Speak Up - KōrerotiaMaking a difference

16 August 2017

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female

Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Welcome to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia.” My name is Sally Carlton, based here in Christchurch. Today we’re going to be talking about what motivates people to make a difference. This is a pretty massive question and I’m really looking forward to getting into it.

It turns out this show is airing just a few days before World Humanitarian Day, which is a reminder on the need to act to alleviate the suffering of people around the world. It’s also a bit of a recognition of the importance of volunteers and volunteering so it’s quite timely that the show is airing about now.

I’d like to introduce our guests: We’ve got Billy O’Steen from the University of Canterbury, Sarah Campagnolo who has many hats including at the moment Gap Filler, Jason Pemberton who also has a number of hats - and you can tell us about them later - and Teoti Jardine.

Now, to give us a little bit more insight into why you’re taking part, it would be fantastic to hear from you and a little bit about your background and what it is you’re going to be bringing to the conversation. Billy, how about we start with you?

Billy Thanks very much. So, as Sally said, I teach at the University of Canterbury and my main position is I’m the Director of Community Engagement and that position I largely have Jason Pemberton to thank for because it is a follow-on to the fantastic work that the Student Volunteer Army did back in 2011. And this idea about making a difference is particularly of interest to me because our university states as its mission that we are “preparing people to make a difference” and that mission statement was created before the earthquakes and I would argue that it

had very little relevance or meaning to most of us who work there and then the earthquakes and the Student Volunteer Army gave us a lot more purchase with that statement and vision statement. I’ve been doing some research over the past six months into this notion about ‘making a difference’ and can share a bit about that later on.

Sally Looking forward to it.

Teoti Kia ora Sally, Teoti Jardine is my name. I whakapapa through my mother’s side of the whānau to Waitaha, Kāti Mamoe, Kāi Tahu iwi, and I sit on the Conservation Board as an iwi representative and I’m involved with the Avon-Ōtākaro Network and also with Volunteering Canterbury. A lot of the things I’ve done in my life have been ‘volunteering’ although I’ve never actually thought of them as being volunteering so I’m kind of interested in how people do their work and sometimes not even know that they’re actually being a volunteer, they just come along and get stuck in.

Sally I think that’s a very, very critical point, actually, and I’m sure we’ll be thinking about that more.

Sarah Kia ora I’m Sarah Campagnolo. I am currently the Chair of Volunteering Canterbury and Volunteer Coordinator at Gap Filler; previously I was running Greening the Rubble, as well. I’ve also been involved with all sorts of activism and volunteering since I left high school basically and really interested in the term ‘making a difference.’ A lot of what I’ve come across in all sorts of walks of life is how many people want to make a difference and I guess I’m really interested in why people do and also the volunteering perspective and that people don’t often acknowledge what they’re doing is volunteering and I’ve had to convince people before that they are a volunteer in the common definition of it. That’s my background.

Jason Kia ora, I’m Jason Pemberton. So Sarah and I used to work together and Billy was on our Board and I’ve done a lot of volunteer initiatives with Teoti so it’s kind of nice to be all together again. Like Billy said, I was involved with the Student Volunteer Army when it was founded and stayed around there for about three years and then popped out the other side and was really interested in that notion of ‘making a difference’ and how we can put something a bit more important than money in front of us at all times. I’ve been on a bit of a journey looking at how we can make the best use of ourselves in a way that supports other people to make the best use of themselves so I’m really interested in things like organisation design and governance and instruments and frameworks for articulating our intent and all of those sorts of nerdy terms. I think this is a really cool topic to be chewing on and some really cool people to be doing it with; so glad to be here.

Sally Excellent. Well I guess my first question to you is: What do we mean if we say ‘making a difference’? Is it volunteering? Is it activism? Sarah, you touched on that term as well. Any thoughts? It might help us to get into the conversation.

Teoti I think my first sense of trying to make a difference was years ago when I was travelling and living in Montreal and became involved with the peace movement and that was the first time that I felt like I needed to step aside of my normal life frame and participate in something that I felt really strongly about. That was my first taste of feeling as if I can make a difference and whether we did or not isn’t... I don’t know if you can measure what happened in all of those things that we were involved with but I’ll tell you it felt good to be feeling as if I might make a difference and I think that’s the thing.

