“The overall view of our work is that it is a big part of our care for creation, and how we can all be a part of that. Food sovereignty is a component of it, as is standing with those in hardship,” says the author. Photo: Janark Gray.
By Stuart Muir Wilson
Program Coordinator of the Ecological Justice Hub at JSS
I co-ordinate the Jesuit Social Services (JSS) Ecological Justice Hub with my colleague Michael McGarvie. This is where we use ecological action to address disadvantage through education and training, demonstration projects, and community engagement.
We have an amazing group of volunteers and participants from every walk of life. This is where we really embody Jesuit values in action. We care for creation and we care for the vulnerable and marginalised through the social and ecological justice we enact in our programmes. The Hub is integral to JSS’ commitment to ecological justice and as our website explains, we are working to restore and repair our relationships with nature and each other.
We promote and teach ecological justice through plastic recycling, social justice advocacy for community-based batteries, permaculture teaching and practice, waste-to-resource conversion, community scale composting, ecological house design, recycling and seasonal planting with food harvesting and cooking — always ensuring that justice and equity are central to our work.
We translate the principles of Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum into very practical outcomes for our environmental footprint. There is a moral responsibility to care for our home and the common good. This also includes empowering marginalised community groups in the context of skill sharing. It’s incredible to see adults and young children alike prosper and develop and become more confident through the programme and how they then start to use these environmental leading skills, while creating habits of change around common problems.
Using the integral ecology model of the Hub, we use place-based disadvantage to meet grassroots needs. The grassroots advocacy approach includes putting people’s experience of rough sleep or escaping domestic violence, for example, at the centre of our advocacy. It is deeply meaningful to be able to help catalyse that change.
Michael McGarvie was the CEO of the Supreme Court of Victoria for 20 years, but JSS CEO Julie Edwards was an old friend of his and recruited him to be a kind of mentor to me through the different programmes at the Hub. We’ve done some amazing work over the last five years together at the Hub, beating a lot of disadvantage, especially through the pandemic and food relief. Another mentor of mine is my grandmother, Margaret Andrews, who is someone I really admire.
Confronting global problems can be quite challenging and sometimes disconcerting, but I always find that the way to confront them is to come up with local environmental solutions as a first step. It’s about building small habits so that we can start to effect change. Pope Francis highlights the urgent need to combat environmental degradation, including pollution, climate change, deforestation and loss of biodiversity. That can be a bit disconcerting because of the scale of the problems, but the solutions are really simple too. That’s where I see the first steps in addressing these really big global solutions.
At the Hub, we work with quite a lot of disability groups. People who’ve been diagnosed with Down Syndrome have come in with a carer or two and they’re very involved in our recycling programme. We run plastic recycling workshops for community groups and a variety of organisations, where they learn the different plastic recycling processes. We show them how to recycle bottle lids – which can’t currently be recycled – into meaningful products. We’re selling quite a lot at the moment for Christmas gifts, and all that money goes right back into the volunteer programme and food relief programme.
Recently, we had three amazing university students come out from Worcester, Central Massachusetts, for a nine-week placement, and those students will go on to work at NASA and on the SpaceX project. I was just giving them the environmental skills they needed and it was a really interesting collaboration.
There are teams from JSS that come here and leave with a big smile on their faces, really inspired about the solutions we present and thinking, “Great, how can we do more of this too?” It’s really about connecting that concept of garden-to-plate food and being thankful for the bountiful creation of God’s harvest. How can we be those stewards of creation? I think a big part of the answer is that we embody that spirit of creation in our weekly work at the Hub.
In Brunswick, we’ve also got Melbourne’s oldest established carpentry workshop for women. It’s been in existence for ten years and we’ve expanded it to look after different marginalised communities. Over the last few years, we’ve also been working with high school students from marginalised and disadvantaged postcodes. We’ve had a lot of troubled young kids who have had difficulty concentrating at school, so we get them re-engaged practically with school too, because some kids are geared to learn best that way. It’s been really important working through their behavioural issues in a very supportive environment too. Those classes happen every Thursday at the moment, alongside different volunteering opportunities as well.
The overall view of our work is that it is a big part of our care for creation, and how we can all be a part of that. Food sovereignty is a component of it, as is standing with those in hardship. It might be people coming through the Humanitarian Settlement Programme we work with on a week-to-week basis, or people who need just that extra bit of support to get through the barriers they’re facing in life, and improving week-to-week access to food and nutrition for vulnerable communities too. We find a lot of the people whom we support with our food or with our meal programmes might only be having one or two meals a day because of cost of living and a variety of other circumstances.
Despite the challenges and scale of the problems of global pollution, Pope Francis remains hopeful and calls for actions from individuals, communities and governments to protect and restore the earth. And I think that really speaks to my own spirituality: my environmental work and spiritual work are very much the same thing. It comes alive through the environmental work that we do.
Banner image: gyro, Canva.