Know Your Worth
On the 15th of July, 10 women graduated from the Know Your Worth programme, run out of Tawa Salvation Army. Jules Badger spoke with Community Ministries Navigator Vanessa Evetts, who facilitates the programme. Vanessa has a strong calling to create spaces where women not only feel heard, accepted and supported, but also grow to understand and affirm their own intrinsic worth and value.
‘Women supporting women is a powerful thing,’ explains Vanessa. ‘When women feel safe and know they can share openly and have people encourage them without judgement, magic happens. They are given the space and grace to make tiny changes that may initially seem insignificant but add up to something mountainous!’
Holistic support
Vanessa is passionate about investing in the lives of women. Like many serving in Community Ministries across the territory, she recognises that while food support is vital and meets an immediate need, it often points to deeper underlying issues.
‘We are constantly thinking about what we can do to holistically support families so they can thrive,’ says Vanessa. ‘What can we offer that empowers their sense of worth and wellbeing and helps restore a sense of power back into their lives? So many are constantly in a system that breaks them down—systemic racism, educational gaps, traumatic life experiences and many other things contribute to a sense of “I can’t” that steals a person’s sense of worth and prevents them from succeeding. It doesn’t have to be that way.’
Vanessa extended the invitation to all women in the local Tawa community, and respondents came.
‘This is a big sacrifice of time for women, especially for mothers of young children. But once they came through the door and made a start, they stayed for the whole programme. The time we spent together activated positive change where many women did not believe change was possible.’
The most recent cohort of Know Your Worth graduates gathered every Tuesday evening for 10 weeks. Aged between 17 and over 60, Vanessa describes the group as ‘beautifully intergenerational’ and adds that group size is crucial. ‘You wouldn’t want more than 15 people because too many and you’d lose that intimacy. In terms of time, anything less than two hours and you’re rushing things and not able to build organic conversation.’
Witnessing change
Content for the programme comes from Lower Hutt-based charitable organisation Worth Unlimited. Vanessa explains that her initial vision for working with women to grow their belief in themselves aligned perfectly with what Worth Unlimited was already offering.
‘Worth Unlimited has 14 years of experience and evidence-based evaluation to support its work. They’ve already been through the trial and error phase and adjusted and changed along the way over the years,’ explains Vanessa, who is both smart and practical. ‘So why would we reinvent the wheel? It’s well worth the investment. We use the “worth kit” in the first term, and I have merged the “I am kit” and the “change kit” into one for the second term.’
Vanessa has been privileged to bear witness to some incredible transformations.
‘When a woman grasps her own profound and unshakeable sense of worth, the impact of that truth is immeasurable. It impacts her family, her marriage, her workplace and relationships with everyone around her. It impacts how she receives information from others because she can receive compliments and dismiss harmful rhetoric. She’s completely transformed.’
Reflecting on the course, graduates said:
‘I have changed my whole life. I have learned how to set and protect boundaries. I resigned from my job and have started training for a new career, and I’ve become much more aware of how I am speaking to and about myself.’
‘I am more aware of the way that I think about myself and how I speak to myself. It is going to take time to change this, but I know now I can change.’
‘This course has helped me learn strategies to be able to move on from my past in a positive way.’
Sharing is caring
Vanessa takes care to explain that building a life that we love does not happen by accident.
‘The Know Your Worth programme is not just about acknowledging our worth and our why—it is also about using this knowledge to activate positive change and build a life that we don’t need to take a holiday from. A life that honours our worth! It helps us build and maintain boundaries; it helps us identify emotional triggers, barriers and stubborn resistance—and learn how to build courage and resilience to push through when life throws a curve ball.’
Vanessa is excited that Worth Unlimited is open to working with other corps and centres across Aotearoa New Zealand and is personally happy to offer support to anyone considering running something similar.
‘Worth Unlimited is a faith-based organisation,’ explains Vanessa. ‘And the skeleton of the programme is faith-based, but it’s not advertised as such because it is presented in a way that anyone can receive the content. It’s sensitively done. Prayer happens
behind the scenes.’
Working primarily with women, Worth Unlimited has recently branched out and now runs programmes for everyone, including rangitahi (youth), and those preparing to enter the workforce either for the first time or after a break.
In Tawa, Vanessa is exploring how the content could be used to invest in local young people.
‘If we can teach this to our children and young people,’ she says, ‘they will become powerful and positive contributors to their own lives and futures and be much more capable of facing challenges with grace and mana.
‘In a world that, at times, works incredibly hard to break us, we need to have an unshakeable sense of our own worth—one that acknowledges that storms will come and moments may be excruciatingly difficult, but we will not be broken.
‘We have immeasurable and incomparable worth that is not determined by external factors. It cannot be diminished and it cannot be taken away—it simply is. This knowledge enables us to bend but not break. This
is truth we can anchor ourselves to when we wobble,’ affirms Vanessa.