Billy What led you to do that? What were the key moments in your life that when you had this moment of truth of when you decided to do something?

Teoti This was the atmosphere of the city at the time, Montreal in the ‘60s, taking in draft resistance people from the States, working through the McGill University who was setting up the whole peace programme and also from years ago my great-uncle telling me about landing at Gallipoli and I swore there and then I’d never pick up a gun for anyone - that morning when he told me that story I became a pacifist. And so here was I in a situation where just down in the States people were being… young men were being drafted and sent off to the ridiculous war that they’d got themselves into so it did come as a natural evolvement of where I was sitting and suddenly here was an opportunity to be able to do something.

Billy Because, in the folks that I’ve been interviewing who have made a difference, I’ve come up with a framework of three components essentially and you’ve just described them really well. So one is that there is some sense of preparation so that you are capable of taking the opportunity when it comes to do something about it; so there’s preparation, so it sounds like you were prepared. There’s an opportunity that you are ready to step into and engage with. But then the most important piece is the third piece that people have told me sort of across the different fields and different sectors and it’s a notion of purpose. So what you’ve just described about your uncle, that gave you the purpose that then put you in a position to do something about it.

Jason That’s a really cool thing to parallel. A lot of the work I’m doing at the moment is in the social enterprise world - we’ve got the Social Enterprise World Forum coming here - and we talk about the difference between an organisation’s footprint and an organisation’s handprint. So everyone is familiar with the term ‘footprint’ and I think you can essentially draw a line between footprints and handprints and say well that’s corporate social responsibility movement and this is the purpose-led movement and I think that’s a really interesting parallel there. It’s very easy and should be the norm for us to be minimising the footprints and a lot of people are about that but what we’re seeing now is a whole wave of people trying to maximise their handprints.

Sarah I’m part of a movement and I’m really interested in statistics - my dad is a

math teacher and I’m a math person - so I’m really interested in effective altruism and what actually works because so many people and it’s come across… like worked in a lot of corporate backgrounds who… and they’re like, “I want to make a difference” but to me they’re driving big massive cars, they’re doing all this sort of stuff and they don’t volunteer and I’m like. “What makes you think you’re going to make a difference and how can you measure that?” That’s what I’m really interested in: How can I measure what difference I’m making, what impact I have? And I think that’s really for me, that’s what motivates me in a lot of the decisions I make is that there are so many options to do and what actually works and what’s actually working?

Billy We’ve found some lessons in ancient texts, if you will, and so one piece that we use with students who are doing community engagement work - which is different volunteering, so community engagement or service learning is volunteering as an activity but then it’s placed within the context of critique and critical thinking within a university setting - and one of the best pieces that we found in terms of “Here are all these options and how do I evaluate what to do?” comes from the Torah, so the ancient Jewish text. And the Torah has a section in it where its super-specific about: Here are eight ways that you can help somebody and here’s how they are ranged from one to eight and it’s fascinating because when you push people into ranking isn’t all helping good helping, isn’t all volunteering good helping? No it’s not. And if you’ve got these eight options in front of you: here’s what you should do first off, second, third, fourth, fifth… So it’s a different notion about evaluating than what we’re used to doing with adding up hours or economic impact or various other things.

Sarah I think Rabbit Proof Fence to me is one of the biggest things. If you look at that guy that’s considered the evil character, he’s making a difference and that’s his intention is to make their lives better but he’s doing horrible things and so I always have that at the back of my head when I’m trying to think, “Am I making a difference or am I just making myself feel good by trying to do something?”

Billy Exactly. And it’s interesting putting that value statement on it because that’s one of the challenges that we’ve had with this as our mission statement at Canterbury: “People prepared to make a difference.” Well, we’re not saying what kind of difference they’re prepared to make; we could be preparing people to be the next tyrant or evil person and they’ll still be prepared to make a difference so how do we attach value to that and whose value?

Jason And also just because we’re prepared doesn’t mean we’re necessarily going to do it.

Billy Absolutely, that’s right. So it seems like, well, there’s no argument with a phrase like that but once you unpack it a little bit it actually can be quite problematic.

Sally So many questions! OK well we might have the first song and Billy, you chose for us Kenny Chesney ‘This Is Our Moment.’ Were there any reasons for that?

