KEY POINTS:
Tauranga's family violence prevention network has been rescued at the 11th hour with a grant of $50,000.
The Tauranga Moana Abuse Prevention Strategy called a meeting with Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby yesterday because its funding from the Ministry of Social Development was due to expire at the end
of this month.
But after Herald calls to the ministry in Tauranga and Wellington yesterday morning, the ministry unexpectedly sent a representative to the meeting and said it had found $50,000 to keep the group going.
The money will pay about half the group's costs of $105,000 a year.
"It's a great start, but far from what we needed to keep going," said the network's co-ordinator, Jessica Trask.
The last-minute rescue comes after Rotorua Violence Prevention Services said it would close on July 31 because of a lack of funding, despite a $14 million Government advertising campaign telling abusers "it's OK" to seek counselling.
Hamilton Abuse Intervention Project co-ordinator Lila Jones said inter-agency family violence co-ordination in Hamilton depended on charities such as the WEL Energy Trust and Trust Waikato.
"The co-ordinators across New Zealand have raised the concern that they felt isolated," she said.
"There was no national co-ordination to bring them together to share their stories, hear their issues and take them forward to the Government."
South Auckland and Rodney co-ordinators said they received letters only on Wednesday confirming that their funding would continue from July 1 at the same level as in the financial year ending this month.
The general manager of operations for the ministry's family and community services division, Marti Eller, said the $50,000 for Tauranga came from a one-off $5 million fund earmarked to compensate agencies facing higher workloads because of the national advertising campaign.
"We acknowledge that they are not equitably funded compared to others. That is no reflection on the quality of what they are doing at all," she said.
She said some smaller districts, such as Whakatane, had been allocated $85,000 a year for three years because they applied in the first year of the campaign against family violence. Tauranga applied later and missed out on baseline funding.
The whole funding system is due to be rationalised under a "Pathways to Partnership" policy announced by Prime Minister Helen Clark in February, which guarantees to pay, by 2011, the full costs of "essential services which the Government would have to provide directly if the community couldn't".
Ms Trask said ministry official Peter Waru told the Tauranga meeting yesterday that "essential services" included family violence counselling, but not "prevention" work such as inter-agency co-ordination.
Mayor Crosby said agencies needed "at least a three-year funding stream" to be able to plan their services and employ staff.
