Social Investment Agency? Whānau Ora Is Leading The Way.

The announcement this week by the Government about their Social Investment Agency demonstrated that Māori agencies like ours have been ahead of the curve for the past ten years. ?

Governments around the world struggle with throwing millions of dollars at the next trendy programme being touted as bringing relief to the problem of the day. And they are layering millions of dollars on top of a whole range of programme funding, the quality of which no one knows. This is conducted predominantly in poverty stricken parts of society where that community is blamed for the issues, not the people delivering the so called “service” that they justly deserve.?

What social investment protocols do is start to identify what is being funded in the total eco system. Take education for example. A child cannot absorb education if they are not well clothed at home, if they are not well nourished at home and if they are not in a warm and safe home with the right support around them.?

There are multiple elements that middle class people take for granted, things they don’t even notice because they are accustomed to living in that way. For our poorer communities, their reality is living in struggle street where they are not able to provide those “basic” resources to their children every day. Sometimes they have to choose what the priority of the day will be, sacrificing one thing over the other.?

Hundreds of millions of dollars is pumped into fixing that problem. However, that money is going to providers who self-fund rather than fund what their community needs. Social investment packaging allows us to unbundle all of that and to look at who is performing and who is not, something a lot of Government departments despise, particularly the present leadership at the Ministry of Social Development and Ministry of Education.?

For example, big players like church-based providers, who are really businesses like Vision West which is the Baptists, or Family Works which used to be called Presbyterian Social Services. These are multi-million dollar organisations which, back in the day used to work, but how effective are they now? ?

What we have to do is ask why aren’t they working?? And if they’re not working, take away their funding. That’s exactly what would be done to us at Te Whānau o Waipareira and Whānau Ora. It’s about an accountability regime and more importantly, it’s about the quality of the delivery of whatever that service is that child would need to be a pro-active, citizen moving forward in an aspirational way.?

You can talk social value impact all day, and we do because this is something we have been doing for over ten years. It is a fiscal fact that we are always underfunded and May 30th will be testament to that and for the fourth year in a row I’ll be releasing our scorecard on the The Budget on June 1st. Regardless of who governs, just follow the money and let’s see per annum where that takes us.?

The Social Value Investment Agency is something that Whānau Ora has had in place for ten years. And we are the only operation that discloses that up and down the country across 82 health clinics and 101 Māori partners; 76 per cent of whom are iwi owned and 24 per cent owned by mātāwaka groups like MUMA and Te Whānau o Waipareira. That’s worked incredibly well for us and evidenced through our collective response to COVID. Over 20 per cent of this nation was vaccinated through Whānau Ora and the effectiveness and efficiency is beyond compare. We outperformed the state and the private sector, on any measure.?

In 2014 we started at the bottom of the Social Value development. Ten years later we are in the top ten per cent of groups in a global movement. We are a part of, Social Value International. Social Value Aotearoa is our national group that delivers these tools.

We know that evidence-based and quality-based tooling counts which is why we front up saying here’s our evidence to evaluate our spend. If we are not qualitative, we should not get resourcing. And that should apply to everyone.?

The issue this government has is you cannot run a social return on investment model on a network unless you are accredited. We have that ecosystem because we are a part of the international and regional entities and we have qualified staff throughout Whānau Ora and Te Whānau o Waipareira.? Our data and analytical system is head and shoulders above the rest because we are the first to have ISO accreditation in Aotearoa meaning, our security with data is the best in the country.?

We are no longer going to be destabilised or put down when we are ahead of the pack. What we should be hearing is praise and developing a joint venture with the state when it comes to their Social Investment Agency. So rather than criticise Māori agencies, you should be supportive and learning from our systemic that we have built up over the past ten years called Whānau Ora, where our entities are social enterprises, not managing a problem actually providing long term solutions.

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John Tamihere is Chief Executive of West Auckland Urban Māori organisation Te Whānau o Waipareira and the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency?