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Six years ago, Ruth Nonu arrived “broke and broken” to Cannons Creek. She had fled Auckland with her children, weighed down by debt, grief and trauma.
She had no one in Porirua, and nowhere to go but a refuge. She had spent the previous six years caring for her mother, who had died a few months earlier with Alzheimer’s. Before that, she and the children had left a violent marriage.
The money she received as a single parent, in addition to the small extra she got as a full-time carer, didn’t cover the basics. She had bailiffs after her for thousands of dollars: she owed money to Work & Income for food and basics, had taken on debt for her mother’s funeral and, unable to get on top of her electricity bill, had an accumulated deficit to the power company of $3000.
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“Debt was about survival … I had no money to rub together to put food on the table. My world was just chaos,” she says over coffee in the lounge of Cannons Creek’s community house, run by Wesley Community Action, which has worked in Porirua since the economic crisis of the early 1990s.
Her oldest child was a trained carpenter, but he was treated as a casual in his job. That meant no security, and no pay if there was no work. At one point, Nonu was referred to a budget advisor, who went through her incomings and outgoings and told her she needed to charge her children board. But the oldest was already paying household bills, and the others were at school. Nonu couldn’t see how trying to extract rent from them was any kind of solution.
Nonu is a nurse, but her registration had lapsed in the years she was home caring for her children and then her mother. Whitireia Polytechnic in Porirua offered the cheapest course that would enable her to re-register, so she shifted south.
After three weeks in a refuge, the family got a state house. With a roof over their heads, “the spinning slowed down”, she says. “I knew I needed to make a change. It was just the how.”
Without transport, it was cheaper and easier to get fast food in Cannons Creek than go to a supermarket in Porirua city for healthy food. She went to another budgeter, who “dictated where my money should be going”.
When her children’s parent-teacher meetings were coming up, she would save $2 for the bus fare to get there. But most of the time, she stayed home. “I wasn’t going anywhere because I didn’t want to spend any money, and I didn’t have any money to spend.”
She heard about Hauora Kai, a network of fruit and vegetable co-ops run under the umbrella of Wesley Community Action. Buying direct from grower-owned distributor Market Gardeners Ltd, and backed by a team of volunteers, Hauora Kai is able to deliver in-season produce 15-30% cheaper than the equivalent would cost at Pak‘n’Save. She started ordering a fixed-price pack from the Cannons Creek co-op every week.
Then she got onto Good Cents, an innovative Wesley financial programme designed in collaboration with the Cannons Creek community. Instead of being “advised” by budgeting experts how to get out of debt, the programme brings participants together to learn from each other and develop their own plan to achieve financial stability. They are shown how to keep a personal diary of everything they spend – which no one else sees – and pull together a detailed picture of their debts
With knowledge comes confidence: instead of a budget advisor ringing the debt collector on Nonu’s behalf, she made the calls herself, armed with every detail of her financial situation. She was able to tell them that it was impossible to meet their demands, and to explain why. Equally confidently, she was able to put forward a lesser repayment schedule as the starting point for negotiation.
“I had to make a lot of changes in my life, and one of them was getting on a bus to go and do my shopping instead of relying on the dairy that was just up the road. I realised I was spending over $100 at the dairy [every week], not including cigarettes. I realised how much I was smoking, so I quit for six months. I’m vaping now.”
The idea, she says, is to find “wriggle room” in the budget through changes that can be sustained. Continuing to buy her fruit and veges through the co-op was one of many small steps to freedom from debt.
Nonu didn’t go back to nursing. As she got on top of her debt and the stress reduced, she started working a few hours a week for Wesley. Now, she’s the local economic co-ordinator, overseeing Good Cents, a time bank, assisting others and building local networks.
She saves money these days, through the Porirua Wealth Pool. It’s made up of 29 locals who put aside whatever they choose into a shared bank account. They collectively save about $6000 a month. Members also help one another out by lending to each other interest-free from the pool, provided saving continues while the loan is paid down.
Not only is Nonu no longer “spinning”; she’s thriving. “Over the last two or three years we have really developed,” she says of her family. The children “were happy to see me with a bit more money. My 18-year-old has done Good Cents now. She’s working full time and is in the savings pool.” There’s just her and her youngest son at home now, and nowadays they can afford to go out for a treat occasionally.
“It’s about constantly growing capacity and capability in our community – supporting them to do it themselves,” says Nonu’s colleague at Wesley Community Action, Makerita Makapelu, who is team leader at Cannons Creek. Instead of wealth, resources and energy being drained out of the community through debt and stress, the goal is to keep them and build them.
“Our mission is to help people see themselves in a different way. They’re not poor – well they are, in terms of money – but here are resources within themselves that they can build on, and allow them to take more control of their own lives. When they are in Good Cents, they measure their changes all the way through so that they can prove to themselves that, ‘hey, I can do it’.”
