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Many New Zealanders have a “primitive” understanding of poverty that can prevent effective action, a senior World Vision staffer says.
Jonathan Fletcher, the Christian humanitarian organisation’s head of fundraising partnerships, said Kiwis tended to see poverty as being purely financial – an attitude that can be a barrier to solving some of the root causes of the issue.
In an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, Fletcher said he started seeing poverty in a different way only when he joined World Vision from a job in finance in 2013.
“The way I saw the world and saw poverty was very much the way most New Zealanders do – as an economic thing. When we talk about poverty, we’re usually talking about money,” he said.
“When I came to World Vision I was constantly grappling with that, thinking ‘that doesn’t solve everything. Not all suffering is related to money. It’s a huge part of the solution, but there’s got to be more to it'.
“So I started reading … because if we’ve defined poverty wrong, then we solve it wrong. If we define poverty as not enough stuff, at that point the answer is to give them more stuff.”
“In Christian development, we would say poverty is about broken relationships at its core. So if I have a broken relationship with God, with myself, with creation, with others, that brokenness is a form of poverty – and broken people create unjust systems.”
Jonathan Fletcher: "The way I saw the world and saw poverty was very much the way most New Zealanders do – as an economic thing." Photo / 123rf
Fletcher says many Kiwis take up one of two common views on poverty – people are poor because they’re lazy or because they’re victims.
“Both have elements of truth, but are largely wrong,” he told Real Life.
“The poor are not victims and when we treat them like victims, we diminish their dignity.”
‘What’s your greatest need?’
Fletcher says World Vision subscribes to the Christian idea that everyone is made in the image of God, meaning everyone has inherent worth and value.
“There was some research done a few years ago by the UN and they studied thousands and thousands of low-income people and asked them ‘what’s your greatest need'?
“No 1 on the list was not food, it was not water, it was not healthcare, it was not education. It was dignity.”
In his role with World Vision, Fletcher leads exposure trips where groups of young people are taken to impoverished areas in which the non-profit organisation runs development programmes.
He says for many of the people who come on these trips, it changes the trajectory of their lives.
“I know how important it was for me to see those parts of the world as a 17-year-old and you don’t always know it at the time, but then you start to see how it affected the rest of your life,” he told Cowan.
“A few [young people] have come back, landed in New Zealand in December … and been taken straight to the mall to do Christmas shopping. And some of them end up on a seat in tears in the mall like, ‘how do I reconcile this? Our family are so wealthy compared to the families I’ve just met'.
“The other element is they’ve seen [communities where people] have a connection to their families that they didn’t have, who have a community they wish they had, who don’t seem to have the same mental health struggles that they have.
“And so it widens the understanding of what poverty really is.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Fletcher spoke about standing against Chris Hipkins as a would-be National MP, raising his kids in a bicultural household, and his upbringing.
Real Life is a weekly interview show in which John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing and the way they see the world. Tune in on Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
