On the ground in South Auckland
Tipene is a good example of how the team at South Auckland Community Ministries operates. He lives alone in Rata Vine, a state housing neighbourhood in Manurewa that has seen better days. Known by locals as The Bronx, it comprises 1980s’ cement sheet housing, deserted streets, gang-tagged fences and an underlying sense of desperation.
In his early 50s, Tipene is one of the many New Zealanders who fall through the bureaucratic cracks each year. But he fell so far and so hard that it almost killed him.
A quadriplegic since a car accident four years ago, the programme of care Tipene needs to survive broke down, leaving him effectively abandoned, malnourished, bedridden and close to death. When the severity of his situation was finally understood, he was hospitalised for two months to get him back to health.
Compounding Tipene’s problems, he had been underpaid his benefit and IRD had been overcharging him for child support, leaving him with $47 a week to live on and in arrears with rent payments to Housing New Zealand. His financial problems stemmed from failing to fill in the correct paperwork on time; understandable when you have a number of medical conditions, including chronic pain.
When Tipene first appeared on the radar of South Auckland Community Ministries social worker Sue Iripa and Budget Coordinator Yvonne Challis in August this year, Housing New Zealand was about to evict him and, still in fragile health, he was deeply distressed. ‘He had been going down hill fast and by the time we came on board, his physical and psychological state was terrible,’ recalls Yvonne.
Yvonne and Sue went to work, and three months of struggling with sluggish bureaucracies and another eviction notice later, the pair began to make progress. They patiently argued their client’s case to officials in three Government departments, attempting to get ACC and IRD to review Tipene’s circumstances and managing to get his eviction postponed.
In recent weeks, Yvonne has succeeded in getting Tipene’s child support payments reduced from $220 a week, based on a high income he did not receive, down to $25. She also managed to get IRD to refund Tipene $880, which will almost cover the $900 rent arrears he owes, finally lifting the spectre of eviction.
Tipene’s strength of character and quick intelligence have helped get him through. ‘I’ve struggled with [Government] agencies since the accident,’ he says. ‘What has got me through all this with my sanity was the knowledge that I hadn’t taken my family with me on the day of the accident.’
Tenacity meets complexity
This kind of advocacy work is meticulous and time-consuming. The client’s financial situation needs to be accurately mapped out, their benefit entitlements, tax rates and other deductions researched and matched with actual payments, creditors need to be placated and persuaded to be patient, negotiations with multiple Government agencies are difficult to arrange and coordinate, and the overall process can be slow and frustrating. If the client is in the courts system or the family is being monitored by Child Youth and Family (CYF), then the complexity of the case is cranked up several notches.
South Auckland Community Ministries has seen a steep increase in the number of people seeking its help since the recession. The economic downturn began to translate into a noticeable increase in clients from March 2008, when around 116 food parcels a week were distributed. Three years later, the number jumped 104 per cent to 238 a week. The volume of food parcels distributed has plateaued in relative terms, but there was still a 6.3 per cent increase from the 2010 financial year to 2011.
The rise in demand at the food bank has been accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the problems that bring families to The Salvation Army, South Auckland Community Ministries Director Pam Hughes says. With few exceptions, families come with long-term and often high-interest debt, usually compounded by—and exacerbating—other problems such as homelessness, relationship breakdown and family violence, poor mental health, or a family member’s drug or alcohol use.
Intensively marketed, high-interest loans to beneficiaries and low-income earners and ‘buy now, pay later’ clothing trucks targeting low-income neighbourhoods have long been hazards in poorer communities. Debt and low incomes combined with rising rents and living costs and breadwinners losing their jobs or having working hours cut, have seen poverty levels in parts of South Auckland deepen and widen.
Pam says these immense financial pressures on families are the likely reason for much of the rise in family violence seen by her social workers. ‘We’ve seen an enormous degree of financial hardship and, as a result, there have been a lot of people coming in suffering from depression because they are literally worried sick over how they are going to feed their families and pay their bills,’ she says. ‘I think depression and the increase in family violence can be seen as symptoms of the level of stress out there.’
Social Work Coordinator Esteban Espinoza says the rising level of hardship in the past two years now manifests in the growing number of evictions, forcing multiple families to live in overcrowded housing. Even families living in cars is becoming more common. Social workers say more clients have been bringing up the subject of suicide in recent months.
‘Many families are in tatters,’ says Esteban. ‘We see more people coming in tears, some are aggressive. We have been dealing with anti-social behaviour for a long time but we haven’t seen this surge of anger, where people behave extremely because of the situations they are in.’
The severe distress suffered by some clients was the main reason a security guard was employed at the Community Ministries office in Manukau earlier this year. ‘You have to remember, we are the last port of call for these people,’ Esteban explains. ‘They have tried all avenues, they have been everywhere for help and they are very worried and frustrated.’
