Understanding global issues in our local context

I haven't posted for ages...

But Kate has been busy. She has a great article here and here about her realisation that she could tackle poverty and injustice in her own backyard, not just by studying aid and development and then dashing off overseas. A snippet:

When I returned home, I started studying International Development, wanting to find positive ways to use my privileges. So I spent a lot of time learning about how sustainable development could create improvements in the quality of human life. On a personal level, I
began giving money away to overseas development projects. But I was increasingly frustrated at the gap between my beliefs and my actions. My life in Melbourne looked more or less as it had before. I was struck as I studied that the world could be such a different place but for greed and a lack of compassion. The problems of globalisation are similar everywhere, and the struggle for social justice and poverty eradication means getting to poverty’s structural heart. So while suffering needs to be confronted on a global scale, I was still uncomfortable about doing nothing to tackle the injustice and poverty in my own city - fragmented, yearning for meaning, often characterised by self-obsession, loneliness, materialism and estrangement.