Just over a month ago, we shared the heartbreaking news that OutLine Aotearoa, after 50 years of tautoko for Rainbow communities, might have to close its doors. We asked for awhi and launched a crowdfunding campaign to help us survive.

Today, we want to share where things are at and thank everyone who has shown manaakitanga to keep us going. Since December 6th, we’ve raised $47,316.27 across our Raisely and Givealittle campaigns alone (as of January 15th 2025 at 1:20PM). Every koha, big or small, has made a difference. It’s been humbling to see so many people step up to support the kaupapa during an already difficult financial climate.

This aroha, has given us some breathing room. Thanks to your generosity, we’ve been able to keep running our services, including our free support line, peer support groups, and advocacy for Rainbow whānau across the motu for almost another month.

We would also like to thank The Tindall Foundation, Len Reynolds Trust and the Wayne Francis Trust for listening to us and providing us with emergency funding to support us in our time of need. Collectively they provided another $85,000 for OutLine to continue providing our services to the community.

We wanted to share what this means for us moving forward. $132,316 dollars sounds like a big number but the reality is our operating costs alone for a year are around the $700,000 mark. This means we are still running however we still need further support and we are working hard to ensure that we can continue providing free counselling, peer support, education, training and care for our communities. So whilst we are extremely grateful to our donors especially our communities, we will be pushing hard to find support to keep us going. The NGO and Charity sector needs to change.

While this government refuses to listen to the people on the ground and continue to make decisions that go against well researched and evidence based advice our people suffer. So we will not be giving up and we will continue to lobby this government to do better for our sector. A healthy country cannot be sustained in any way by the government running the NGO sector into the ground by not providing financial resources for mental health care in Aotearoa. It is not healthy for us to be consistently chasing money to provide the health care that our government is not providing to our people when it is their responsibility. It is not healthy for the NGO Sector to have such high staff turnover because of burnout. It is not healthy to have the NGO sector begging for money on national broadcasters from a country who is already struggling to put food on their tables, while Ministers actively choose to ignore our plea. It is not healthy for us to be stuck in a cycle of stress and fear and trauma while the government sits back and gives Landlords tax breaks. It is not healthy to ignore your most vulnerable sectors and fund your mates with handshake deals.

Finally Minister Matt Doocey has consistently lead with his line that ‘nothing is a silver bullet’ and his aim is to fund ‘scaleable’ orgs and projects yet he still has not responded to our requests for a face to face hui and he still has not given us any other options for government assistance beyond a second round of mental health innovation fund which again is unachievable for the sector. If Minister Matt Doocey is serious about his role and the work he is doing then they very least he can do is agree to come to our tari and meet with us. Anything else is performative and political posturing for the media. He talks a big talk and we would like to see him walk that walk and do the right thing for Mental Health organisations like ours, our communities and the members of the public who contribute to his larger than average salary and deserve better mental health outcomes.

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