Billy A couple of reasons. So Kenny Chesney is… Last year, he was the second highest gross profit in terms of touring in the United States, country music star. He is from my home town and he and I are very short in stature and we played football against each other in high school but knowing how our size was then and is now we actually didn’t… You know, we were probably on the side lines looking at each other and this song in particular is about… It’s his reflection, I think, about what it feels like to perform in front of 80,000 people so saying ‘this is our moment’ but for me: What is your moment, as in a moment of truth? So when you’re faced with something - and I’ll use Jason and his buddies as an example - they were faced with the question about what they were going to do with their time when classes were cancelled and they chose to spend their time going out to Halswell and to Bromley and Bexley and various places. So it’s what do you decide to do when all the stuff is in front of you in terms of a moment.

Sally Great, well thank you for the choice.

MUSIC BY KENNY CHESNEY – THIS IS OUR MOMENTSally Nau mai haere mai, welcome back to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”. We’re

talking about ‘making a difference’ and in this section in particular we are keen to focus on how do we measure it? We’ve touched on the Torah and those eight suggestions; we’ve touched on, Sarah, what you were talking about with how do you even begin to talk about it in a positive thing, you can potentially make a difference in a negative way, those sorts of big issues - and Jason, I know you’re really interested in measurements as well - so I’m sure we’ve got lots to say in this segment. I’ll open it up with: How can we measure ‘making a difference’?

Sarah From a volunteering perspective, there’s the real basic things like how many hours, tasks achieved and things like that. There’s Volunteering New Zealand who have just started making sure that they do those sorts of measurements every year and also talking to the charities themselves about what volunteers do for them. They don’t show the whole picture obviously, we can talk about hours and volunteering… We can talk about how much money: If we paid our volunteers minimum wage, how much money would that contribute to the economy? and things like that so it’s all very useful but for me it’s like, does it make a difference? What is the end goal and who does it affect? How much does that matter if we affect one person; is that enough? Things like that.

Jason I think it’s a really fascinating thing to think about relative to purpose or intent because if you take - this will be, like, an obscure metaphor - but if you think about something like throwing a rock into a pond and you say what was the impact of that? Well you could say it’s the displacement of the water, how much the water is lifted or how many waves were created or how far the waves went out or how tall the waves were or how high the

water splashed when the rock hit. You can measure just about anything but it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what’s important to you and I think that’s a really interesting thing that a lot of people don’t think about before they’re trying to make a ‘difference.’ It’s, what are you actually trying to achieve and what’s the measure of success?

I’m glad to hear you mention the effect of altruism movement; I think that’s a really interesting space. I actually just applied for a fellowship, effect of altruism fellowship three days ago. I think social enterprise is really tossing some of this stuff up into the air in New Zealand because you look at something like the Sustainable Development Goals or any of the global frameworks, the UN frameworks that New Zealand has signed up for, and you could argue that any one of those are about making a difference and then you look at the Charities Act in New Zealand and if you’re going to get charitable status in New Zealand you’ve got to line up with one of the four benefits in the Charities Act and there’s a whole lot of other stuff that sits in these global frameworks that doesn’t sit in those four benefits. And so it’s really interesting to think about that: Well, what do we mean in New Zealand by ‘make a difference’? By the letter of the law it’s quite specific but at a personal level I think we’d all point to things a bit bigger than just a list of four benefits.

Sarah Yes and they’re based on England’s Charity Act that came around in the 1800s and it’s still the same, those same four purposes. We live in a very different society from when those four were created, as well, which I think is quite interesting.

Jason Totally. So I think it’s going to be interesting to see where and how those sorts of things evolve and when we know that there are new ways that you can organise yourself. We know that a lot of the challenges that we’re facing don’t respect national boundaries, so why should the solutions have to respect national boundaries? I think those are the sorts of things that we’re going to start having to chew on as a society and New Zealand really could be a leader in that space.

Billy And I think you’re raising a couple of points there, one of which is around the notion of knowing what kind of difference you’re trying to make or trying to impact or achieve and then in some ways that should backward design you back to the point at which somebody decides to volunteer because in a sense - and I can draw on the Torah again but then various other things - in a sense, we’re not just wanting people to just go volunteer or just make a difference, we actually probably want to qualify that difference into positive or impactful or something like that and in order to do that that requires a bit more training and preparation and a different outlook than just simply saying all comers sign up, we’ll go volunteer, we’ll go paint this fence or we’ll go dig a garden or do whatever. If you really want there to be a difference to be made, you have to know what that is and then build that into your process earlier on.

