Profile of vivian Hutchinson by Allen Miller
from "Hand in Hand with Inspirational New Zealanders"
— The Tindall Foundation Annual Report (Nov 2001)

Vibrant communities are based on livelihood. Livelihood underpins our ability to create and sustain our communities but when it disappears, the cohesion of our way of life starts to crumble and very quickly, we start to see the emergence of all the social problems that come packaged with poverty. These range from crime to overcrowding in housing and are symptomatic of the exclusion that follows the loss of livelihood.

“Our communities have been experiencing dramatic and fundamental changes to employ-ment over the past twenty years,” says vivian Hutchinson of the Jobs Research Trust . “Some of the changes have been swift, like the impact of new technology and the effect of globalisation on local jobs; but others have been much slower such as the changing nature of work in our culture and in our personal lives”.

The sum of these changes has forced us to perceive, understand and interpret our world differently and the effect of these changes is clearly having an impact on all layers of our communities. “The paradigm shift we are facing is systemic,” says vivian, “and we are not going to solve our employment challenges if we simplistically focus all our attention on how we can better manage the poor and the unemployed.”

In the New Economy, economic growth does not necessarily yeild the same numbers of jobs that growing economies produced 35 years ago. Ours is the first generation to face the fact that the “cheapest” worker anywhere in the global economy, will not be cheap enough to compete with new technologies coming on stream to replace them. All the exciting new jobs we are now creating are not going to be enough to replace those being lost in areas hard-hit by technological innovation and a globalised marketplace. So where are all the new jobs going to come from? What can we do in order to attain what the Mayor’s Taskforce describes as its goal o f “ zero waste” of New Zealanders?

“New business opportunities will not be the only drivers of future employment,” says vivian. “The jobs of the future will also come from us valuing different things. They will come from acts of community and cultural leadership that have the capacity to make choices for a common good. These jobs will not come from acts of economics or business development as we know it, but rather from acts of governance. We need to apply longer-term thinking to the critical issues facing our communities and regain our capacity to talk to each other about the long-term trends affecting work and income.”

“The job-rich areas of the future will emerge from two main sectors,” says vivian. “The first contains jobs that come from choosing to look after one another better and the second contains those jobs that come from choosing to look after the earth better. Both sectors are very rich in terms of job potential. These sectors will be driven by governance choices that communities make through their economic, cultural and political leaders.”

If we value business and economic development, we have to invest in the sort of infrastructure that will have a tangible spin-off in local jobs. This has to involve stakeholders and interest groups from business and the community as well as local and regional authorities and national Government. Collaboration, leadership and co-operation are required in order to translate this vision into reality, but we particularly need to harness the creative energies of society’s “Social Entrepreneurs”.

The Social Entrepreneur looks at the need to value different things and helps find ways to pay for it. Such people are great alliance builders and work out how new ways of doing things can become politically saleable and economically pragmatic. “These are the people who can make hope possible in face of uncertainty and despair”, asserts Hutchinson. “Fostering Social Entrepreneurs will be critical to developing sustainable solutions to the challenges of the 21st Century.”

vivian is a Social Entrepreneur and community activist who has pioneered community-based action for jobs in New Zealand, especially in establishing programmes for the training, support and education of unemployed people. He is also an accomplished writer and sought-after speaker on employment and livelihood issues, here and abroad. He is Editor of The Jobs Letter, co-founder of the Jobs Research Trust and Community Advisor to the New Zealand Mayor’s Taskforce for Jobs.

His other accomplishments include helping establish the Community Employment Development Unit (later to become the Community Employment Group) within the Department of Labour and working with the national network of Local Employment Co-ordination Committees. vivian was also a founder of the Taranaki Work Trust, based in New Plymouth and pioneered the first Skills of Enterprise business courses aimed at unemployed people. His Website at www.jobsletter.org.nz, was the 1999 premier Internet award winner at the New Zealand Peace Media Awards.

In common with many community development practitioners and business people, vivian shares the view that New Zealand could become the first sustainable country on earth. Just as this country was considered a “social laboratory” for the world at the time of the rise of the Welfare State, it is conceivable that we might become a “social and environmental laboratory” as the global economy starts to explore the new practicalities of what is described by author Paul Hawken as “Natural Capitalism.”

The key to moulding New Zealand’s collective future will be the acceptance that social equity should not be defined by the social structures that were the product of the 19th Century. We all have an important role to play in rethinking how our employment problems are defined and how longer-term solutions can be envisioned says vivian.

The Tindall Foundation has provided donations to the Jobs Research Trust since 2000. The Trustees recently approved a further contribution of $30,000 which will be used to support vivian in his work as a Social Entrepreneur as well as a further $500,000 to promote youth employment in collaboration with the Mayor’s Taskforce for Jobs.

For more information contact:
Jobs Research Trust,
P.O.Box 428,New Plymouth.
Ph:06 753 4434 Fax:06 753 4430
Website:www.jobsletter.org.nz

TOP