Community

Could poverty be a sign of our need to heal our relationships with self, with family, with our communities, with all mankind, with all living things, with the earth and with God?

My father, Frank Pullar Junior, served two terms as president of the former Rodney Shire Council.
He was not into financial management – that was for bean counters, and he was not interested in infrastructure – that is what engineers are employed for. Frank cared about people. He saw local council as the first tier of government, the level that was closest to the people. Welfare and human services was Frank’s unofficial portfolio and was supported by his council colleagues and staff. Frank led the shire to become the acknowledged leading service municipality in the state of Victoria at the time.

His father, Frank Pullar Senior, was a businessman who managed a number of orchards.

He, my grandfather, produced fruit for both the local and the international market.

He told me to read “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations“, generally referred to by its shortened title “The Wealth of Nations”, written by Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith.

I read it at the time and I read it again recently. It teaches some principles of international trade.

We now have the internet. The internet didn’t exist when I first read “The Wealth of Nations”.
We now have an amazing opportunity to do some international trade ourselves without the long delays of international shipping and the huge costs associated with producing, exporting and selling internationally.

We can sell information.

How can we sell information?

Take a look on the internet. You will see a huge amount of free information.

You will also see information products for sale.

Ebooks, trainings, audios, videos, subscription newsletters and more.

People pay for information that they believe is valuable to them.

And it can be easy to find out how valuable your information is to the people who can afford to pay for it.

For example you can test information by posting it on Facebook and seeing what response you get. Any likes or comments.

You can reply to any comments. You can message any person who likes your post and discuss about the usefulness of your information.

When you discover what information people value, you can create more and consider ways of packaging and marketing it to people who may be willing to buy.

If the is a serious lack of financial resources where you live, some of the people considering purchasing your information product may be more willing to pay for your product knowing that the money that they pay for your product is helping your community.

While only a few people will want to sell information products, there may be people in your community who do, and who can bring wealth into your community with international trade.

That way your international trade can help heal the relationships between the materially wealthy people and those with less financial resources.

The leaders of projects are working with me.

One group is creating The Chicken Project

Another group has a bigger poultry house project.

And Colin is starting rabbit projects

There are already a number of rabbit farming projects operating.

Rabbits breed quickly, about 28-31 days breeding cycle.
The baby rabbits can be weaned at 3 weeks.
The rabbits need to be well fed and watered.
Rabbit manure is good and the urine is used as a pesticide.
There are many uses for rabbit skins and rabbit meat good for food.

The borehole project is being created by another leader for the purpose of providing easier access to reliable supplies good water.

This will solve the water problem and save these people from walking a long distance to get water.

Could poverty be defined as “the amount brokenness of relationships”?

After communicating with many people who have no food, I have learned a lot more about what it is really like in places such as Uganda or Kenya.

I appreciate these people’s friendliness, their willingness to help me, their persistence and the smiles on their faces as they introduce me to all the members of their families.

It seems to me that the amount of money is not really an accurate measure of the amount of poverty.

People in Australia and the United States generally have more money than people in Kenya.

Looking at the quality each person’s relationships with themself, with their family, with their community, with all mankind, with all living things, with our planet and with God, how does the quality of people in Australia and the United States compare with that of those in what we regard as poor countries?

Some people often have no food for themselves and for their orphans to eat.

These people have taught me to appreciate what I have, to be more resourceful and to do more with less.

I live in Melbourne, Australia where the winter is mid year. I like warmer weather.

In Melbourne, winter is most of the year except around January and February.

I feel cold sitting in my workspace in my room for long hours, communicating with people who are experiencing their hot summer. A heater doesn’t heat the room much and it costs a lot of money to run.

These people inspired me to insulate my workspace and get myself a heater to be warm.

Now that I have made the changes to my workspace, I don’t even need a heater when the sun is shining in through my window during the day!

When the sun is not shining, I can be comfortably warm with a small heater.

I am grateful for what I have been given in exchange for the business coaching that I have given to them.

I am a business coach but instead of promoting my services to paying clients and being paid $120 per hour, I have been providing business coaching to people who often can’t afford a meal so that they and other people in their community can eventually afford to support each other and the orphans.

Many of the people in countries like Kenya are very skilful at making the best use of limited resources, and I believe that they could teach more people in my country and the United States not only to save money, but also to cause less harm to the environment and be willing to pay the people of countries like Kenya for teaching them.

I live in Melbourne, Australia.
Thank you for reading.

I work with you so that you can create a business that provides a valuable service or product to your customers, and earn an income in exchange for that value that your business provides to your customers.

For a community, I can coach a leader to take on the role of a business coach.

We start with the overall purpose of what we are doing.
This includes:

Our vision, what we are creating

Our goals. What we are here to achieve

Most people and organisations tend to implement the tasks and strategies before having fully worked out the overall purpose of what we are doing and that is one of the major causes of failure.

I use the “Critical Alignment Model” developed by The Coaching Institute, Suite 40, 30-39 Albert Road, Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia.
+61 3 9645 9945
www.thecoachinginstitute.com.au

I receive many messages from people who are asking for relief.

Some are from people who do were earning money from working at a job.
But now the business that they were working for has closed so they have no income.
They and the orphans that they are caring for often have no food.

While I have empathy and feel some of their pain, I understand three different categories of help:

Relief – immediate and temporary material assistance, relieving the pain and stopping the bleeding.

Rehabilitation – helping them recover to their pre-crisis situation

Development – reconciling relationships and exploring the underlying issues that tend to cause the problems.

I am a counsellor, a life coach and a business coach.