The Reverend Vicki Sykes is the Director of Friendship House, an ecumenical social service centre in Manukau City that has had a long and close working relationship with South Auckland Community Ministries. She says the recession is still very real for many local families. Her staff has also seen a growing number of people seeking assistance with ‘a constellation’ of interrelated and complex problems.
Rev. Sykes says The Salvation Army’s emergency assistance and longer-term work to relieve poverty and suffering in the area is invaluable. ‘They fill a really important niche in the Manukau community with their emergency, front-line social assistance and triage work, and it would be hard to imagine what people would do if they weren’t there. Actually, I couldn’t imagine them not being there.’
Plotting a new course
Professional social workers are a combination of advocate, educator, negotiator, counsellor and personal strategist. They look at a client’s life in its entirety rather than attempting to deal with issues piecemeal. Salvation Army social workers are also able to call on the specialist skills of the Army’s wider suite of services: budget advisers, life skills and parenting programmes, addiction services, Employment Plus and food banks, as well as external agencies such as health care providers and family violence groups.
In South Auckland, it is the job of a social work team of three full-time and one part-time staff to help clients determine the root causes of why they are seeking emergency assistance and help them plot a course of long-term changes that will build to a more stable and satisfying life.
The growing volume and intensity of social work at South Auckland Community Ministries is reflected in the work they do for CYF. The team was contracted to CYF to work on 40 highly complex cases in the past year, but their caseload was 79. They were contracted for 140 non-intensive social work cases, and worked 263 cases. This shows the high level of compassion and commitment of the Salvation Army team, that they are prepared to take cases on even though they’re stretched, says Pam.
While the pressures on client families have become noticeably greater and their problems more complicated, new kinds of clients have been seeking assistance. Esteban says long-term beneficiaries were once the core clients of Community Ministries. Now, working families that own their own homes are coming in because reduced working hours or redundancy mean they are unable to meet mortgage payments and they face losing their homes. This includes middle-class people who earned good incomes but were made redundant and are now surviving on a benefit or have moved onto low or minimum wages, yet still have large mortgages and other debt to service.
Yvonne has seen families break up because of the massive pressures caused by debt and the tremendous efforts required to keep a family afloat with a minimal disposable income. When a client’s financial situation is truly dire, the last resort is a no asset procedure, which is a less severe version of bankruptcy and occurs when there are no more personal assets to sell. Budget advisers have had to come to grips quickly with the intricacies of attempting to avert mortgagee sales and dealing with no asset procedures and the related legal processes.
The strength of social work
Across town, one family faced both the loss of their home and a no asset procedure that would have left them destitute. Social worker Diana Vao was called to Alofa and her husband’s house after a school nurse alerted CYF to a possible case of physical abuse. Some of the couple’s six children had arrived at school with apparent bruising. While investigating the case on behalf of CYF, Diana discovered the bizarre truth.
For seven years, water draining from a neighbouring property had been seeping onto Alofa’s property and pooling under the house. Capillary action had drawn the water up into the house’s framework, causing dampness and mould throughout a large part of the house. The bruising on the children was in fact mould spores, which had also infected their parents. Diana says the plasterboard walls were soaked and crumbled when touched, layers of cardboard had been placed on the floor to soak up the moisture, and the internal walls and ceilings were black with mould.
Yvonne Challis was called in. Faced with more than $20,000 of repairs to get the house to a safe standard, and with the family having little or no financial reserves, she contacted Habitat for Humanity, which agreed to undertake the repairs for the $9000 cost of materials.
Yvonne was faced with the choice of finding the money or helping the family with a mortgagee sale and bankruptcy. She successfully applied to have the couple’s KiwiSaver superannuation contributions released and is now in the process of getting their employers’ contributions paid to them on the basis of hardship to the family.
The family underwent tremendous strain, says Alofa, but their house is no longer a health hazard and the family itself is no longer under threat.
Salvation Army Social Programme Director Major Campbell Roberts says professional social work has been central and invaluable to the Army’s mission since it became a stronger component of Salvation Army community work toward the end of the 1970s. In fact, The Salvation Army’s mission of ‘caring for people, transforming lives and reforming society’ is fundamental to the International Federation of Social Workers’ definitions of social work, which is the basis for social work training in New Zealand.
‘Social workers are absolutely vital to the Army because traditionally we have been good at doing the crisis stuff, but more and more we need to be addressing the causes of the crisis, and doing this in a sustained manner,’ Major Roberts says. ‘When you look closely at what social work teams are doing in some of our Community Ministries centres, it’s invaluable because they truly are turning lives around’
By Jon Hoyle (abridged from War Cry, 19 November 2012, p5-7)