Meet the good sorts who give a lot

He was a city boy. He said so himself. This farm was something well outside his experience and maybe comfort zone.

On his fifth visit, he and his buddy for the session Rachel Ralph were doing some work with one of the farm’s ponies, Geronimo. They got partway up the back and he asked if they could check out some rabbit holes. Fidget the jack russell was with them and needed no encouragement to start digging. After a while the boy cautiously started helping scrape dirt from a hole as well.

Soon he asked Ralph if he could reach into a hole. It’s your initiative, if you want to do that, go right ahead, she said.

So he put his arm in. He couldn’t feel any rabbits, but came away with the front of his clean shirt covered in dirt. On the way back, he proudly proclaimed: “This city boy is now a farm boy.”

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Ralph, telling the story, laughs at the memory – it is exactly the kind of experience she wants at-risk youngsters to have at the farm she established 10 years ago. Hope Rising Farm helps youth by partnering them with ponies, donkeys and horses. They might start by leading the animal, they might end by riding, but the point is along the way they have been put in a leadership position and gained confidence.

The farm takes youngsters who may have no perception about changing seasons, who don’t know north from south, Ralph says. It’s about helping them reframe things, get a taste of the world around them.

For Ralph, this is a labour of love. She works as a volunteer on the farm, which also has four paid staff. Her commitment was recognised when she was named Volunteer of the Year last month in the annual awards run by Volunteering Waikato.

She is one of thousands in the region giving freely of their time. They are also gaining – volunteering is good for wellbeing, says Volunteering Waikato regional adviser Chris Atkinson. “People are engaged, they’re connected, they’re still learning. They’re physically active, they’re given a sense of purpose.”

But times are changing, and numbers have been dropping. People are increasingly time poor, Atkinson says, and the lifecycle of a volunteer is shorter than it used to be. The generation of the “dutiful volunteer” is disappearing, she says.

Those challenges are not evident at Ralph’s wellbeing farm, which got its start after she and her husband had been fostering children, and realised the suburban youngsters often knew nothing of the outdoors life. She says it was a case of joining some dots. Could they get some land where kids could hang out together, learn some skills? Learn that mud washes off, even?

They found some near Ngāruawāhia and leased it for 10 years before investors enabled them to buy their current property nearby. Up to 40 volunteers helped with the recently completed shift, including refurbishing the barn, and they are about to get cranking again on the roughly 10ha rolling block. Last year they were working with up to 30 vulnerable youngsters weekly on their subsidised programmes, and the barn at the new place means they can take more in winter.

They have also started working with women, including some leaving prison. One had been inside for 23 years. She made some stupid decisions when she was a teenager, Ralph says. Now she wanted to make good decisions. She wanted to feel the grass between her toes. “She grew up on a farm and wanted to reconnect with horses, which she’d also had some exposure to. And the whole time we were doing our ‘this is what we are, this is what we do, this is what to expect’ she was just sitting there just stroking this pony, you know, who was in heaven.”

It was a compelling moment for Ralph and the staff.

“We all need a second chance, third chance, fourth chance.”

She stops to consider. “Fourth I think.” She laughs.

“We blame the government for so much. In reality the issues that we’ve got with the kids in our targeted area, Ngāruawāhia, Huntly and Taupiri, I believe is a community problem. And if people got a wriggle on and volunteered, then, you know, we can’t save everybody, but we can make a difference. Which is why I love working with the women, because if you change one woman, you can change a family. If you can change a family, you can change a community.”

It takes time, adds Ralph, whose parents are the late philanthropists Bunny and John Mortimer, founders of Taitua Arboretum.

Winning the award was an honour, and it was fun for the team to dress up in their glad rags, Ralph says. It was also an opportunity for an organisation constantly on the funding treadmill. “I’d like it to work for something. So exposure, marketing, money, funding, whatever.”

Hope Rising Farm’s endless search for funding is all too typical. A 2019 report suggests the Government funds contracted social service providers for less than two-thirds of the cost of delivery, estimating total underfunding at $630 million annually.

Among other things, that sees volunteer-based organisations in an endless chase for funds, with the holy grail being to score a three-year grant, rather than the more usual hand-to-mouth annual grant.

Despite that, volunteering is huge, contributing $4 billion to the economy in 2018.

It has also been in decline. According to Census data, there were just over a million so-called formal volunteers with established New Zealand organisations in 2018. That was down from 1.2 million in 2013.

Volunteering NZ chief executive Michelle Kitney says the number of hours volunteered in 2018 was similar to 2013, meaning fewer people were on average doing more hours.

