No Poverty With Prue Kane

Prue Kane is the Jobs for Nature Programme Director at WAI Wānaka – a role which she applied for after her own business was badly affected by Covid. In this role, Prue herself helped first-hand to provide employment, security and resilience for people in Wānaka whose employment had also been impacted heavily by the effects of Covid. The creation of jobs and economic support by this programme in Wānaka over a very challenging period has seen Prue and WAI Wānaka work directly towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal #1: No Poverty.

The story of Prue Kane and her meaning of sustainability

Prue is based in Wānaka, not far from where she grew up. After attending school and Univeristy in Dunedin, Prue spent a few years overseas, working for places such as an innovation company in Melbourne. She returned to the Wānaka region on a 3-month holiday about 10 years ago, but forgot to leave. While home, she undertook work experience for a native nursery and landscaping company because she thought she might like to get into native revegetation. However, Prue discovered she didn’t have much of a green thumb but remained passionate about native revegetation, so her then boss offered her a job setting up the Longview Environmental Trust, working in the project management side of revegetation programmes. Eventually she left to start her own business but the impacts of Covid led her to pivot again, applying for a role as Project Manager for the new Jobs for Nature Programme advertsised by WAI Wānaka.

I guess what attracted me to WAI Wānaka was they had a really wholeofecosystem approach to their work that connected the rural, urban and tourism sectors. They actually, they did stuff as well. I’m a bit of a doer. I liked the fact that through the Jobs for Nature programme were able to employ people that went out and did the work so, yeah, still there almost two years later.

Sustainability has become a big word and is very trendy at the moment, which can sometimes make the words become meaningless, as Prue points out. But to Prue, sustainability is more than just environmental – it’s about a whole approach, looking at things as an interconnected system. So that includes obviously the natural world, but also the people in the communities that live within that world. And I think the sustainability of the environment doesn’t really exist without the people to sustain it”. This whole approach, looking at interconnections and the emphasis on people is so apparent in the work that Prue has done with WAI Wānaka’s Jobs for Nature programme.

WAI Wānaka and the Jobs for Nature Programme

WAI Wānaka is a community organisation that started from a group of passionate water advocates who were looking to protect the freshwater of the Upper Clutha. The Chair of WAI Wānaka, Mandy Bell, had been away at a Freshwater Leaders Group in Wellington and when she came back she looked into what was going on in this space in the region and found that there were a lot of different groups in different organisations doing projects and with interest in the area, but they weren’t necessarily all talking to each other or communicating. There were duplications and gaps, so Mandy and others got together and formed the Upper Clutha Lakes Trust, now known as WAI Wānaka.

The vision of WAI Wānaka is community wellbeing and ecosystem health for future generations, led by a key understanding that freshwater and the quality of freshwater doesn’t exist in isolation, and that the activities carried out on land has a big influence on that and that it’s not just rural and it’s not just urban, but it’s those sectors coming together and understanding what their impacts are and, including the tourism industry, which is huge in Wānaka, understanding what the impacts are and then working together on hard to mitigate those. So, WAI Wānaka is we don’t do the research but we’re more of a connector and collaboration is very much at the core of what we do.

The Jobs for Nature programme through WAI Wānaka also came about in the wake of Covid, with the Minister of Agriculture enquiring about potential projects that were going on to see if they would qualify for upcoming funding. Just before lockdown in 2020, a community catchment plan was finalised but there were 20 actions that were unaccounted for, so WAI Wānaka took those actions on. Covid was putting unprecedented pressure on employment across New Zealand, so the Jobs for Nature funding was about getting people into meaningful work and WAI Wānaka applied for funding to get people to carry out integrated work streams with farmers across the Upper Clutha Basin, including native planting, weed and pest control, plant maintenance and biodiversity and freshwater monitoring.

