Reduced Inequalities with Carl Storey

Carl Storey is the Farm and Land Enterprises Manager of Hōhepa in Hawke’s Bay – an organisation that offers a range of services such as on-site school, adult residential options, programmes for work and ongoing learning opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. For over 40 years, Carl has been involved in agriculture and cheese making, which has led him to work around the world. Carl is a lover of the paddock to plate concept, and the small herd of cows and the on-site cheese production facilities have allowed Carl and Hōhepa to have direct relationships with customers in their community.

Hōhepa

Hōhepa employs around 650 staff, with their core business being about supporting and looking after nearly 200 people with intellectual disabilities, ranging in severity. For Carl, Hōhepa isn’t only about support, but it is a place that allows people to be actually be themselves, as well as give people opportunities to develop, and work if they wish to work. Hōhepa provide a number of work opportunities such as woodwork, weaving and textiles, candle making, working in the cheesery and gardening care, but Carl is focused on the land enterprises. With the help of Carl, 30,000 native trees are grown a year, with some of the residents deeply involved in the growing of these trees right through from the eco-sourcing of seeds, to propagation and then planting. Partnerships with like-minded people has also allowed for contract work planting native trees for the Regional Council, other farm and land owners, as well as some DoC projects. For Carl, an important there is an important distinction to be made about what they do at Hōhepa:

But what I tell people is really, we’re a community that look after the intellectual disabled people and we happen to have a farm and a cheesery, it’s not the other way around. And all these enterprises give us the opportunity to give people a real challenge and a real sense to be themselves, to find something that they might want to do, I mean, they might like to partake in. They come along and they work with us as colleagues, it’s not about forcing them into certain things. It’s completely and utterly their choice in what they’d like to be involved in and what they’d like to do.”

Hōhepa is all about giving people opportunities, and creating work opportunities, which in turn allows for the empowerment of people and promotion of inclusion. Meaningful work is such an important factor when it comes to wellbeing, and the reduction of barriers for people to be able to engage in these opportunities, particularly in agriculture, is something that Hōhepa excels at.

“A lot of the empowerment comes from within themselves, so a lot of what we do is just open the door and give them the opportunity, whether they wish to engage with the cows, whether they wish to engage with vegetable gardening, but it’s about starting the door and giving them the opportunity to see, learn and do with us.”

While Hōhepa excels at providing opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities, there is a need for more people open the door to providing opportunities that support reduced inequalities and increased inclusion within our sector. Not only does it lead to the provision of meaningful work, but it provides people with the opportunity to be themselves and discover what they’re really capable of, which has positive benefits for people, organisations and the wider community and sector.

“While we deal with quite a few relatively severely disabled people, there are others on the farm that have some mild disabilities. They come to us in what we call our day services programmes, and they have some vulnerabilities and some disabilities, but they’re absolutely perfectly capable of doing work. And they love the work. They like getting paid. They like the freedom of getting paid and the ability that they can then have some life choices on what they do with that. And they also have some life choices with where they work, around how they spend their day, who they associate with and things that actually are important to them and these guys, they find that planting the trees, caring for them, is really rewarding and really important to them because they make a real contribution to the sustainability of the Hawkes Bay region.”

SDG #10 – Reduced Inequalities

Under SDG #10, targets are focused around promoting and empowering the inclusion of all irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, economic or other status. Additionally, increasing representation and increasing equality in various ways is also of priority under this goal. This is something that Hōhepa are leading in. 

One thing Hōhepa prides itself on is paying everybody the minimum wage. Under the New Zealand system, if people have a disability, you can apply for a dispensation and remove them from the minimum wage scheme because they may not work at the same rate as able-bodied person. This is something Hōhepa has never done and will never do, because to them it is all about providing equality.

“They may not work at the same rate as us, they may not harvest vegetables or milk the cow, stir the cheese, quite as quickly as us, or they may not operate on the same intellectual level as us, but it doesn’t mean we pay them less. And this is very important for me. We have a milk bottling line, and we have one staff member and three to four people that support him there. They’re all doing the same job. The outcome of that job is milk in the bottle, with a nice label. If any one of them isn’t there and they’re doing their little job, the bottle of milk doesn’t come within the production line to be sold. The equality is they all must doing their little part. So why shouldn’t they all be paid the same?”

