Information and insights provided by member organisations of SSPA, April 2020

Families and communities are facing significant challenges in daily life as a result of New Zealand being placed at Alert Level 4, with all except some essential workers being required to remain at home. Social service providers are working in new ways to support families thorough this time. This Snapshot highlights what some SSPA members have told us they are seeing amongst the families they are working to support and how they are responding.

read it here

March 2020 - read the latest news from SSPA detailing an upcoming open space meeting for SSPA members via zoom.  You'll also find details about workshop and event cancellations.  However there's the chance to share your ideas and brainstorm how to provide services if face to face contact becomes impossible via a zoom brainstorm session.  Read more here

March 2020 - Good piece on One News about the continuing problem for NGOs arising from inadequate funding to pay competitive wages.  We're looking for a boost to funding in the 2020 Budget as a step towards sorting this out.  Minister Carmel Sepuloni is quoted in the piece referring to work being done on the best way to fund social services.  Really pleased she has commissioned this much-needed work and pleased to be involved with it - but it is explicitly NOT looking at the level of funding needed.  Hence my focus on the Government addressing that in the Budget.  Big thanks to Judy Matai'a at ATWC and to Andy Pilbrow at Birthright Hawkes Bay and their collegues who also featured.  The real life stories make a difference.

February 2020 - read the joint letter to Ministers from SSPA and our members calling on the Government to take the following three steps in the 2020 Wellbeing budget:

• Announce as part of this investment the allocation of an additional $300 million into current NGO social services baseline funding.

• Address the broader funding gap facing NGO social services by including in Budget 2020’s Child Wellbeing package a commitment to fully funding all contracts for essential services delivered by NGO social services.

• Announce your commitment, in the longer term, to implementing the broader package of recommendations to ensure sustainability of NGO social services, as set out in the Funding Gap report.  Read more here