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SEWN NEWS Mahuru / September 2016 Welcome to the September / Mahuru Social Equity & Wellbeing Network (SEWN) newsletter. __________________________________________________________________ SEWN HQ Once a year incorporated Societies and Trusts need to Don’t miss out ! hold an Annual General Meeting. The reason for an AGM Inside September: SEWN AGM and is to keep the charity legal and transparent to the public. celebration! Having been to many they often feel like a pain, doing · Resilience is Futile Talk by Dr Duncan something that has to be done…. · Parking Tickets Webb However, it is really important to SEWN that we engage · Food Security Lunch from 1pm, with people who have interests and/or work in Equity & · NGO Resources Thurs 15th September Wellbeing, people who want systemic change and re- · Training Christchurch Commu- duce marginalisation. We are a network of members so · Conservation Wk nity House. want to continually ensure we are on the right path ac- · Suicide Prevention 301 Tuam St cording to what you need and want. · Lots of funding Not sure if you're a So come along and talk with us! member? Contact the To help balance the boring stuff that will be done quickly opportunities SEWN office and we we have a really interesting speaker. A practicing lawyer, · Upcoming Nation- can make sure you're Dr Duncan Webb is well known to the people of Christ- al Conferences all signed up. church for his work in supporting those struggling with [email protected] insurance claims. He is also recognised as New Zea- land’s leading expert in lawyer’s ethics and professional responsibility. Clare in the Community With thanks to the Guardian and Harry Venning Newsletter for and by the Community Sector in Waitaha (Canterbury). Email items for SEWN’s October newsletter to [email protected] by Tuesday 27th October, 2016. Keep up to date with the latest relevant information by ‘liking’ us at https://www.facebook.com/SEWNChch Love our work? Support us at givealittle: http://givealittle.co.nz/org/sewn/donate SEWN NEWS Otautahi 1 September / Mahuru 2016 Resilience Is Futile: How Well-Meaning Nonprofits Perpetuate Poverty Adapted from an article by Melissa Chadburn for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, US. Two years ago, I was hired as a campaign coordinator for a community initiative in South L.A. I got the job because I’d been an organizer for labor unions, and I was eager and thrilled. I’d be coordinating The Be- long Campaign, part of a nonprofit funded by government entities as well as large foundations. My cubicle was in the heart of The Children’s Bureau. What they said I was doing—what the foundations were paying us to do, what I thought I was doing—was working to prevent child abuse and neglect. But the work was not what it seemed. Then, on my first day, I was shown to my cubicle and handed a heap of papers that touted an ideology—a Theory of Change. On subsequent days, I sat at large round tables and looked on as a series of aggravat- ing white liberals spouted the inherent value of this theory. The story the campaign told was a story of lost resilience. The narrative they preached was how to get it back. This is a common theme in community work. Over the years the term “resilience” has been applied more and more frequently to people in distressed communities to mean their capacity to bounce back from dysfunction or breakdown. Increasing community resilience becomes a solution to chronic barriers such as poverty, trauma, and class inequity. Dozens of programs that encourage resiliency have been introduced in schools and low-income neighborhoods all over the world in an effort to help children recover from trauma and also cope better with their day-to-day stresses. It’s poverty amelioration through behavioral change—a behavioral change that asks for utter stability. What the resilience preachers look for is a person to be unchanged in the face of trauma. But I would argue that this is impossible, that people are always changed by trauma, and furthermore, that we ought to be. Rather than shift ourselves to change what is, the foundations that fund these initiatives would be better off ad- dressing the gaps, filling the lacks, changing what isn’t. To me, the story of the families we engaged in South L.A. was never the story of a lack of resilience. It was the story of your electricity getting turned off or your landlord being a slumlord, or your immigration status standing in the way of a good job, or your children graduating from high school with little to no money to pay for college, or your child joining a gang, or your child suffering from autism. The story, another way, goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a wealthy community. Just to the south was a poor community. Between the two ran a freeway. People from the poor community were always sneaking over, trying to partake of the wealth of the wealthy community. The people in the wealthy community resented this. Or some did. Some seemed fine with it, and even helped them once they got there. Some said it was a crisis. Others said: What crisis? It’s been going on for years, plus they work so cheap. The local nonprofits, city and county ef- forts seized on the situation and, as always, screwed it up: reduced it to pithy ideologies, politicized it, and injected it with faux urgency, until I was confused, and we all were confused and there was nothing much left to do but to throw some good wholesome foundation money at it. About five months into my employment as campaign coordinator, I attended a research meeting where all the plans for the organization were laid out and where I felt very conflicted. I already knew that, in these types of meetings, I was made a tourist to a world and a life that I already knew well. Oftentimes I was asked to be a translator of sorts—a translator of where things went wrong for all these people, for the me I had once been. At roundtables, this one woman who developed our particular Theory of Change sat at the head, and she carried with her a sort of dominance. Her rhetoric was accepted as the central rhetoric. Over time, the rest of us who worked with her stopped believing in our value as organizers. Some of us became passive and stopped believing in the validity of our own experience. We all began speaking in her language: protective factors, asset based organizing, personal resilience. We started to absorb this woman’s idea that changing people’s behavior was the solution to their problems, which meant absorbing the idea that people’s behavior was the source of their problems. But I knew at the core of me this was false. The problem had never been that I didn’t know the right number to call. It’s a lack of resources that produces a lack of resilience, not the other way around. SEWN NEWS Otautahi 2 September / Mahuru 2016 But the work of the initiative said otherwise. This is what we did: we gathered residents in the community and pointed out what their individual and community assets were. Nothing else. We didn’t provide services, or even find a way to coordinate between the different service providers. Our mission statement: The 35,000 children and youth, especially the youngest ones, living in the neighborhoods within the 500 blocks of the Magnolia Catchment Area will break all records of success in their education, health, and the quality of nurturing care and economic stability they receive from their families and community—Getting To Scale An Elusive Goal. The Belong Campaign chose an area because it’s a place that houses vulnerable, high-need, low-resource neighborhoods with multiple threats: high poverty, low employment rates, high incidence of diabetes and asthma, and high rates of involvement with the child welfare system. In other words, we served people who are already resilient. If there’s one thing that people in poverty, chil- dren in foster care, and recent immigrants already have in abundance, it’s the knowledge of how to be tough. How did this gaggle of liberals measure this mental toughness of resilience? One common tool to measure resilience is called the Children and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28). The CYRM-28 is a 28-item questionnaire that explores the individual, relational, communal, and cultural resources that may bolster the resilience of people aged nine to 23. The measure was designed as part of the International Resilience Project, based in Canada—a group on the forefront of resilience studies and partially funded by the Nova Scotia Department of Justice Correctional Services. Part of the programming offered by The Belong Campaign was a training for the parents in the community. The theme, of course, was resilience. It would be encouraged through discussions about challenges that life presents you and what possible resources you can use to respond to those challenges. I felt this training endorsed a morally appealing self-castigation, and when I was hired, I did away with it. We’d built what I thought was a lonely hearts club; parents attended their “resilience meeting” casually, waiting for the day to unfold. They’d do this with or without us, without this hovering idea of what they lacked. Rather, I thought it would be best to go out in the community and assess who lived there, ask where the children were, what their barriers were.

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