Sarah Struggled a lot of that, I was always told it’s just the way it is, there’s

nothing you can do and so when I started volunteering it’s like well actually… My first volunteering was at Trade Aid doing fair trade and there’s a measureable impact on communities who have a fair trade system in place and so for me volunteering is that first step of being you actually can make a difference rather than… It’s kind of the first step in the idea that they can make a difference and then they need to think about what they want to do and all that sort of stuff.

Sally I think it might be a good time to go back to the point you raised, Teoti, which is how do people even recognise if they’re volunteering and if they’re not necessarily recognising that they are volunteering or making a difference does that still ‘count’?

Teoti I’m thinking about some of the things that I’ve done that I wouldn’t consider being volunteering but there was a purpose that drew this particular group of people together and then we were committed to the purpose. I’m not sure though how we measure, Did that make a difference?

There is some outcomes sometimes and you think that was a lot of effort and we did do something or did that just bounce off something and going back to the ‘60s I had friends who were pacifists who were so concerned by what it was they were opposing that that ate them up. They were learning to make bombs, they moved from being a pacifist to becoming exactly what they were opposing and to me that was a real warning that we’ve got to be careful about this, if that so-called enemy is such a focus that we become like it, then we’ve fallen into the trap of behaving exactly the way… And that became quite obvious later in the ‘60s, that we were behaving the way the establishment wanted us to behave so then they could point the finger and say, “Look at this.” A lot of learning went on during this particular time but I’m not sure about how do we measure what a difference is.

I’m with a group at the moment and basically we are setting up a partnership with the City Council to ensure that biodiversity runs through everything that they do - not just because its parks or recreation but its everything - whatever is happening, whatever the council is involved with they’ve got biodiversity in their face at some level. So I suppose if that happens then we can feel like, yes we did make a difference.

I think it’s kind of interesting thing because we also need to talk about what difference has it made to me? What happened to me when I was involved in this? I think that’s worth thinking about. What is it that the individual brings to a situation and how has that changed? I don’t know what I’m trying to say but I think there’s measuring differences on many levels rather than is it just the outcome. What happened to me when I was doing this? All of those things need to be weighed up, don’t they, if you’re going to look at what was the difference that happened?

Billy Yes because you can look at it in a very clinical quantitative way and say X number of people devoted this number of hours to this cause and it would

have cost this much money but what you’re describing is much harder to capture both in the moment because a lot of these experiences that we might have in being volunteers or being activists or whatever, the actual payoff in the transformation for us may come way further down the road and so we have to acknowledge that there are benefits or side products/by-products of these engagements that we may not be able to get a hold of.

Teoti And you’ve just reminded me of a lot of… In te ao Māori we just do things, if there’s a tangi we turn up at the marae, we feed everyone and when we’re looking out from the kitchen and everyone is sitting down having a great feed we go, yes we’ve done it. There’s that simple kind of yes we have made a difference; we’ve fed all these people.

Sally That’s also one of my questions, I guess, is I don’t imagine that people see that as volunteering or necessarily even making a difference; it’s just something that is done.

Teoti No, we can manaakitanga - taking care of - and we just do that and no-one would even imagine to think of themselves as being a volunteer. There’s a need; we’re filling the need.

Billy That’s right and I looked into cultural differences with regard to volunteering in New Zealand and found that there was no directly translatable word for ‘volunteer’ into Māori and it’s because exactly what you just described, they don’t really view it that way because it’s just how you carry on, it’s how you do things. And in the stats of volunteers in New Zealand, I think 90% of people who identify as having Māori heritage ‘volunteer’ and most of that is done with the marae, local iwi etc. but it’s not viewed as volunteering.

Teoti And on the statistics we saw at Volunteering Canterbury - and there’s a little box about this little compared to the other ethnicities who volunteer and Māori it looked like… When you look at that you think, Oh Māori don’t volunteer because we’re busy doing it.

Jason Too busy doing it to talk about it.