So, we were successful in that application, which is great and that’s where I started. Quickly after that we employed 10 full-time equivalents to be working out on the farms every day and those work streams. But what we found in Wanaka was that rather than mass unemployment, there was a large amount of underemployment, so a lot of the tourism businesses here in Wānaka are small family-owned operations and the same with the hospitality, the restaurants and cafes and they were really keen to keep their staff, but they couldn’t do so on a full-time basis with no tourists. So, we ended up employing a large number of part-time staff so that they could retain their jobs with their original employers. It worked really well for this community, and it meant that we just had an amazing mix of skills and experience and backgrounds, joining the team at WAI Wānaka. We had lawyers and designers and hunters and abseiling guides and all sorts that all contributed amazing skills to the team. Yeah, that was how we got up and running with the Job’s for Nature programme.

Having something for people in Wānaka that could supplement their income from other organisations was a great thing during this time, as Wānaka isn’t a cheap place to live, but it had a greater impact than just economic. It provided a really cool opportunity for these people to be introduced into a different industry and actually see what goes on farms and understand the different demands that the farmers are having to deal with every day and the different priorities that they’re juggling. And a bit of insight into what goes on behind the scenes.

SDG #1: No Poverty, and the SDG that aligns the most with Prue

UN Sustainable Development Goal #1 seeks to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. One target underneath it is Target 1.5 which seeks to build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environment shocks and disaster. The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of these shocks that have left large populations of people in vulnerable situation in Aotearoa New Zealand, and around the globe. On reflection of the work of the Jobs for Nature programme over the pandemic, Prue recognises that it was a vehicle for providing employment, security and building resilience during a really challenging time. Additionally, “I also think the work we do on farms hopefully helps the landowners as well improve their resilience to changes that are coming, you know pandemics are one example, but climate change is a hot topic also, and so understanding how, through the Carbon 101 workshops that we run into the biodiversity and freshwater monitoring, how those work streams can help land owners not just prepare for changes but also prepare to take advantage of opportunities that come out of all of those changes. So, I think that, yeah, you’re absolutely right that 1.5.Building resilience is the one that really aligns with the work we do.

For Prue, the theme of interconnections was evident in her meaning of sustainability and that also comes through in the SDG she is most aligned with is SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.

I think a lot of the issues we’re facing are the complex and we’re going to require some really integrated thinking and pulling on knowledge from different sectors and from different parts of the world to work towards those solutionscollaborating and working together to find those solutions is becoming more and more important. In a time of rapid change, which I think we’re in especially in the agricultural industry now, working together does provide that support structure as well, and just those different ways of thinking, as you say, the diversity of thought to add in there.

The challenge facing agriculture when it comes to sustainability, and Prue’s take-home tip to contribute to sustainability in your farming business

The sheer volume and rate of change across all facets of the farm business at the moment, with lots of uncertainty around expectations and what needs to be done, is one of the biggest challenges Prue sees for farmers currently. However, with those challenges come opportunities, and Prue stresses the importance of understanding how we position ourselves as an industry and as individuals to take advantage of the opportunties that arise.

“It’s an easy thing to say, a harder thing to do, to be open to change and comfortable with change, but I think it’s becoming more and more necessary and you’re absolutely right, Becks, I think just there will be uncertainty across some of those areas for a while yet. So, understanding how you can connect in to groups and industry bodies that can help with that and just understanding as well what’s important to your business and your farm vision, I guess in working on the most important things to you first, not always possible when there are regulations that need to be met, but yeah, and as you say working together and being open to what opportunities might come out of this.”

From a practical lens, a take home action that Prue sees as helping farming businesses contribute to sustainability right now is knowing your greenhouse gas number to add to your understanding around what is happening on your farm.

There are lots of tools and support out there to understanding, you know, calculating your carbon number or greenhouse gas number and even though there’s still work to be done through the pricing mechanism and it may not seem like there’s a lot of options in terms of mitigation, I think just going through the process of calculating your emissions and understanding what is the source of those emissions are, gets that thinking going on in terms of where those might be able to be reduced or possible sources of sequestration or potential areas that might be planted to add to that.”

Listen to Prue’s episode here: 

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