Social service boss says poverty all year round. The director of Methodist City Action says Christians need to be generous all year round, no matter how generous they feel at Christmas.

Catherine Hodges, di-rector of the Hamilton-based social service agency, said they always see a large array of volunteers and donations during Christmas. “People are very generous at the end of the year,” says Ms Hodge.

However, she believes most people do not appreciate how big the problem is.

“I’ve been in the role six months, having come from the private sector and I thought I knew a bit about what was happening in the world,” she explained.

“I’ve been quite confronted by the level of extreme hardship. We’re not opening our eyes to what people around us might be experiencing”.

Methodist City Action is one of the agencies which form the Hamilton Combined Christian Foodbank Trust.

Mrs Hodges says people forget how close they could come to poverty. “It’s because we’ve had a budget blow-out with a big power bill, or an unexpected health cost, or lost our job,” she points out.

“We tend to live right to the last penny of our pay- packet; any overrun that happens completely throws the budget out.”

Poverty does not stop after Christmas, especially for families facing a school year with new stationery, uniforms and fees.

Mrs Hodges is concerned society is becoming more individualistic, with focus on survival and the self outweighing a sense of community.

“The mentality is thinking about what affects just me and my family,” she said. “We do not know our neighbours any more. We’ve just forgotten how to connect with each other.”

Methodist City Action and the Hamilton Combined Christian Foodbank Trust are reliant on community funding and support. There are seven Christian-based agencies in Hamilton that work together to provide food support for families and individuals in need, who are experiencing extreme hardship.

The Foodbank Trust pro-cessed as many applications for food assistance to the end of October 2011, as had been applied for in the entire 2010 year.

“This is a frightening statistic and should have us all concerned about the level of hardship that people are experiencing in Hamilton,” wrote Mrs Hodges in a letter to the Waikato Times. “Donations of food or financial assistance are gratefully received by participating agencies and passed on to the Foodbank to be distributed to those in need.”