Sarah I think volunteering as a term and as a concept is quite a western thing and I think it is partly because there’s that break between we all do… We have our individual family units, individual units versus a lot of other cultures and societies even when they’ve ‘modernised’ are still very community- and extended family-based and things like that and so they support their family that way. Where we have segmented everything with our hospitals and everything like that is separate so we need volunteers to keep going. But I think in a lot of other cultures in countries there’s not quite that need because it’s just done as part of community life.

Billy That’s right and it was interesting when we were setting up this course right after the 2011 earthquakes and the motivation to set up the course was to give the Student Volunteer Army members a place to reflect on their service and to do it within an academic setting and we consulted with these

guys a lot on how would a course like this look, what’s legitimate to you - we don’t want to co-op what you’ve done, we want to celebrate it - and we initially had a bit of pushback from Jason and his colleagues because they didn’t want it to appear that they had volunteered to get course credit and they were keeping things a bit more in a box: That’s what we did over there; we didn’t intend to do that as students of the university, we did that just as concerned citizens.

Jason As humans.

Billy Exactly. So there was a resistance to merge the two things of academia and volunteering.

Jason And that’s where I think that the community engagement or a service learning movement is really valuable but when you’re making students volunteer because they have to get so many hours… The intent gets a bit lost, it feels like it defeats the purpose but I haven’t figured out… Sure, you haven’t figured out how to reconcile that.

Billy No.

Sarah I’m kind of the volunteering… We’ve done… Teoti is laughing because we were very strict and we did the session, two-hour session and right at the end of it we were like it’s all volunteering, everything, it’s all OK but I don’t know… A few studies came out of the States in the ‘70s I think - my memory is a bit vague - about people who were forced to volunteer as part of course credit and they ended up being lifelong volunteers and having a lot more instance of activism, making a difference, thinking about what their impact is than people who weren’t forced to volunteer at university and so while the intent kind of can be a bit messy I think sometimes the impact is the same long term.

Sally Interesting. OK well it’s time for our next song. Teoti, you’ve chosen for us Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now.’

Teoti That came to me when I read your email properly and thought, Oh this is an opportunity and that song just came to me and it’s all about life’s illusions… What is that line? “I don’t know life” or basically or I know the illusion of it and to me that’s where we sit in ourselves, that’s how I… I mean, I sit in the world and I’ve studied esoteric things, been part of a school that I’m going to advertise now, the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education where we were reading this 13th century mystic’s work who just began with “There is only God…” and then we’re going how the hell do we fit into this? What is this? But it was really statements about the unity of all existence and those same statements that my tupuna, that was their work too, that’s what they knew and I feel like I get a taste of that but most of what I see in the world is the illusion of the world, the essence is kind of hidden and that’s the mystery. I think that’s the thing that as human beings we’re asked to explore. So to me, that’s always a kind of tantalising place and I think Joni gathers that up with this song… And that was

waffling on a bit!

Sally Awesome.

MUSIC BY JONI MITCHELL – BOTH SIDES NOWSally You’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” 96.9, we’re talking about

making a difference today and we’ve touched on it already but we’re going to think more about who makes a difference - we’ve talked a little bit about cultural differences - and then I think we’ll finish up with how do we encourage people to get on board with this.

Just to start the conversation flowing again: We’ve talked about statistics and various statistics being captured - Teoti mentioned that in terms of the statistics, it doesn’t look like Māori volunteer much at all - do we get the sense from the statistics other than just ethnicity also say gender, age differences, those sorts of things, who volunteers? Who makes a difference?

Sarah Well in regards to volunteering: I know sport is a big one - especially dads and guys do it - but they don’t see it as volunteering and I think that often can reflect in the statistics when you’ve got lower male volunteers. But I know that we often get requests to how can we get more male volunteers? especially in mentoring roles and things like that. So I think males do volunteer but in different forms so more in sport and things like that. But again, how that volunteering reflects making a difference, I don’t know but I can talk to the statistics around that and the experiences we have.

