Hope for Community Groups?
AUTHOR: Judy Turner
This week the Prime Minister announced a new willingness to strengthen the governments relationship with those organisations within the Community sector who seek to improve the lives of others.
There is substantial money promised to this end and a new model for delivering that funding.
The optimist in me was very encouraged by what I heard. The skeptic in me knows that the devil is always in the detail.
However if the PM is true to her word, then there is more than just funding in the wind. She talked about organisations facing less bureacracy, fewer compliance costs, more certainty, less duplication of services and a new focus on outcomes rather than just out-put.
This should mean that organisations that have up till now, feared accepting government funding lest they were required to compromise the character of their organisation may now be able to get support and be able to spend less energy on fund-raising and more on service delivery.
UnitedFuture has always believed that help is best given by competent people at a grass-roots level, rather than by centrally driven government departments. This is not to make little of the good work government departments do but to suggest that the safety nets we need in place in every neighbourhood are achieved when there is a high level of collaboration between both government and non-government sectors.
This new approach is focused on what is described as essential services. This means groups who provide services that if they didn't would mean that the government would need to step up. Plunket, Barnardos, Woman's Refuge, Salvation Army, Prisoners Aid and the like will be keen to discover for themselves what these changes will mean to their existing funding arrangements.