“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted by consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” Noam Chomsky.
In December 2023 National announced that social investment was back. Government would provide a Social Investment Fund starting in 2025 and top it up in each year’s budget. Private capital would also be considered. They said they would, “consider opening the Social Investment Fund to investment from New Zealanders seeking positive social change for the disadvantaged”.
Social service delivery is going to be turned on its head and current funding redirected. NGOs meeting the social investment criteria would be contracted to provide social services over a set period. If they don’t deliver their funding will be re-deployed.
Nicola Willis’s version of social investment is more structured than that of Bill English and Amy Adams. However, it still has the same symptom-centric aspirations when the root causes are what need to be fixed. In an article in NZ Doctor Willis said, “I believe we can, and we must, do better. So, we’re taking a different approach. We want to look beyond good intentions in our policymaking and use hard evidence to invest in what works.”
From my experience telling us what we do is ‘well-intentioned but ultimately useless’ is an insult. Clients seek out local NGOs because they need help and they need it now. The help we give them is tailored to their needs and aimed at getting them on a pathway to self sufficiency both financially and mentally.
From where I stand, the rationale for National’s social investment is prevention of cost. For example, it costs about $100,000 a year per prisoner. Youth crime like ram raids cost retailers and the taxpayer in police and court time. People receiving benefits long term also cost the taxpayer, are unproductive and therefore need to be moved off benefits as soon as possible. They never stop to think that a beneficiary might be a volunteer, or a parent and looking after children is productive. Drug abuse and family violence cost the taxpayer and the economy in lost productivity and health costs. All these are seen as a significant drain on revenue.
To prevent that, the concept of social investment uses data to create a profile of at risk individuals and structure interventions which will set them on the right path, even before they head down the wrong one. In other words, this approach only deals with the symptoms of social deprivation, not the basic need families have for shelter, food and security. It’s a bit like prescribing Panadol to cure the pain of a broken leg when setting it would work better in the long term.
Over the years, successive governments abdicated responsibility for providing social services. Consequently, a range of local community NGOs sprang up to meet the need. To date these have been funded by central or local government along with some charitable donations. Foodbanks, budget services, family support services, women’s refuges, community education programmes, Citizen’s Advice Bureaus, church groups, have all played a part in keeping the wheels on for families and individuals in need. Now so many of these NGOs have been defunded, the government plans to restructure the sector through an amalgam of hand-picked NGOs and digitisation.
For many of the services community NGOs currently provide, the government is proposing to use online tools such as an App or an AI generated Chat Bot. Digitisation is the way they see our sector’s future. Recently Technology Minister Judith Collins announced their version of ChatGPT, GovGPT, as “an exciting first step towards a vision of a 'digital front-door', where individuals can find answers to their questions about government in a convenient and timely way," she said.
MSD spokesperson Mark Henderson has said, after being challenged over funding cuts, that people will be able to find government funded solutions to their issues online. Imagine you’re in crisis, the repo man is at the door to take the family car and you’re trying to get help from Gary the Chat Bot.
This brilliant 2017 article by Simon Wilson in the Spinoff examines National’s approach to social policy. Interestingly the issues concerning the government are the same issues Labour inherited from John Key’s government and have passed on to the National led coalition to deal with.
With community organisations out of the way, the field is open for larger more corporate NGOs to take up the government’s challenge to shift the dial on social issues like child poverty, crime, family violence, and drug abuse.
As soon as he exited parliament, Bill English and his family started an enterprise called ImpactLab which does social impact reports for the NGOs and businesses who can afford the $30k price tag. Small enterprises like the Budget Service I work with could never afford one.
While Nicola Willis is quick to say that ImpactLab isn’t the only service providing social impact analysis and reporting, she is signalling strongly that organisations wanting government support ‘going forward,’ will need to provide them when tendering for funding. An example of this is the $24 million given to Gumboot Friday after they did an ImpactLab report.
However, to me that’s where the failure of logic behind their version of social investment begins. If only the well-heeled NGOs can afford the reports, then there will be consolidation and centralisation of services around a few organisations and many local community initiatives will be lost.
This is a tragedy because local NGOs know their community. They live there, they know the individuals and the families they support. They know their backgrounds, their issues and challenges and work alongside them to find an outcome that works for them. Their clients are not faceless statistics but people in need with a range of often complex issues requiring a nuanced solution.
The funded projects will be a mix of Social Impact Bonds (SIB) and other programmes. Those initiatives deemed worthy of support will deliver social services using a mix of private and government funding. One, the Genesis Youth Trust was reasonably successful. The bond was issued seven years ago to fund the operations of Genesis Youth Trust, an Auckland-based charity working with youth offenders.
