Mental Health And Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund Inequitable

The 10 million dollar fund that was promised to community providers after the Government gave Mike King 24 million dollars for mental health has opened for the RFP process. 

However, OutLine Aotearoa are dismayed to see the fund is being administered in a completely inequitable and unfair way. CEO of the national Rainbow Mental Health organisation OutLine Aotearoa, Emmaline Pickering-Martin has massive concerns about the inequity of eligibility for this fund. She explains;

"The pre-requisites to even submit an RFP are so out of touch with the community mental health sector that it negates any possible positives that could come out of this fund and creates again another exclusive pot of money that grassroots and community organisations cannot access at all.

The Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund is a match fund with a MINIMUM application amount of $250,000.00 this means that organisations wanting to submit an RFP in the first instance must have that amount of money in their banks waiting to be used on a project they are proposing. It is absolutely inequitable and unfair to even propose that this fund could be for community mental health when communities do not have that baseline amount to begin with.

Alongside this are a raft of other requirements which rule out 99% of any grassroots or community organisations in the sector. One of them being the need to have hired external experts to audit an organisations ‘project’ they want funded to pre-prove a positive social return on investment. Which means organisations would have to pay out of pocket for this service before even knowing if their application would even be considered. Not to mention the fact that there are a very limited amount of external individuals or organisations that could undertake a social ROI audit IN ADVANCE.

Another ridiculous pre-requisite is that organisations must not spend any of the matched funding on overheads or administration costs. This is absolutely out of touch with the community / mental health / NGO / Charity sector. It is abhorrent that this Government has given a single organisation 24 million dollars without any of these pre-requisites and without a transparent process and yet we are expected to go through this process that is hugely inequitable and unfair for crumbs in comparison.

The real kicker here is Mike King and I Am Hope would now be able to apply for this fund too because they have so much money in their bank from the 24 million given to Gumboot Friday which means they can redirect what was there previously. It is disgusting and a horrific way to hold us all hostage within the sector. Minister Matt Doocey has so much to answer for here.

Our community organisations deserve better than this and our people deserve better mental health and addictions investment. It appears to me that this fund was created with all these impossible pre-requisites because the government already had organisations in mind to take the money. If this government really cared about Mental Health and Addictions and the actual people who need this money they wouldn't have made the money impossible to attain. They are creating the social conditions in this country for people to resort to crime and violence in order to get the help they so desperately require. It is disgusting and we are absolutely calling on the Minister Matt Doocey to make urgent changes to this fund’s criteria".

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