“How people want to engage in volunteering is changing. As younger generations come through, people and lifestyles have changed, people want to commit less time and maybe in shorter bursts,” she says. “But I think the thing that underpins it from a trend point of view is probably an ageing volunteer workforce in those organisations.”

But New Zealand is an over-achiever when it comes to volunteering, heading a 2014 OECD table. Think old-fashioned working bee. “It’s ingrained in many of us, I think, to give a hand to help others, to do it for our communities, to do it for our future generations.”

Among the volunteer ranks is Tim Wang, who joined his wife and daughter from Beijing last year. He had a career in graphic design and marketing, but little English. A year later, he is enjoying the relaxed Kiwi lifestyle in Hamilton and his language skills are greatly improved.

Wang has been drawing on his background to volunteer for the Refugee Orientation Centre (Roc), coming up with a simplified new logo and branding, and designing the annual report. He has taken a two-month break for his language studies, but is returning this week to further develop their marketing material.

Improving his English is important if he is to make a living. “If I want to live in New Zealand, I need to find a job.” But his motivation for volunteering is different. “I like to help people. I need to find a way to help people,” he says. “I can use my skills to help.”

His commitment was recognised by Roc when it nominated him for the Volunteer of the Year awards.

It also nominated Fidella Wijaya in the youth category. A year 13 student at Dio, for the past three years she has been helping out at holiday programmes for refugee children. For her, it’s good to invest time, rather than just money, and be able to see the impact. “I really enjoy just working with the children and being able to create these bonds and knowing that they’ve come from rough backgrounds, but they’re able to be just so cheerful. It’s pretty inspiring.”

The Refugee Orientation Centre is among many organisations that advertise positions on the Volunteering Waikato website.

Early this week, the website had 189 positions for individuals and seven for teams and corporates.

Some roles can be oddly specific. A couple of years ago Woodlands Estate sought silver polishers for its historic homestead near Gordonton. Atkinson was initially doubtful about that one. It was hard to imagine anyone would be interested in such a niche role. But three people jumped at the chance and the Woodlands silver got its sparkle back.

Less spectacularly, this week the Morrinsville Historical Society was after a volunteer to correctly store its textiles and costumes.

Goldfields Railway wanted a train guard and a train driver, Waikeria Prison wanted a carving expert and a table tennis coach, while Waikato Marching Association sought a competition announcer.

And op shop helpers are always in demand.

At the moment, however, volunteers face rising petrol costs, while low unemployment may also be taking some out of the volunteering pool. Similarly, international students, who often volunteer as a way to get to know about the country, are fewer thanks to Covid. Total applicant numbers on the website dropped from 3121 in 2020 to 2571 in 2021.

But the response to the first Covid lockdown was encouraging, Atkinson says, as people who may have been briefly less engaged in their paid job put their hand up to volunteer. Sometimes a role would be snapped up within half an hour of being posted. Since then, however, Atkinson says some of those in the 65-plus age group, who may have been stood down during the pandemic, have drifted away, whether because of health concerns or because they’ve found something else to do.

“I sometimes think that social enterprise model of the op shop funds being used to fund essential services in our communities is actually a little bit under threat at the moment, because the volunteers just don’t seem to be there.”

Younger volunteers, meanwhile, are over-represented. “They see volunteering as a way to develop skills, get workplace experience, develop networks that can help them.”

She says they are also hugely driven by causes, the likes of gender equality or the environment.

Volunteering Waikato may skew younger, given it is based on an online platform. Even so, the number in the 20-29 age group dwarfs all others, with 640 applicants in 2021, compared to the next highest of 402 in the 40-49 age group. Those aged 60 and older numbered 358.

There is no shortage of older volunteers at Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, which would scarcely exist without the unpaid labour contributed over two decades to the environmental project.

Jocelyn Dawkins, who clocked up plenty of hours as a visitor host, says in the early days about 400 volunteers were involved. That number is down to a still-hefty 200 as paid staff numbers have slowly risen.

When Dawkins started 11 years ago, she and her husband would head to the back of one of the adjoining farms, and do a slow check of the pest-proof fence, looking for tiny holes.

She also volunteered at the visitor kiosk near the southern enclosure, and acted as a visitor host. “That’s what I really enjoyed, talking to people, telling them about the project.” And she has been down to Pureora to help collect robins, driving back in a station wagon with 17 boxes of the little birds in the back.

