Volunteer!

I'm a bit late in mentioning this, but this week is Volunteer Week in New Zealand.

New Zealand is a leading nation in contribution made by volunteers. A 2008 study of the New Zealand non-profit sector estimated that volunteers make up 67% of the non-profit workforce. This is equal to 133,799 paid positions, a higher proportion than in any of the other forty world countries participating in the research project on volunteering.

Volunteer rates between different ethnic groups in the country don't differ greatly:

34.8% of Pacific people
34.5% of Pakeha
34% non NZ-born Europeans
33.4% Asians
33.2% Maori.

More women volunteer than men, but in the retirement age groups, men do more unpaid work outside the home than women.

Most volunteers are in the 30-49 age group but young people are active as volunteers. The average young person aged between 12 and 24 does over 708 hours of unpaid work outside the home a year, with young Maori giving significantly more of their time in unpaid roles than other young people.

Volunteers keep people safe by being unpaid fire fighters, St John ambulance officers, Red Cross volunteers, community patrollers, surf lifesavers, coastguards and search and rescue volunteers.

Over 820,000 people do volunteer work in sports compared to 41,000 who get paid.

These are just a few stats from Volunteering New Zealand and Office for Community and Voluntary Sector.

Young New Zealand

Throughout New Zealand, there are Presbyterian churches, elders and ministers who focus much of their time on ways to be in touch with the young people around them. Some churches are more successful than others, often because the right kind of person is in the role of youth leader, or because there is a good team of people reaching out to young people.

Having information about young people is one way in which to improve your ability to work with them. This may be information that's primarily local, or it may be anecdotal or word of mouth.

The Ministry of Youth Development has recently improved their website and one of the pages contains youth statistics for New Zealand. Statistics may not be everyone's cup of tea (particularly not youth leaders at the coal face) but they can give interesting overviews of an area or of trends in relation to a particular subject.

As an example: In the 2006 Census,
19.5 percent of young people aged 12 to 24 identified as Mäori,
9.3 percent as Pacific,
13.1 percent Asian
and 1.2 percent as Other ethnicities.
These figures are all significantly higher than the proportion of the total population that identifies with each of these ethnic groups. In other words each of these people groups has more young people than old. The only exception are the Europeans.

You can see a graph showing these stats more clearly on the web, and further down the page a table comparing where the different ethnicities predominate.

In another section, the wellbeing of young New Zealanders is discussed.

Take a few minutes to check the site out. It may prove more valuable than you'd expect.

Gran Torino

I watched 79-year-old Clint Eastwood's latest (and probably last) movie on DVD last night. He plays a stolid, grumpy character with flint in his bones who, at the beginning of the movie, has just lost his beloved wife, and now lives alone with his dog. He's the only white person in a neighbourhood where various other ethnic groups have moved in, and lives right next door to a Hmong family - the teenagers speak English, but the mother and grandmother have no English at all.
The movie takes a while to wind up: the first twenty minutes or so set up Eastwood (who plays Kowalski, so ironically he comes from a family that were immigrants themselves at one point) as the sole survivor of the white people in the neighbourhood, at odds with his neighbours (or at least wanting to avoid them), and at odds with the '27-year-old virgin' Catholic priest who insists on keeping his promise to Eastwood's deceased wife, that he'd get the man to confession.
Then there's a turnaround, and he begins to befriend - or mentor - the young Hmong boy from next door, who's in line to get caught up in a gang that does nothing but cause trouble.
The relationship is a surprise - for both the characters - and for the audience. And the outcome of their relationship is also a surprise, with an intriguingly Christian parallel underpinning it.
I won't spoil the story for you, but it's worth seeing. You'll have to put up with Kowalski's often foul and blasphemous mouth (though some of his use of language is quite funny), but if you can get past that, this is a movie that has considerable integrity at its heart (as Eastwood's late period movies mostly have). And it's an interesting parable in its own way.