Carol, We Miss You Already

The article written by Rachel Mackay, for the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services Kete Kupu Kirihimete 2023 edition is a fond farewell in recognition of Carol’s long serving role as a NZCCSS member. 

Carol Barron, National Coordinator of the Methodist Alliance, is stepping back from her role for her first Christmas as a retiree. As a member of the governing Council of NZCCSS, and an active and engaged member of our Older Persons and Equity & Inclusion Policy Groups, we wanted to take a moment to look back at her career and time with us.

Carol began her working life as a radiation therapist, qualifying in one of the last cohorts to go through English Exams through the London School of Radiographers. She found the combination of her love of maths and physics and her natural inclination to care for people made her perfect for the role.

The on-the-job training was perfect too, for someone who professes to “get bored easily”, and the engagement with the patients was motivating and rewarding. She worked in oncology departments both here and overseas, and it really hammered home that the human experience is a universal one – the cancer patients she had cared for here in Aotearoa were going through the same deeply human thing as those overseas.

After a successful stint in this field, it was time for something new, and so Carol retrained as a lawyer at Canterbury University. She timed the birth of her children for semester breaks, and was supported by her tutors to bring her children to tutorials with her – sometimes to the surprise of her fellow students.

True to her nature, Carol managed to arrange a small cohort of other parents of young babies in her civil liberties class, getting the lecturer to agree to put them all in a group together for an effective and understanding “divide and conquer” approach. It was proof Carol has a knack for creating communities that understand differences and nurture success – they all completed the paper with an A grade.

Carol’s law career spanned personal, properties, commercial and elder care, with her first clerking job being at the New Zealand College of Midwives.

The difference between the clients in her two professions were stark, she noted “I didn’t see my law clients naked, and they gave far less chocolate than the cancer patients ever did.”

A variety of steps, including redundancy, administration for telecommunications, and time as a funding contracts manager at MSD and what was then Child Youth and Family, finally brought Carol to her role as National Coordinator of the Methodist Alliance in 2017. The Alliance itself was established at Conference the year prior, and so Carol is the first person to have held the role and sculpted what kind of position it is.

Over the last six years, the Methodist Alliance has injected an enormous amount of good into communities across the country, but there are a few things that Carol notes as being particularly proud of. Within her first six months in the role, she had arranged national forums for the organisations under the Methodist Alliance banner and has successfully run another two since then.

She uses the network to produce “videos from the front line” to show at the National Conference of the Methodist Church to keep those on the theological side of things up to date with the work being done on the social service side. And she has written The History of Methodist Social Services of Aotearoa – an excellently referenced overview of the impact that the services that would become the Methodist Alliance have had since the earliest missionaries arrived in Aotearoa in 1822.

Throughout her work history, Carol has been deeply involved with the Methodist church, as a parishioner, a Parish Steward, on various Committees, and as a Sunday School teacher. Carol’s engagement with her church and the core values of the Methodist Church is where she thinks her own strong sense of social justice came from.

“We’ve had a long a strong history of social justice in the Methodist Church. It’s part of how I was brought up.” She notes with pride that the Methodists have been actively engaged with cogovernance since the 1980s, when the whole church committed to the Treaty of Waitangi as a covenant relationship at the 1983 Conference. She was thoroughly engaged in protests on key issues when she was younger – such as the antinuclear marches and the anti-racism protests around the Springboks tour.

This lens has allowed her to provide clear leadership in the Alliance on issues such as climate justice, housing issues for Māori and Pacific Peoples, and communication on political party policy. It also afforded the NZCCSS secretariat the combination of her excellent wit and humour, and her critical eye over much of the work produced while she was part of the policy groups and Council.

Despite a full and meaningful career, there are a few other projects Carol would have liked to put her orderly and detail-oriented stamp on before leaving. The newly established Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation holds so much potential for the sector, it would have been fascinating to be involved with its progression.

In addition, the reports coming out from the Royal Commission on the Abuse in Care are important, and the necessary changes for continuity, fairness and independence are critical. Working with those documents to advise the Methodist Church on the changes and processes would have been deeply meaningful and important work.

Now a very active early retirement is planned. She is taking on a volunteer role within the Transitional Team for Mission Resourcing, a small team working to ensure that the systems of the Methodist Church function for the future, as well as returning to Parish Stewardship at her local church.

She is also bringing her father, in his 90s, to come and live with her and her husband. She had been encouraging him to move in sooner, but he wouldn’t do it until she retired, so she has. “This time is precious,” she said. “I want to help him have the best quality of life for the rest of his time with us” Her father is also encouraging her to write the family history of her mother’s side of the family, so she is looking forward to hearing all his stories about them and getting them down on the page.

That might leave a spare afternoon here and there for any of Carol’s other hobbies. “If there’s a craft, I’ve tried it,” she said, outlining her fondness for watercolours and acrylics, pyrography, and needle and yarn crafts.