Sue Reid started earlier, around 2003. Like Dawkins, she has guided visitors, and she has also worked in the aviary, putting out sugar water as a supplementary feed. Mostly, however, the birds content themselves with foraging. “There’s so much food out there,” Reid says. “You don’t want to be eating takeaways all the time if Mum’s a really good cook.”

That means the birds are not always visible to visitors, but the drawcard needs to be the forest itself, Reid says. “That’s what I push, is the magnificence of this forest.”

She also helps with health checks for kiwi, holding them while they are examined. There’s a trick to it – you can’t touch the chest, which is a weak spot. Mostly the young ones are good, but she held one big female that resisted. The kiwi spent the whole time flicking her beak, risking damaging herself. So Reid was trying to avoid her beak while hanging on to her claws. “Because if they kick you they rip you to bits, they’re very strong. So she’s kicking and she’s fighting and Craig our kiwi man said ‘this is being filmed’. I said ‘yeah, I know’. He said, ‘whatever you do, don’t drop her’.”

Twenty years ago, there were no kiwi in the mountain; now there are about 2000. It’s a similar story for other species. The level of detail to get to this point is extraordinary, and the roles volunteers have played are similarly wide ranging. In the early days, for instance, kiwi had leg bands that had to be continually replaced as the birds grew.

Bev Hill got her start in the early days checking tracking cards for footprints. She then joined those putting the cards out on the mountain. She and her group put out 66 cards in their area, including at 50m intervals inside a stretch of fence, collecting them two or three days later. Occasionally, that would lead them to the troubling sight of a paradise duck chick stranded inside the fence with its parents on the outside. A happier experience was the time a paradise duck flew up in front of her in the southern enclosure, leaving six babies – tiny little bundles that immediately transferred their affections to Hill who had to take to her heels to get away from them.

Not for the first time, these three women, who have come to know each other well, share a laugh.

Like Atkinson, Volunteering NZ’s Kitney says Covid has had an impact on the experience of volunteering. “If you volunteer you are often doing it for relationships and connectedness and things like that, which are definitely a lot harder in a pandemic environment, but the need continues to soar.

“It’s probably not as much fun to be a volunteer in the last couple of years as it has been.”

There are warning signs from Australia where numbers of volunteers dropped by 2 million, according to the latest Census data.

“They’ve definitely been reporting a lot more of a challenge around getting people re-engaged and reinvigorated,” says Kitney.

In New Zealand, however, an upcoming state of volunteering report shows retention remains quite strong, she says.

One of the issues for the sector is around the increasing contracting out of “public stuff” into the community and voluntary sector, Kitney says. “There’s a bit of attention around volunteering in that space and trying to protect the intrinsic value and nature of volunteering contribution as separate from an organisation doing the business.”

Government strategies can rely on delivery in the community and voluntary sector. “And they’re not actually funded.” She cites maternal mental health as one area where that is happening.

“There’s absolutely room for us to have a conversation about what sits out in community, and what sits under government, and it’s a sliding scale.”

She does, however, welcome a Government report commissioned by Voluntary Sector Minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan to identify and provide advice on the gaps and opportunities in government support to volunteering. She also notes the minister has just been elevated to the Cabinet.

Newly formed not-for-profits are less likely to have funding to pay staff. Once they do, it may be a volunteer who moves into a paid role because they’ve got the skills and organisational knowledge. That has been the experience of Eve Cunnane at Hope Rising Farm.

Cunnane started volunteering in 2014, doing buddy work, and took on a paid programme manager’s position at the start of 2021. She is wholehearted about the farm.

“Sometimes things that haven’t worked for kids in school or in the justice system work here,” she says. “The horse is this non-judgmental, empathetic, respectful, totally trusting animal that’s looking with these big eyes at this kid saying, ‘Take me somewhere safe, be my safe leader’.” That draws out empathy and leadership, and the fact the animal will also push back at times means the youngster in charge also has to have confidence and set boundaries, she says.

Rachel Ralph, meanwhile, says she believes her work in the faith-based organisation is what she was born to do. “You know, it’s the accumulation of all my life experiences, the things that didn’t go well, and looking at the things that did go well, and how can I make this count for something?

“When we feel most gratification is when we contribute to others. If you’re contributing, as a human, that’s what we’re designed to do at some level.”

Back at Maungatautari, the tīeke, or saddleback, is making its high-pitched call in the canopy, while at ground level, earth star fungi are sprouting around tree roots.

Reid volunteers here because she values the positivity of those around her. Plus, there’s the natural world. “I’m just fascinated by nature. And I can see the writing on the wall for nature. We need to do a lot more for it. So this is my way of doing it.”