Jason I think one area that I’ve been surprised with in regard to volunteer turnout has been with school boards of trustees. So in the last cycle… The way school boards of trustees work is that parents in the resident community put their hand up, nominate themselves, somebody nominates them and then there is an election and the terms are three years and in the last election cycle less than half of schools in New Zealand had elections and that is because either the same number of people as spaces available ran or fewer people ran than spaces. And it breaks down in terms of school deciles, so decile 6 through 10 tend to have elections, deciles 1 to 5 tend to have whoever put their hand up and they get a spot. And for me that’s a really interesting problem to try to resolve because that is democracy at its most local level and you would think at its most impactful level - I mean, we’re talking about people’s kids and what they presumably would be concerned about - so for me that particular segment with regard to volunteering is one that I’d like to figure out how to get more people to put their hand up, to show up to be a board of trustee member.

Sarah I wonder if it’s partly around empowerment and people valuing their voice or feeling like if they did turn up that it would actually be worthwhile.

Jason And feeling like they may not have the skills to do it, when in fact you need basic meeting skills, how do you work well with other people, how do you present your ideas, how do you listen, that kind of stuff.

Sarah But also I think working parents, it’s much harder come that with volunteering, by the time you have children, have a job and a lot of families need two fulltime incomes to make it work these days… Yeah… Do they have time for a board? and things like that as well.

Jason I think to me, that speaks of the importance of preparing people and training them almost to be good volunteers because of the overreliance, I think, of New Zealand on essential services to be staffed by volunteers - so the fire brigade, surf lifesaving, school boards of trustees, the jury system. And in some ways we’ve got a key competency in the curriculum for participating and contributing but it’s not measured in many places. Numeracy and literacy is measured, but this other notion about being a contributing member of society is not measured as much, if at all.

Sarah Some schools tick off the hours but like you say you don’t know… If the teacher doesn’t know what they’re doing it just like OK well let’s go pick up some rubbish which is very important but don’t know how much reflection they’ve had and how much they understand that and know what they’re doing, what impact and all that sort of stuff.

Billy If it’s not sort of fostering a moral imperative, what’s the real value?

Sally Does it make a difference… Ha, make a difference - that might be the wrong terminology in this context! - but does it make a difference… We all know the earthquakes, for example, were such a key motivating driving factor; does it make a difference having that sort of event or moment? And Billy, this might work in your framework that you touched on.

Billy Absolutely, it absolutely does. I mean, post-2012 - and Jason worked quite hard on this - we at the Student Volunteer Army Foundation had a passion and a purpose and a motivation to try to get Student Volunteer Army clubs set up at other universities around the country and we utterly failed at getting any of them to take hold and we came to the conclusion that no matter how good an example these guys set and how we could create manuals and ways to do it, if you didn’t have a precipitating event it wasn’t going to happen.

And that’s an interesting challenge and the American philosopher William James posed that problem around the moral equivalent of war: How do we get people as fired up, as passionate, as innovative, as full of comradeship and wanting to go defeat something and make it so that it’s not a war? And he came up with the answer that there is no moral equivalent of war; it achieves certain things that we have trouble doing in peacetime.

Jason I’ve never heard about that before but that’s a really interesting thing to think about because my mind immediately jumps to well it’s the sense of urgency and the awareness of the problem. And we know that - let’s just say, current populations are a lot more aware of the world’s problems than previous populations, we’re more connected and all those sorts of things,

and the result is that we’ve got higher mental health decline, a whole bunch of negative stats on all of us and I think that’s maybe we’ve got the huge compelling problems but we don’t have the sense of urgency that’s presented by…

Billy They’re not in your face; they’re not on the doorstep.

Jason Exactly and in a sense they kind of are. You go up to South Brighton and let’s talk about sea level rise, it’s right there but it’s not tangible and doesn’t have the same urgency that a war or earthquake does.

Sarah I think also there’s a time factor there. Like the students, they had their classes cancelled. I was in Auckland but my partner, he had one day off in the earthquake, he didn’t have power or water for weeks, months I think and I moved in with him and we didn’t have sewage for nine months but we had to go to work every day and things like that.

Billy Time is huge.

Sarah Time is huge and part of that is actually some people it’s keeping the economy going and working and raising children and stuff like that. I think when you’ve got everyday things they can easily get on top of you and when you have spare time you’re just like “Ahhh.” One thing I found interesting is when we were looking at volunteering stats it’s like we’re not competing against other volunteer organisations to get volunteers, generally we’re competing against leisure time and so how do we make volunteering leisure time which I think a lot of people have worked on - and Volunteer Army definitely did some stuff around that when I was there - but it’s that idea of leisure time versus volunteering and how can we combine them more in everyday life as well.

