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Linda Glew: Tireless worker for the vulnerable people in our community

April 3rd, 2010
By David Armstrong

A Quaker-based commitment to help society's more vulnerable people motivates keen gardener and angler Linda Glew in a wide range of roles within Motueka's social work networks.

Linda is currently the coordinator of the very successful Strengthening Families programme in Motueka, but in the past she has been deeply involved in probation services and drug counselling both in her native England and over her more recent 16 years in New Zealand.

For many people in this town working in social and health services and community groups, Linda is the "go to" person to navigate the community networks in which contacts may be made and help found.

Linda seems to have been destined to devote much of her life to helping people in need. She was born 62 years ago in Yorkshire into a working class family. Her mother was a strong advocate for social justice and fairness and her father was a pacifist - "and I wonder where I got those things from," she laughs.

She left school to begin teacher training but soon took on a two-year volunteer service position in Egypt during the Egypt-Israeli wars, teaching teachers. There her long-standing love of language allowed her to learn Arabic within two weeks. "I had to live as an Egyptian, speak Arabic. I wasn't part of the British colonial set."

Straight after this posting ended she was back overseas, this time on a private contract as a boarding school house mistress and teacher in Nigeria. This was a vastly different experience to her immersion in Egyptian.

"This time, as a white person living amongst black people, I had to stay within and become part of my own colonial set," she says. "I didn't have a choice, and that came as a big shock. Any friendships with Nigerians were really quite difficult, certainly with Nigerian men."

Being unable to satisfy her natural curiosity about this different culture and to explore what it was like to live in their shoes, "it was not a happy experience, although I learned a great deal about being an alien in a reverse culture - a white among blacks rather than a black among whites".

Back in the United Kingdom in her mid-20s, Linda felt the classroom environment would be too claustrophobic so she joined a publishing firm involved in making a new schools' comprehension and reading kit. Her role was to market the kits by making presentations to teachers and conferences around the UK and in Europe. Linda became sales and marketing manager of a team working on this project.

"With my background, now being in the commercial sector, it wasn't me who had anxieties about losing my integrity, but I remember my mum saying to me that I don't really like who you're becoming. I took a look at myself and I could understand what she was saying, that I had all of the kinds of skills but I wasn't utilising them in a way that had integrity.

"I realised that I'd become very money-focused and a bit of a smart arse. It wasn't me really. But in that environment it was very easy to get caught up into that hype." So she left the company after three years and was unemployed for a while in order to "look at what I was going to do for the next 30 years". She decided on social work.

"At that stage I knew that I was going to be living a woman-centred life, I wouldn't be getting married, I wouldn't be having children, so I would always have to be financially independent." She was openly gay in an era when it was still not at all easy. "In the later 70s we had the peace movement, CND, we had feminism, Germaine Greer, and I was only beginning to wake up to it because I was coming to a sense of my own identity and where I fit in."

She began to experience discrimination, and received no empathy when she began work in the career she chose in the probation service. After two years training for the profession, she returned to Yorkshire to work and found that at her assessment interview she was grilled about her "lifestyle" and how it affected her working with women offenders.

"To be asked those kinds of questions was really difficult, so I responded by saying that if I have any inkling that there is any discrimination against me then I shall go straight to the union. He backed off."

Her strength came from her membership of the Quaker movement, the Religious Society of Friends, which she joined in 1979. "I felt held by Quakers in the time I was a probation officer. Being a probation officer fitted with Quaker principles of social responsibility," she says. "Though there were some struggles, it was a rich learning time for me."

She worked in several probation officer roles for the next 20 years. The first two years she was based in a huge remand centre. "That brought me so much learning, working with men on remand for murder. That taught me a lot about loss and grief. The Quaker principle of 'that of God in every person' is the foundation of the way I live my life, why I do what I do, and to be in that environment with those men gave me a lot of privileged learning."