In an article by Emma Hatton of Newsroom, she says “Five organisations, including the Superannuation Fund, invested in the $6 million bond, which is expected to deliver a 6-10 percent return. However, despite its success and potential as a blueprint for other investments, it was shut down in 2023. This was because there was much antipathy towards the idea of private enterprise profiting from social inequality and the shift in responsibility for social services away from government. Also, the upfront investment is large and small community-based NGOs unlikely to qualify or even compete.”
The danger is that these programmes will do nothing for most people facing social deprivation. In another article by Hatton, Professor Michael O’Brien of the Child Action Poverty Group says, “The individualised targeting that they’ve been talking about will not take us anywhere in terms of shifting the dial on incomes, on poverty, on housing affordability, which is what determines what happens for so many individuals and families and communities.”
In a 2010 article in Stanford’s Social Innovation Review, Geoff Mulgan wrote about the “four unavoidable complexities that bedevil the measurement of social value”. Basically, people bring different mindsets, perceptions and experiences to the table when looking at social investment and consequently, modelling for the long term doesn’t happen.
The Social Investment Fund will use the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) run by Stats NZ. This is a database collating anonymised data from a range of sources, which will guide the fund in identifying targets to build solutions around. The fund will then contract NGOs to deliver those solutions. However, because clients are complex with diverse needs, how can you accurately assess them through data. Being on a benefit, antisocial behaviour, crime, family violence, and drug abuse are all symptoms of a wider problem and there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution.
Taking at a closer look at how NGOs are going to be measured, I read the ImpactLab GoodMeasure report on MoneyTime, a platform that teaches financial literacy. The report shows the return on investment (SROI) of $7.70 for every $1 invested.
From what I understand of social investment, the aim is a shift in the wellbeing of the targeted cohort. The difficulty is how do you measure that? Should it be at an individual level, or a macro level. I suspect that it’s the macro level this government is interested in. Shifting the dial on statistics but not the underlying causes of crime, welfare dependency, drug and alcohol abuse, and family violence.
So, is there a new way of solving social issues that is not as Willis and others in the government classify as ‘well-intended programmes’ that don’t deliver? Or the social investment approach that prejudges a person’s pathway based on statistics? I believe that there is and that it starts at the local community level.
Geoff Mulgan advocated for NGOs to collaborate across sectors. This is something I believe is missing from our social services sphere. Rather than focusing on deficit measures and data, why notfocus on social wellbeing as the goal. Treasury’s way of categorising wellbeing has four ‘capitals’ – social capital, financial and physical capital, human capital and natural capital as outlined in their Living Standards Framework (LSF).
In many ways the Ardern government followed the LSF path by instituting the wellbeing budgets, where government departments bid for funding not just based on what they need, but on how it would provide intergenerational benefits for kiwis.
In a 2022 report for MSD titled The Intensive Case Manager and Navigator Initiatives Evaluation Report, started by saying that “a stable and affordable home provides a crucial platform for health, employment, education, and wider community engagement and participation.” This initiative was centred around homelessness, but I think it is well worth considering for a wider programme using community led navigators. For this project the Navigators were funded by NGOs and the case managers by MSD. I worked with one of the MSD intensive case managers to get my client out of emergency housing and into a rental. It wasn’t a simple case but working together we got it solved.
If this initiative was to be broadened, I think it would work better than Social Investment. The main advantage I see is the ability to create a cohesive delivery of services that fits with the needs of the local community. It can involve businesses, churches, police and schools as well as social service and other NGOs to ensure the whole community is on board with it. One way this could be done is to have social service navigators funded by MSD to co-ordinate the efforts of local social service NGOs to ensure that there are no double ups and no gaps in delivery.
One organisation which could be used as an example is Navigators Community run by the Gateway Community Trust in Papakura. For almost thirty years, Gateway Community Trust has been dedicated to empowering the Papakura and South Auckland communities through making connections with diverse stakeholders in the social services sphere; churches, government departments, and community groups. Their work is centred around three key areas of impact, families, children and leadership development. Collaboration with community NGOs deliver a range of social services, including pastoral care, counselling and family-centred initiatives.
If our government really cared about vulnerable families, it would support local communities to provide the wrap around services the vulnerable need. Government would ensure everyone had an income that allowed them to live with dignity. It would make sure there was access to adequate, affordable housing. It would provide free dental and medical care to those who can’t afford it. And would actively assist those who are unemployed to get work that pays a living wage. If government focussed on providing the basic neccessities of life, on delivering an environment where everyone can thrive, most of the symptoms they believe social investment will solve would disappear. As Mahatma Ghandi said, "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members."
Just found you. Good research data and reporting. Thanks.
Thank you for this informative review. A much needed counterpoint to a flawed narrative by National and its coalition partners