I do development work, working patiently with individuals and communities to discover the underlying causes of problems and to reconcile relationships.

Development and rehabilitation helps to provide long term benefits for individuals, communities and the world.
Relief can be beneficial in the short term yet it can, and very often does cause a lot of harm to individuals and communities.
Relief when given inappropriately or for too long tends to create unhealthy dependencies and undermine the self worth of the recipients.

I feel so tempted to provide relief to take away my pain and their much greater pain. Most of my friends would applaud me for providing relief. Many of those who have asked for relief have already told me that they would be eternally grateful if I gave them relief.
Yet I am wise enough to know that I could cause a lot of damage by well-intentioned efforts by me to give relief.

I would like to give you my undivided attention.

There is a problem.

Many people want to communicate with me and I can not give each of you the amount of individual attention that you would like.

There are not enough hours in the day for me to do that.

Just like a baker focuses on baking, a bricklayer focuses on laying bricks and a fruit grower focuses on growing fruit, I can probably serve more by focusing on my own specialty.

I value personal development. I have participated in many programs and assisted on some. I have had training in person centered counselling. I have been studying life coaching and will continue to study to become more competent and more able to serve my clients. I am also studying and getting trained in other ways.

I am an independent member of a community of life coaches. While most are certified or accredited, I am not certified and I am not accredited. I am committed to continually improving.

I value responsibility. I am not interested in excuses or blaming.

I am open about myself and my own life yet I value your privacy. I regard what you tell me as confidential.

I value honesty and am committed to saying what is true for me with compassion. I know many will be offended by what I say and I also know about how much damage is caused by withholding the truth.

I am not willing to do for you what you need to do for yourself. I see so much damage caused by people trying to help or giving money instead of giving an opportunity to learn and to grow.

I am open to feedback and learning but closed to propaganda and invalidation.

Thank you for reading this far. Please feel free to contact me.

My original aim in helping to create this community was to share stories as a resource so the people in our community would not continue to be crushed.

It now seems to me that I was thinking too small.

A bigger purpose could be to honour the members of our community.

For example Murray Pullar did some drawings so his grandchildren could know something of his experience in the Second World War www.frankpullar.org/Drawings and I share them to honour him. So many young people have no idea how much those who lived before them sacrificed for our freedom.

I remember when Robert Kiyosaki was leading the “Money and You” program in Australia more than 20 years ago and he explained that he does not give his money to poor people as it damages them.

Similarly in the preface of the book “When helping hurts – how to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor and yourself” by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert, Dr John Perkins writes “Have you ever done anything to hurt poor people? Most of you would probably answer no to this question, but the reality is that you may have done considerable harm to poor people in the very process of trying to help them. The federal government has made this mistake for decades. Well intentioned welfare programs penalised work, undermined families and created dependence. The government hurt the very people it was trying to help.”

I see so many people sleeping in the streets of Melbourne or begging for money.

I care about these people and as I talk with some of them I have discovered how much they care about me. I am grateful for the encouragement and useful advice that I have been given when I have needed some help and reached out to them.

I believe that we all need to learn to help these people without hurting them or ourselves as in most cases they need a hand up rather than a handout.

I was about eight years old and I was telling my father, Frank Pullar, about a problem that I was facing in my life. He listened to me until I finished telling him. He then paused for a moment before replying “And what are you going to do about it?”

Over the years he did the same, individually with my sisters and my brother on a number of occasions.

So I have been trained from a young age to ask myself that question, “What am I going to do about it?”

In about 1974 I again met Brian and started doing some volunteer work with his group of people who were setting up the first FM radio broadcast station in Victoria.

Over the next few months as I worked with Brian and the other volunteers, I was inspired by all the many steps in his journey that he took towards getting classical music broadcasts again in Australia He told us some of the story each day. It was a long journey yet he continued on where anybody else would have just given up.

Brian used to enjoy the classical music broadcasts on the Australian Broadcasting Commission radio stations. However the Australian government decided to broadcast parliament so the people of Australia could hear the proceedings and debates of their government. So the ABC rearranged their programming to accomodate the government’s decision. They cut their classical music broadcasts from playing full works of music down to “just playing small excerpts of classical music.”

Brian Cabena objected. He wrote to his local member of parliament.

He made endless approaches to the government. He lobbied them. He came up with many alternatives such as having the government allowing the classical music lovers to have their own radio broadcast station and broadcast on the AM radio broadcast band. The government said no, the AM band is already fully occupied. Brian’s suggestion that they open up the 88 to 108 megahertz FM radio broadcast band in Australia only resulted in the government answering that that part of the radio frequency spectrum was already allocated to other services.

Eventually Brian placed an advertisement in the Melbourne Age newspaper inviting classical music enthusiasts to a meeting in the Kew town hall about getting classical music broadcasts again. About 200 people attended. That was a big step towards creating the Music Broadcasting Society which, after many years and a lot of effort, achieved Brian’s aim of having classical music broadcasts again.

I saw how Brian orchestrated several changes to the Australian government’s broadcasting policies.

He caused the government to reallocate the radio communication services which were licensed on the 88 to 108 megahertz radio frequency band and open up the FM broadcast band for FM radio broadcasting. He also caused the government to pass legislation which allowed community radio broadcasting in Australia.

Not only did I feel so privileged to be a member of Brian’s Music Broadcasting Society team. I was also able to give my grandmother , Julie Harbison aka Dr Julie Hickford, the gift of an FM radio with which she could now enjoy classical music broadcasts. She was very grateful for Brian, the Music Broadcasting Society me.

So whenever anybody complains to me about the government, they are likely to be asked by me “Have you spoken with your local member of parliament about that?