Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Soup the first course for poor students

from The Australian

Dorothy Illing

IN winter it offers pumpkin, mushroom or tomato soup with a chunk of Turkish bread. In summer it's a juice bar.
So popular has the soup kitchen become at Murdoch University in Perth that, on average, 16 litres is consumed by students every 40minutes.

"The sad thing is we see quite a lot of regulars turn up at a certain hour to ensure they've got that bit for the day," student guild manager Gerry Georgatos says.

About one in five students at Murdoch University are classified as having low socioeconomic status. Many are the first generation in their family to go to university.

The soup kitchen, which began last year and runs two days a week, is one of a number of schemes the guild runs to help disadvantaged students.

Among them are recycled clothes, hampers, textbook vouchers, recycled electrical goods and a used computer service that last year distributed 7000 recycled computers, half of them to Perth students, the rest to communities in need in Australia and overseas. Georgatos says the guild is using practical ways to assist the growing number of students who live below the poverty line.

"There is no point forever arguing for governments to address the hidden poverty of students.

"In our case we decide to do what we can to address poverty with our patchwork solutions and assist in ensuring they stay in education long enough to graduate," he says.

Last year the guild carried out a welfare survey of students at Murdoch University.

About 20 per cent of the 667 students who responded said their total average fortnightly income was less than $200.

For more than half it was less than $400, and for 68 per cent it was less than $500 a fortnight.

About 2500 of the 10,881 students at Murdoch are healthcare card holders.

The guild's education vice-president Eden Ridgeway says a growing number of students work and they are "definitely working longer hours". That has affected how many turn up to lectures.

She says universities need to adopt more flexible ways of helping students engage when they need to spend so much time off campus.

She suggests providing lecture notes on the web, recordings of lectures and repeat lectures are some of the ways they can do this.

Georgatos predicts the financial situation will get worse for students as the cost of rent, books, HECS and other living expenses rises.

"It's a hidden poverty: sometimes it's actually disguised because they say student poverty is part and parcel of life when you're young," he says.

2 comments:

GERRY GEORGATOS said...

Letter to the Editor: XMAS

Through my work and other commitments I see the best and worst of society (people). The best stirs hope for the worst that singes my soul. I spend my work days trying to find ways to help those who slip through the management systems of our societies.

I am the General Manager of the Student Association at Murdoch University. I spend my days working outside my position description to find ways to help students stay in education, to change their lives. I also head Students Without Borders, 10,000 students strong, and I founded SWB a couple of years ago to assist students to help other students and now whole communities. We have global social reach.

SWB was recently recognised at the WA Government Community Service Industry Awards where we were multiple finalists and award winners.

The world can't just change with flushes of monies and infrastructure but rather with an ethos of caring.

The attributes I want to see instilled in our university graduates are those that make us aware of one another and the desire to engage and make a difference for those that need us.

I see XMAS churn over each year and I sit and reflect about people and the great divides. It breaks my heart to see us live in divides, and it breaks my heart to see those who have the capacity to help others not to do so.

What do we need to have, to own, to be in order to realise that it is enough? What education do we need before we realise we can actually help others, give them a break, be there for them? What do we need before we just understand the other?

I am a strong advocate for those less fortunate, and for propriety in general, and I step on many toes, of those in expensive shoes, nevertheless I do realise that in the end we need to educate one another, the haves and the have nots.

We need to come together, maybe we are, maybe the unfolding human rights language will ensure this in a time long after us. I wish justice were a sprint rather than a marathon.

On my office wall hang two paintings, two of the most beautiful pieces, which I bought to help out a young struggling student, who only two weeks later took her life because the impacts of society, the pressures were too much for someone with very little and alone.

It's XMAS and maybe we could reflect on the idea of what XMAS means and carry this meaning each day of our lives. I love no one better than the Little Drummer Boy, he gave everything he had, and still had it to give again.

Gerry Georgatos

GERRY GEORGATOS said...

Freedom of speech should not be overwhelmed by imposts such as codes of conduct. Freedom of speech is one thing and conduct is altogether something different. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to expression and comment.

I work on a University campus and when I witness freedom of speech cut down then we have major societal problems when our identity forming bastions are managed in these immature ways.

Australia, unlike most other Western countries, has not included freedom of speech in its Constitution but Australia is a signatory and ratifier of many UN conventions which require her to allow for this freedom.

WA, as I have discovered in my 14 years here, is behind the times in terms of the unfolding human rights language that its eastern seaboard counterparts are moving along with. Victoria (2006) and the ACT (2004) even have Human Rights Acts.

Our five WA universities must lead the way in ensuring freedom of comment, this willing away of power towards engagement, as to improve the consciousness of this State and hence its institutions and their accordance to the intentions of laws and policies of inclusion.

We cannot move equitably and justly forward, and address endemic problems, without freedom of speech. When this assumption of freedom of speech is threatened in any way at a University then all society is at high risk.

Gerry Georgatos, Murdoch University Guild General Manager, Coordinator of Students Without Borders, National Spokesperson for Reclaimoureducation