Nuns want funding for communities

Press, 1 August 1989, Page 26

Nuns want funding for communities

Communities expected to take over the care of increasing numbers of patients and offenders need adequate funding, say two nuns working in Aranui. Sister Pauline O’Regan and Sister Teresa O’Connor, of the Catholic Order Sisters of Mercy, said the neighbourhoods expected to take over a significant part of the work of institutions should be adequately funded and resourced. Government policies to “decentralise and deinstitutionalise” people who had traditionally been cared for in institutions would increase the pressures on voluntary workers, they said. The nuns give the warning in a book, “Community — Give it a Go,” in which they outline some of their experiences in helping build a community over 17 years in Aranui and 12 years in Burwood. The Government’s

policy of entrusting former patients and offenders to the community was a form of “enlightened liberalism that deserves to succeed,” but only if there was "such a thing as a community out there beyond the institution wall,” said the nuns in their book. “To hear these policies being enunciated, one could believe the word “suburb” and “community” were synonymous, or that the word “neighbourhood” had some inherent relationship to the word “neighbourliness,” they said. “There is an alarming absence of realism in such assumptions.” The Government was “building this part of its social policy on sand” if it did also not set in place a system for building a community, they said. Sister O’Regan and Sister O’Connor hope their book will be used as a

handbook by those engaged in voluntary work and teachers in community topics at polytechnics. Sister O’Regan said voluntary workers should be paid for their efforts, either by the Government, local bodies, or the organisations they worked for. “There certainly should be a system for funding voluntary workers, especially since they will be the ones expected to take on more responsibilities as a result of Government policies.”

Sister O’Regan and Sister O’Connor said they had helped develop a system of support for voluntary workers in Aranui and Burwood that had been effective in preventing workers from “burning out.”

“Community” is the nuns’ first book together, although Sister O’Regan wrote an autobiography of her work in Aranui, "A Changing Order,” which was published in 1986.