A Social Justice Learning Collective: Investigating the housing crisis
As followers of Jesus, we are called to point to the injustices we see around us and work to direct them towards the hope of God’s Kingdom. The ongoing housing crisis in New Zealand, highlighted by the upcoming elections, is an issue that affects many of us on a personal level and has direct ramifications on inequality and poverty levels. Kate Day from Anglican Advocacy in collaboration with Charles Waldegrave from St Peters on Willis and the Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit recently held a Social Justice Learning Collective to discuss housing in our country and how we are called to respond as Christians.
The Learning Collective ran for six weeks on a Thursday evening over July and August, with twenty-eight people getting along over that period. Kate said that her hope with the Learning Collective was to “impassion other young Anglicans about structural change and being part of that, and we thought that the housing crisis would be a good place to start because it’s not nearly as well understood as it could be. It’s not a very sexy issue, it’s a broad topic with a lot of economic background”.
Kate explained how the evenings ran: “we started off with soup and just chatted; the great St Peter’s soup ministry team provided amazing soup and the Free Store gave us bread which was really generous of them. We got to meet some people from different groups, mainly in their twenties. There were a few from the Hutt that came in, a couple from Porirua, and a couple who made a few sessions even though they live in Palmerston North, so that was very impressive.”
Ben Schmidt, who works for the Manawatū Tenants Union and has been connected in on other housing projects with Kate, was one of the crew to travel down from Palmerston North for a handful of the sessions: “I work as a tenant advocate, I‘ve been doing some research on church responses to the housing crisis and involved in a few other housing actions as well so it’s something I’m passionate about, which is why I was interested in being involved. In places like Palmerston North I have a lot of young people in really substandard, appalling housing conditions. We have a housing crisis here just the same as Wellington, but it’s often really challenging to organise a response to that. So quite exciting about the learning collective that it’s a group of people who are aware that we have a housing crisis and are wanting to change that, and are being informed by their faith which is important with our responsibility to act for social justice.”
Ben found a lot of encouragement in being able to meet with others and discuss the housing crisis through a lens of seeking change, as “it shows that if it’s important it can be done and we need to keep working for that’. Charles and Kate also emphasised the way our desire for systematic change in spaces of injustice is rooted in the model of Jesus’ life. Kate explained that “one part of each session was on theology so we looked at a Bible passage that was relevant to the topics, like the Magnificat and the parable of the good Samaritan, and talked about what those might mean in light of the structural inequality, particularly when Jesus is calling out the authorities for neglecting issues of justice. When you’ve just had a conversation about the injustice that is still prevalent in New Zealand, those passages suddenly become like, ‘if Jesus was in Wellington today maybe he would have something to say about the fact that things are so unequally shared’.”
As we near the elections in October, there is the hope that the crew involved in the Social Justice Learning Collective can lead out of a space of greater knowledge around the housing crisis, and can work to educate their own communities to be informed on the ways our leadership needs to shift to support those who are most vulnerable. Kate said that “my hope was as we looked at the root causes of what was going on we’d be able to take action together in the election lead-up and call for some changes that we’d identified – although the opportunities for that didn’t really come to fruition in a messy time with Covid-19 and uncertain plans around the election, certainly there’s still lots of work to be done.”
By Holly Morton
