SAANZ Conference 2019

Chair: Jay Marlowe

Hoa Nguyen: Social Justice approach for Financial Capability program

Financial literacy has received increasing attention as a strategy to help reduce and prevent financial hardship. In 2018, the Sorted in Schools, a financial capability programme, was launched with the aim to integrate financial literacy across the New Zealand curriculum and Maori Medium Education by 2021. This is a great initiative, helping to equip our youth with financial knowledge and skills from an early age. However, practitioners and teachers need to be careful in how they deliver the materials, avoiding deficit based approach as it could potentially have negative effect on students’ self-efficacy and their cultural aspirations. This idea came from a formative evaluation in which online surveys were collected from 137 students and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 students. All were from an intermediate and a secondary school in West Auckland. Results showed that some Pasifika and Maori students have negative perception regards to how their families manage money as it does not resonate with the Western individualistic way of money management. This presentation will discuss the findings of the formative evaluation along with some recommendations for best practices.


Alankar Sharma: Heteropatriarchy, masculinity, and child sexual abuse

Men and boy survivors of child sexual abuse are an under-acknowledged, under-studied, and stigmatized population in India. Research on child sexual abuse in India is still in its early stages and little extant research has examined experiences of child sexual abuse for boys and men. I conducted a phenomenological study focusing on the lived experiences of 11 Indian adult men who had experienced sexual abuse during childhood. Through centering participants’ experiences, I demonstrate that heteropatriarchal social structures manifested as homophobia, compulsory heterosexuality, silence about sexuality, and masculinist gender norms are at the core of how men survivors understand and make meaning of their abuse experiences. These lived experiences as located within a web of pervasive and toxic heteropatriarchy stand in dissonance against individualized, behavioral and psychopathological approaches to preventing and addressing sexual abuse of boys. I argue that feminist perspectives are integral to meaningful and sustainable responses to sexual abuse of boys.


Marissa Kaloga: Capital for Construction: A case study in advancing racial equity through community engaged program development

In 2017, an informal group of retirement-age African American construction contractors approached their local non-profit microfinance organization (ECDI) in Columbus, Ohio. The 2008 financial crisis forced most African American contractors out of business, leaving a gap in the local economy. The group wanted to know: How can we work together to create a new cohort of minority construction contractors? In the following year, ECDI worked with a diverse group of public and private stakeholders to create and implement the Capital for Construction program, which offers technical assistance, mentorship, and a novel loan product to launch and grow minority-owned construction businesses. The pilot program was deemed successful in 2018, having successfully supported successful more than 12 new minority-owned companies, and creating more than 40 new jobs. I will present this program as a single, retrospective case study, using an interpretive approach to explore the innovative program design and strategic partnerships employed to develop and implement this program. Using analysis from methods including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and program outcome data, I will present a holistic account of how social and economic justice, central tenets of social work, can be advanced through community level partnerships and design thinking.


Mike Dee: Protest to Survive

This paper explores the surveillance and control project underway in Western societies to govern the ‘dangerous classes’, of the poor, dispossessed and homeless, who owe their malign fortune to the climate of austerity and punitive welfare measures facilitated by the Global Financial Crisis. It is at this point that a reaffirmation of civil, social and political rights as a basis for a ‘good society’, is most crucial. The conference theme of Resistance is a key element in the paper, in resisting the seemingly unstoppable decline of the welfare state. Instead, the principles of social justice, participation and meaningful social inclusion have a major role to play in the reframing of social work, aided by an emerging protesting class of children and young people, taking to the streets because of climate change, forming a constituency of progressive change agents, active across a range of social, environmental, political and economic issues.


Each presentation will be allocated 20 minutes. Additional time for questions and discussion will be available in each stream.