Social Welfare Part 3

Expanding needs

As part of my orientation work I had spent a fortnight attached to the Social Work Department at Base Hospital and got to know some of the staff there. One who came for help was Caroline Blume, an Occupational Therapist, who was worried about stroke patients who were not getting their rehab exercise. So we recruited a small group of ladies, and Caroline trained them (I attended the training as well) to help stroke victims in the early recovery period when making progress is very important. This group was called “Counterstroke”. 

Later a similar group worked with cancer patients, visiting and befriending those who had been diagnosed as terminal.  One of the retired nurses on our list took charge of this activity; it was before the days when the Cancer Society or the Hospice could meet all the need. 

Then there were the elderly couples where one was housebound or disabled.  Our volunteers would visit once a week and provide relief for the carer for a couple of hours. 

After a year or two we recruited a group of younger people and ran a training session in the evenings. It was the same course as the daytime one, but held over fish and chips from 5 15 to 9 pm. There was an enthusiasm among these youngsters to get cracking and at that stage the shortage of housing caused by the “Think Big” projects was acute. 

So we put a group together to help with housing, and one of the Senior Volunteers offered to lead the project. We negotiated with one of the caravan hirers, and with the Council for the use of an under-used camp site in one of the parks. We eventually had a dozen or so caravans for emergency housing, each family with a volunteer from the group to help them work with Housing NZ to find accommodation and with other agencies to make sure they had budgetting help, the correct benefits and so on. 

This group was so energised and politicised by their work that they led a march down the main street to the office of the local MP, Tony Friedlander, who was also Minister of Housing, to tell him of the problems they were having. 

Eventually agencies like the Council of Social Sevices, under the chairmanship of our friend and colleague Ian Kilgour, set up an emergency housing committee, and a housing action group, which took over this work, which was in any case not nearly so acute once the projects were completed. 

Towards the middle of the decade we persuaded the Benefits division of the DSW (now Work and Income) to allow our volunteers to attend on benefit day and help people apply for their benefits. So a group, with an experienced volunteer, who had been a beneficiary for many years, as leader, would attend the office and help people in the queue for benefits with their applications, pointing out when they didn’t have all their documents correct, and when they needed to see other agencies, and accompanying them as support.

 

(More coming)