Sally You’ve touched on getting people into volunteering, have you seen that recruitment drives or publicity drives like Volunteer Week, we just talked about World Humanitarian Day, those sorts of events that can acknowledge what people are doing - Does that make a difference at all in terms of encouraging people to get into it?

Sarah I don’t know, I haven’t seen any stats on that. I do know that from the VNZ State of Volunteering in New Zealand thing that they put out, they kind of said that recruitment was a problem for around 70% of organisations but retainment wasn’t. 80% of people have no problems retaining volunteers, it’s recruiting them. So I think, to me, it’s like that first step of how can you get a volunteer on the track and then once you’ve got them it’s not that hard to keep them.

Billy That comes back to your forced volunteering results. So once you get somebody, then it’s more likely that they’re going to stick around to do this but it’s a matter of getting them. We’ve had success with The Concert with getting several thousand people volunteering who otherwise wouldn’t have done it, we’ve had success with Serve for NZ, again getting several

thousand people to volunteer when they otherwise wouldn’t. But those are one-offs and we never really had follow-ups after either of those.

Sarah And I wonder how many times somebody has to volunteer before they’re addicted.

Billy That’s a really good question.

Jason I really like drawing on the vocabulary thing; You have to come across a word seven times before it enters your vocabulary and I wonder how that principle applies to other things.

Sarah It would be interesting to know if we could force people to volunteer, trick them, bribe them, whatever we need to do, how many times do we need to do it before they’re like, “OK I’m going to do this on my own volition” sort of thing.

Teoti And at Volunteering Canterbury we have talked about the image of volunteering so that needs to change somehow because it’s, “Oh you have to be retired” or it didn’t have a good image, did it? So we need to explore how we can sell that.

Sally That comes back to that demographic again, I think: Who is it that has the time, who can afford the time, to volunteer - and often people think about being retired or middle class; class is another one.

Sarah Definitely. Also, how can people do it from home? Part of a lot of parenting Facebook groups - a lot of people who run those wouldn’t consider themselves volunteers - but they offer huge amounts of support and information and stuff like that and they’re mostly mothers, stay-at-home mums who run them and I run one as well. But it’s quite interesting, I haven’t seen any research or studies on the impact of Facebook groups and Facebook support groups and things like that and volunteering and if once they go back to work or things like that how much it impacts their choices or their choice to volunteer afterwards or if they move into other forms of community building, I guess is probably the term.

Billy Deloitte has a programme called micro-volunteering and so employees at Deloitte are given a certain amount of time per day off and it’s 20 minutes or 50 minutes or whatever it is to devote to this and they then remotely contribute to somebody’s strategic plan, somebody’s consulting plan, somebody’s accounting, whatever it might be but they do it in little chunks of time and so they may never come face-to-face with the group or the person they’re benefiting but they’re able to do it on their own time in these little micro-chunks which is a pretty cool way. It’s kind of what you’re describing: How to volunteer without being somewhere.

Sarah Yeah and I think that’s a really important part of how we need to change our society a little bit or change how we volunteer or change how we can get organisations to work in with that and that’s part of what I’m doing at

Gap Filler is creating systems to help those volunteers. Because a lot of the time, staff who manage volunteers will work in an organisation, they don’t have the time to engage with the way volunteers need to. And again going back to the stats: something like only 30% of volunteers actually reduce the cost of running the business for the volunteer site so most of the time when you’re volunteering, you’re costing the organisation but you’re making a difference, you’re helping the organisation and it’s definitely a part of organisational goals it’s just it’s not necessarily a time saving thing. So how can we set up some systems that… Small charities especially can just log into and they don’t have to develop a whole new set of skills just to do some part, they can actually hook into something else like the Deloitte thing and get some skills, get some volunteers helping them but not have to… They have to invest more time and money to train than they’d probably get out of it in the short term anyway.

Jason We’re pretty much talking about the changing nature of work.

Sarah Yes and work in general, that’s true.

Jason I’ve got a friend, Huia, who is an excellent, excellent connector and so many amazing things have happened because she’s met somebody and said, “Oh you need to talk to Billy” or, “You need to talk to Sarah” and they’ve gone off and done great things together and we’ve spoken at length about that and she’s kind of like, “Well that’s what I do.” There’s no way to monetise it or anything like that, it’s a hugely valuable thing but it’s just a different sort of work that she does which she currently does voluntarily.