Next was a period as a drugs counsellor in a pioneering, multi-disciplinary team when HIV-Aids was new. Needle exchange and methadone programmes initiated there were based on a harm-minimisation approach. "Again, I was working with people around loss and motivation, coaching and guiding and being a vehicle toward them reaching potential."

By then Linda decided it was time to step up into management and co-led one of the biggest teams in Cheshire in community development projects working on issues such as employment, youth and drugs. In 1993 she set off on a tramping holiday in Iceland where she met her current partner, Dunedinite Sally.

"We'd been friends for about two years when their attention was brought to a New Zealand Herald article saying probation officers were needed in Auckland." She had already told Sally that she really wanted to come to New Zealand, despite knowing very little about the place. At 45 years of age, she knew it was time to move. Sally was happy to move as well.

She took a job as probation officer in Mangere, Otahahu and Otara. "It was a baptism of fire culturally," she says. "Again I was in the situation of being in the minority as a white person, but in a whole melting pot, and I felt absolutely included, embraced in the learning and the spirit of the work I was doing. For me, I'd come home."

After three years, Sally wanted to come back to "the mainland" and got a teaching job in Mapua. Linda wasn't able to transfer directly within the probation service so she spent three months working out what to do in a town with a much smaller job market for the skills she had to offer.

They moved in 1999 and purchased their home with its large secluded garden in Motueka. She chose to live here rather than Nelson, she says, "because of the feel of small-town New Zealand, the feel of community, and community has been my foundation. Community and service has been an important part of my identity. Motueka offered me a lot of that."

Then she found a job as Projects Manager for Health Action, a health promotion organisation, based in Nelson but operating throughout the Tasman area. This involved a lot of networking through the Motueka Community and Whanau group and other local connections.

She put three years into this work, and in 2001 was shoulder-tapped to work part-time for NMIT in community education, providing support and education in the voluntary sector throughout the top of the South Island. "I felt that, having started as a teacher, I'd gone full circle," she says. It all fitted with the Quaker principles of being a vehicle for people achieving their potential. And I like the creativity of it."

At the time, Linda had a parallel activity of professional supervision. She explains that increasingly over the past decade organisations expect managers and employees to have regular sessions with professional supervisors to ensure they are doing their work ethically and safely with regard to their clients.

She did a course in the discipline at Massey University and, in 2004, took the "leap of faith" to go out into private business, setting up called Online Supervision Services operating full-time from Nelson and eventually including online work using Skype.

About three years ago, approaching the age of 60, Linda decided to step back from this work and do more work within the Motueka community. Although she was living here, working daily in Nelson with professional friendships there she felt she still did not have a sense of really belonging here. To help with income, she continued just the online services but passed on all face-to-face clients.

Soon she was talking with people involved in community services in Motueka and before long she took on the part-time job of coordinating Strengthening Families, a service within the Family Works (Presbyterian Support) umbrella.

Linda is, or has been, on the boards of several community groups, including Alzheimer Society (chair), Get Safe, Health Action, KidPower and Family Service Centre. Those who attend the monthly Community & Whanau group attest to Linda's thorough knowledge of contacts around the services networks. She is also on the national committee of the Quakers, and takes part in the local group meetings held in private homes.

If all of this suggests that Linda Glew's life is filled with serious work and caring for others, it would be ignoring many of her down-to-earth interests and a gentle sense of fun. She and Sally love games and dress-up parties. And Linda has a great love of the outdoors and particularly river fishing.

"I'm absolutely passionate, even obsessed about fishing," she says with a big smile on her face. "My forebears were fisherpeople on trawlers in the North Sea, fishing for cod. Sally and I belong to the RSA Fishing Club, so we can expand our experiences. We fish from our kayaks. I don't actually need a rod, but put me on a river and I'm like a dog with two tails." Walking and cycling are also strong interests.

"But my garden just draws me, because it's very therapeutic. Being in the garden and reconciling myself to 'nature will have her way' is a wonderful lesson of discipline. It also highlights my insignificance, and that's not a bad thing. I know my place."

 
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