SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: A test for Whanau Ora
SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Wero for Whanau Ora
by Pattrick Smellie
April 9 (BusinessWire) - Down in Christchurch, for the last 20 years, the Family Help Trust has beavered away creating one of the best early childhood intervention programmes in the country, creating futures for families that the statistics would normally be first to write off.
They are doing God's work. If anyone should thrive under Whanau Ora, it's committed, innovative, independent organisations like this which have survived more in spite than because of government efforts in the same fields.
The Trust's focus has been ruthless, which
is a big part of why it's been effective. It will help no
child older than five, but it likes to get hold of them
before they're born - their mothers and fathers
self-identifying for their poverty, drug or alcohol abuse,
criminality, family violence, and social isolation.
They have often decided against applying for government
funding when the guidelines would have required them to
change what they were proving worked best.
For those
first five years of the infant's life, the Family Help Trust
wraps itself around this family unit, treating the infant
rather than the parents as its client, and all the
influences on the infant as its job to help the parents cope
with.
Its success is measured on simple, effective
things like reduced rates of smoking in the home, increased
involvement of neighbours and wider family members, and on
the big issues like reduced family violence, addiction, and
criminal recidivism.
In its latest university-backed
study, the Family Help Trust was able to prove it has
lowered rates of family violence from 40.5% to 6.8% among
client families. High levels of reoprted "partner
psychological abuse" have also plummeted. The Family First
crowd mightn't like it, but this is happening partly because
Trust, among other things, gives the abused adult in a
violent relationship the confidence to leave and improve
their lot.
The result? Far less violence towards the
children of a violent parent as well. Fewer Bailey
Kurarikis out the other end. Fewer prisons too, that
wasteful expense being dollied up now as a public-private
partnership investment opportunity for rental property
investors nervously looking for new places to park their
money.
About half the Trust's clients are Maori
children, and they have Maori among their staff who have
been encouraged to develop a "kaupapa Maori" approach to
their services for years. They are not, however, a Maori
organisation.
Recently, glacial changes in public
funding have delivered a small but important stream of funds
from Child, Youth and Family.
That has only come
because the Trust, led by the indomitable and visionary
Libby Robins, had to go out and find funding for an
academically rigorous epidemiological study to prove it was
doing anything right before any government agency would fund
anything it did.
Ignore for a moment the fact that
such a rigorous focus on actual achievements for society's
most vulnerable families has never previously been required
of early intervention programmes run by government agencies
themselves - amazing as that may seem.
Indeed, one
of the best things about the Whanau Ora policy released this
week is that - if it works properly - caring about the
outcomes will be the absolute primary focus of any funding
awarded.
No wonder Finance Bill English thinks
Whanau Ora can be funded from current budgets rather than
needing new ones. If Whanau Ora works, it should lead to a
dramatic cut in wasted funds on current programmes that we
know, without a university study to prove it, don't work as
well as they need to.
For English, this is an
exciting opportunity. He is doing this as a National Party
Minister. He knows if the policy was Labour's, it might be
deemed something like "radical communitarianism". Under a
National-led government, it risks being slagged as no more
than "reform".
Such was English's experience with similar experiments in health reform when he was a Minister in the 1990's Bolger Government.
And that's where the Maori
Party is useful, because if there's one thing the Nats and
the Maoris jointly believe, it's the importance of a spot of
tino rangatiratanga on the home front. What greater unit of
self-determination could there be than the family as a
building block of society?
So the Family Help
Trust, and a myriad of other, dedicated, non-government
agencies living the same experience all over the country -
may Maori, many not - should take heart from the intent of
this week's Whanau Ora policy announcements.
The
proof, however, will be in whether they benefit, and
especially whether merit rather than ethnicity will really
win out where the dead hand of bureaucracy has previously
been a barrier to success.
And if the Family Help Trust does not benefit, how could we not say that the Maori children and families that the Family Help Trust saves have not been the subject of discrimination?
(BusinessWire) 18:37:57