I’m really interested - and this is a very separate conversation - but we look at things like the emergence of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and micro contracts and some of those sorts of things and how they can enable us to do micro-tasks and account for them in some way or another. That doesn’t feel like volunteering or making a difference but it absolutely is, it might take a tiny little introduction to fundamentally turn something into this amazing.

Sarah I guess if we’re measuring making a difference rather than volunteering, those sorts of tasks like what Huia does probably wouldn’t measure as volunteering but in regards to making a difference, yeah she’s making a huge difference.

Jason And it might only do maximum of 20 minutes a day or week.

Sarah But just knowing people, having that in your brain you need to talk to each other.

Jason Seeing a web of things. I really like thinking about the difference between mince and chilli con carne, it’s just a tiny little bit of chilli. If you didn’t have the chilli it would be a fundamentally different thing but add the chilli…

Sarah It’s a fancy meal!

Sally One question that might be good to ponder, just as we’re finishing up, is: How do we, as people interested in discussing this issue, suggest that people decide where to devote their energies if they’ve got limited time, if they’ve got limited resources? What advice can we give in terms of effectively maximising that time and making the choice about where they want to put their resources?

Teoti I’d like to say that it needs to come from a place where that person has an interest. If there’s an interest there, then there’s no problem rather than taking on something as an obligation, that’s not the place to go even though that can be volunteering. But I think work on that interest, follow whatever it might be and just follow that up and there will be people who connect you and who will connect with you and before you know it you’ll be doing something and you’ll actually be volunteering but you won’t even know it.

Sarah That would be my advice: Start somewhere in what you’re interested in and then start looking at the impacts it has as you go. But start first and then look and it might be that actually what you do you realise doesn’t have the impact you want it to do but you’re going to learn skills and you’re going to get experiences there and you’re going to get that positive feedback that will help you move onto your next thing. And so I’d say: Start! Just do something, whether it’s micro-volunteering, volunteering or changing a lifestyle habit that has an impact, whatever is important to you and then start looking at the stats and research and things like that and then go from there but don’t wait until you have the answer because you’ll be on your deathbed before you do probably.

Billy I think this kind of work affords you the opportunity to pursue your passion if your regular day job doesn’t so it could give you a real… To bridge off what both of you guys have said, it’s really the place to pursue your passion and there are far more ways to pursue your passion in a volunteering sphere or making a difference than there are probably with paying jobs so it gives you an opportunity to do good while you’re doing well in your other position, your other job.

Sally Any final key learnings, words of advice, concluding remarks? I also wonder, Teoti, if there’s a whakataukī which ties in these sorts of ideas we’ve been talking about?

Teoti There’s one from Kāi Tahu which is “Aroha ki ngā tāngata.” Often ‘aroha’ is translated as ‘love’ but it’s more than that, it’s around manaaki, taking care of and basically that’s one of our tribal sayings is “Take care of everyone” and if we’re doing that… We do that in many ways. And I think that’s my final sentiment: “Aroha ki ngā tāngata.”

Sally Anything else you’d like to add?

Jason I really like what you’ve just said, Teoti, and I think it’s important to extend

that to oneself as well. There are a lot of people trying to do good and make a difference at their own expense which is just hugely counterproductive; so do less would probably be my thing.

Sally I think you need to take your own advice!

Jason Correct. Do as I say not as I do. But you know, there are a lot of people like, “Oh I’m just going to do some good over here” and over-extending and it actually causes more harm in the long run than good.

Sarah And impact. If you’re spreading yourself too thin you’re not impacting anything; I’m a very big believer in that. I spread myself too thin, I’m always looking at something new and then actually if you spend some time doing something you’re going to make a bigger difference than if you try and do everything a tiny bit.

Teoti Kia ora.

Sally OK well I’d like to say thank you very much for coming in and discussing what is a massive topic and I’m sure we could have kept on chatting for ages but hopefully this will at least give our listeners some sort of sense of empowerment, some kind of drive. If you’re not already volunteering or getting out there, why not give it a go?

Sarah Yes, you can jump on the Volunteering Canterbury website (http://www.volcan.org.nz/) of course.