By Nicola Taylor, Director | Posted: Tuesday May 31, 2016
Child poverty affects one in five children, whose basic needs of warmth, food, adequate clothing, good health and opportunities for education are not being met.
The social service sector is navigating a very uncertain time in the aftermath of the reforms of Child Youth and Family, announced recently. We do know that programmes such as Family Start are providing support to the most vulnerable families in our community. The budget of last week did not give a lot of detail about changes to come, but for the implementation of the new service to children to be in place by March, 2017, a great deal of work is needed in a very short time.
Meantime, we are watching with interest as the media unravel the housing ‘crisis’ in Auckland and local providers such as The Methodist Mission offer to provide solutions to the problems of homelessness for young people. The inequity of housing issues – cost of market rentals as a percentage of weekly income – cost of heating – substandard rental properties – are a significant cause of the problems many families face in Dunedin, where income levels do not meet basic needs.
Child poverty affects one in five children, whose basic needs of warmth, food, adequate clothing, good health and opportunities for education are not being met.
The solution to this entrenched and complex situation needs a desire to work pro-actively to find solutions from all who are aware of it. The biggest barrier to finding such a solution lies in the individual and compartmental approaches to working for change, and while this fragmentation and competition exists, little change will occur.
The challenge was put to me recently, by one of our supporters, that if everyone gave one item to food banks, this would make a difference.
I believe the challenge is greater than this – if everyone concerned with the issues of poverty, food insecurity, food rescue, hunger, homelessness and the inevitable despair which goes with this, agreed to work together, we would finally begin to address the problem and its underlying causes.