Thursday 4 April 2013

Faith in Action: Hammondcare by Meredith Lake, UNSW Press 2013

There’s a repeated myth that the only photo of Arthur Stace, the Eternity man, is one snatched by a Sydney Morning Herald photographer in the stairwell of the newspaper’s old building in Broadway scrawling “Eternity” just outside the 6^th floor photographic studio. But in a new book, Faith in Action, on the Hammondcare charity here we find a two page spread picture of Stace among the men he was responsible for sheltering in a dormitory during the depression in Chippendale.

The Eternity man was the phantom chalker at dawn of the word “Eternity” wherever tram could take him, and by day was the superintendent of Rev Robert Hammonds’ largest inner city dormitory. From his base at St Barnabas church Hammond built a huge network of relief work. He converted 4,000 men and sheltered thousands more.

Faith in Action starts with the story of Stace, perhaps the most famous of the Hammondcare staff and clients. He was both. And he was a convert of Robert Hammond’s at St Barnabas Broadway in the inner city: “I went in to get a cup of tea and a rock cake but I met the Rock of Ages,” the Eternity man later said.

By the sixties when Stace became ill, one of Hammond’s network of good works, Hammond’s Pioneer Homes, which had built an entire suburb to house the poor, had moved into aged care. So the Eternity man is not only responsible for the world’s most famous one word sermon, but also traced the trajectory of the Hammond charities from poverty relief to aged care. (The modern Hammondcare charity was formed from the Pioneer Homes work, with other parts of the Hammond empire forming part of Sydney’s Anglicare).

Faith in Action asks the question of “what is a Christian charity” – a feature of this organisation is that it has sought to answer that question. It is the story of an charity that has challenged some of its own most cherished beliefs in order to become a leader in aged care, especially the care of people with dementia.

Take temperance for example. Robert Hammond and the depression generation created “dry” facilities. Arthur Stace, for example, had been first arrested for drunkenness at 15, and had grown up in an alcoholic home.

At home I have a tattered copy of “He that Doeth”, a 1951 biography of Robert Hammond by his right hand man and successor Bernard Judd. Temperance is the great crusade: “the open bar is the devil’s way to man, and man’s way to the devil,” Judd quotes Hammond as saying.

“He that Doeth” has an Acts of the Apostle’s feel, heroic figures given a pietistic treatment.

But by 1998 the Hammondville aged care home gets a social hour with alcohol available. Abandoning strict temperance, as Lake recounts, it was was part of rethinking how to be a Christian charity. Christianity had been asserted by rules “formalism fear, legalism”  with strict temperance, compulsory staff chapel, and an “all-pervasive broadcast” of the Sunday service. Some rules were kept -Board Members “declare their agreement with historic doctrines” but the new Hammondcare is happy to have some some senior managers who are not Christians.

A  “battlers only” mentality kept a 1930s ideal of serving the “deserving poor” and charging no entry fees alive until Federal Government regulations made it financially unviable.

Faith in Action takes the history of the charity into a third generation of leaders, including the current CEO Stephen Judd, Bernard’s son, who has made these changes and have rescued Hammondcare from being a small nursing home in a south western Sydney backwater into a large-scale health and aged care provider. It’s not hype to say that Hammondcare is a “light on the hill” for the rest of the industry.

Get a CEO from a rival large scale aged care group into a relaxed enough mood and they will say, “Hammondcare – they are the gold standard in elder care”.

Faith in Action reveals that reputation did not come easily.

It is partly a hard-won consequence of a unique staffing culture. Meredith Lake, the author of Faith in Action, a young historian given unfettered access to Hammondcare documents and people and editorial independence, is an example of Stephen Judd’s ability to entice brainy young Christians into his organisation.

But they become part of a culture alongside staff that have grown up within the organisation: Joanne Innes is one example in the book —joining as laundry assistant, progressing to a staff bursary that meant she could get a nursing degree at UWS.

“Why is it that most charities, Christian or otherwise, hire from outside?” Judd is quoted as saying, “I think it is madness.”

The easy way of importing managers from the corporate sector risks the organisations’ values. This is especially striking as one of the “warts” revealed in Faith in Action is an exodus of staff in the early nineties when Stephen Judd with the board insisted on operating surpluses. It would have been easy to abandon the principal of maintaining a strong culture at this time by choosing managers from outside.

Hammondcare wanted to transform into a business-savvy charity, effective financially but also a place where care staff- not a manager- would rebuke a peer for raising their voice at a resident: “That’s not the way we do things here”.

It was a key change. Building up its own funds has allowed Hammondcare to escape a “barren dependence on government” that Lake says it fell into during the 1970’s and 80s. But by being efficient and developing non-government sources of income, it could put it own initiatives into practise.

It could develop excellence- Hammondcare is widely regarded as a leader in dementia care – and decide to be Christian.

Can Christian charities avoid joining the ranks of post-Christian organisations? Can Christian charities combine the pursuit of  excellence and have a servant culture? The Hammondcare story is that by hard work, effective leadership and maintaining clear goals you can.