting itself was trying to tell Picasso about its own life and character.

An unfolding artwork — from the 1956 French Documentary Le Mystère Picasso

The film shows us something intangible that is rarely captured. Yet, for any artist or entrepreneur, it also shows us something very familiar: the many acts of risk-taking and daring to chase that unfolding that is all part of creating a new possibility.

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CULTIVATING an imaginative mind in a civic space is a definite challenge. This is especially so in a political climate where our aspirations for well-being have been side-lined into a narrowing focus on the efficient management of infrastructure.

We need to keep alive those local civic spaces where a diverse group of citizens can talk with one another, strengthen their relationships, and imagine the possibilities that will lead to a different future.

This is why Community Taranaki started our seasonal gatherings of active citizens, which are now held every three months in the Council Chambers of the New Plymouth District Council. We invite anyone to join us who feels they are making a positive contribution to the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of our province.

We have worked in partnership with the NPDC to create this forum, and the council staff move the tables (that are normally used by the Mayor and other councillors) out of the Chamber, and replace them with a simple circle of chairs. 

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The circles start with a few short keynote speeches from an active citizen, or a council member or employee. They speak to what they are seeing in our communities, the activities they are involved with, and the questions they are asking themselves. These keynotes spark the rest of the community conversations that we continue in smaller groups.

These small groups are the heart of our process — they are a chance to listen and speak in a way that unfortunately is currently rare in our civic spaces. They are also an opportunity to practice getting out of our personal silos and thinking “bubbles” and get to know a whole range of people that we wouldn’t normally meet and talk with.

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At one of our Summer Community Circles, local artist Shirley Vickery was invited to come and speak. She turned up with buckets full of ferns and lilies, and flaxes and flowers, pinecones and shells ... all things that she had gathered that morning before our meeting. 

When it came to her turn to speak, Shirley invited members of the group to join her in creating a huge mandala on the floor of the Council Chambers.

Nothing really needed to be said.

Her collective work of art was its own message about active citizenship and the role we each can play in the stewardship of our place.

Making the mandala itself was a demonstration of the creativity that leads to possibility.

And it was an affirmation of how we each have a part to play in imagining that messy and beautiful wholeness that is also known as community.

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 Creative Community 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

Building Communities from the Inside Out – a Path Towards Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight (1993) pub Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA.

“Councils to get shake up” by John Antony, The Taranaki Daily News 20th March 2012

2019 Local Government Amendment Bill ... see https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/bills-and-laws/bills-proposed-laws/document/BILL_77941/local-government-community-well-being-amendment-bill

Umberto Crenca in Providence, Rhode Island, for more see AS220 at https://as220.org

The New Zealand Creativity Challenge was first held in New Plymouth, Taranaki on 27-28 April 2013. See vivian Hutchinson’s paper “What’s Broken is the We – some thoughts on creativity for the common good” at tinyurl.com/vivianWe13

Wayne Morris, see The Creative Edge Workshop – a practical approach to becoming more creative by Wayne Morris (2010) available from Future Edge Ltd, 693 Carrington Road RD1, New Plymouth 4371, New Zealand

Pablo Picasso – see Henri-Georges Clouzot 1956 French Documentary Le Mystère Picasso.

Photopage: Incubator — THE ACTION INCUBATOR — Some of the participants at the Community Action Incubator - Ringa Pūrere workshops in New Plymouth, Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson.

Photopage: Circles — COMMUNITY CIRCLES Active Citizens at the New Plymouth District Council — Some of the small group conversations at the seasonal Community Circles held in the Council Chambers of the New Plymouth District , New Plymouth. Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson

the creative process of writing ... take a look at the video made to capture the writing of this book chapter — and how it also unfolded as the How Communities Awaken project itself took shape over a three-year period. http://bit.ly/turningaphrase

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

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. 

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

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

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.

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

>click< for photopage

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.

>click< for photopage

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

>click< for photopage

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.

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

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.

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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