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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