“When I first came to Hōhepa, I had no experience with people with a disability. What I’ve discovered is that they all have a heart of gold. They all are extremely honest in what they will tell you. They don’t have a separate agenda going on. When we come here to work with us, or actually it’s our privilege to work with them, because we actually learn a whole lot more from them than we can from other people in society. It’s the real heart of gold, honest approach. They know that they have some limitations of perhaps what they can do, and I’ll give you an example. We have a young man here; he will find something on the ground that may be a feather from a bird and to him that is a treasure, and he will slowly head over to one of the staff and to him he is giving them huge treasure from himself that he has found and located. They don’t see ages, sex, race as an issue at all to them. It’s all just we’re off to the farm. We’re going to do some work, plant some trees. We’re going to do some nursery work. There are no inclusion issues whatsoever.”

What Sustainability means to Carl

When it comes to sustainability, for Carl, it is all about our ability to coexist.

“If we look at the biosphere of the earth and human civilisation, sustainability is how can human civilisation coexist with the earth and how can we maintain ourselves and the environment without damaging it? You know if we look at sustainability on a very literal level, it refers to a state or a process that allows things to be maintained indefinitely. Most people around the world would agree at the moment the way we are living as human societies is certainly not sustainable for the planet. And if we carry on as we are, we can see its natural resources and physical systems will be depleted and potentially irreversibly damaged. So, sustainability for me is just that. It’s the ability for human civilization to coexist with the earth. Indefinitely, and without depleting it.”

For Carl, Life on Land is the SDG he aligns with most personally, and that flows through the Hōhepa motto that ‘every life will be lived’.

“That includes all the bacteria and microbes. It includes the bees and the butterflies in the air. Of course, the cows, and  people, but it’s every life and that whole philosophy of Hōhepa, if you look after the soil and the microbes and life in the soil and it will look after you, for us runs very true so we spend a lot of time looking after what we can’t see.”

Carl’s take on the biggest challenge to NZ’s Ag sector regarding sustainability

Carl views the biggest challenge to NZ agriculture probably is fiscal.

“Unfortunately, debt drives production and so a lot of what New Zealand agriculture is doing is driving production to stay ahead of that fiscal curve, so to speak. If you have financier that you owe money to, you’ve got to live up to those obligations. And so New Zealand agriculture generally, the farms have been getting larger and more corporatized, and it’s such sustainability is not always the first goal or first thing they think of, it’s how do we pay our bills? And there’s a lot of money tied up in that.”

However, Carl sees potential to flip the script on that by thinking about sustainability in a multi-faceted way, focusing on economic, environmental, and social sustainability, to bring about new opportunity.

“I think there’s opportunity to grow in the NZ agriculture industry a little bit more around smaller farms, rather than the big corporate farms, which allows more social activity based on those farms and that social activity could be in the form of schools, so actually allowing those high schools, the older children in the high schools, to really interact and perhaps even partake in some of the work based opportunities on those farms. Children that don’t want to be outside necessarily getting dirty can learn the fiscal skills, computer skills. All those other skills that are associated with it.”

It is clear that the approach of Carl and Hōhepa as an organisation is focused on ensuring social sustainability. When it comes to a take home tip, Carl reflects on what he gets from hosting school visits to Hōhepa, not just through connecting children to where things come from and what life is like on the farm, but that it is a catalyst for self-reflection, driven by the curiosity and direct questions that sometimes come from 8-year old’s.

It allows you to think about:

  • Is what you’re doing actually sustainable?
  • Why do you do whatever it is you’re doing?
  • Then you can really start to dive into your own mind and think about it. Sometimes that can prompt little changes

“And so, I would say that would be my take home is if you’re able to host some children and out on a farm or in any enterprise, is to listen to them because really interesting. It’s a big question in schools. It’s something that they’re being taught, something they’re learning and studying about, and those hard questions whether what we’re doing is correct and that starts that whole sustainability model, are we doing it right doesn’t mean what we’re doing now will be right 10 years’ time. Maybe around 20 year’s time. Perhaps it is. Hopefully it is.”

Listen to Carl’s podcast episode here:

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