A Lower Hutt mum who was severely assaulted while heavily pregnant has joined a rally against the closure of a charity that gave her vital support during a “harrowing” time in her life.
Hutt residents are rallying to save their local Birthright centre, which supports 1000 families experiencing hardship every year, but is set to close next month because of funding shortfalls.
Mum Samara said the organisation was “living proof of the vital safety net this organisation provides”.
“They were really the only people who consistently had my back and stuck with me,” she told the Herald.
Birthright is a national non-profit social service that has been operating its Hutt Valley centre for 68 years.
It provides single parents with food parcels, clothing, transport, mental health support, parenting advice and help accessing their benefit entitlements.
While the Hutt Valley centre’s operational costs rose and the competition to secure philanthropic grants got tougher, the overall funding given by Oranga Tamariki has not increased since 2023, centre manager and social worker Sarah Szabo said.
She said Birthright Hutt Valley was unable to cover its funding gap of $140,000 per year, so it planned to close its doors on May 22.
The impending closure would be a heartbreaking loss for local parents who needed immediate support and could not afford to be put on a waitlist elsewhere, Szabo said.
Solo parent Samara, 29, who is keeping her last name private, said she was physically attacked by her then-partner while pregnant last year.
She suffered multiple injuries and her baby began bleeding after damage to her placenta, so she was hospitalised for a total of 10 days.
Ongoing complications from the injuries later caused her to have an induced labour ending in emergency C-section.
“Birthright did what no other agency could,” Samara said.
The service helped her and her son get a permanent protection order against her ex, provided food parcels and drove her to critical appointments after her ex damaged her car.
“When I underwent an emergency C-section, it was not a state service that brought my newborn and me home, it was my social worker Alice and the [Birthright Hutt Valley] manager Sarah.”
Samara praised the service for having social workers that understood “the complexities of the WINZ system, the Family Court, and the daily reality of single-parenting in a cost-of-living crisis”.
She is pushing to keep Birthright Hutt Valley open so “the next heavily pregnant girl in the hospital” has somewhere to go.
She was one of about 40 people to join a rally protesting the closure yesterday, alongside members of the Public Service Association (PSA), New Zealand’s largest union.
In a statement, the union said the closure would leave “hundreds of local single-caregiver families without a lifeline, and the staff that support them without a job”.
“The PSA says Government cuts have forced more groups to compete for a shrinking pool of philanthropic grants, effectively starving the sector.”
The union called for Government agencies like Oranga Tamariki (OT) to work with the Birthright board to find a way to keep the Hutt Valley centre open.
OT deputy chief executive of commissioning and investment Benesia Smith told the Herald Birthright Hutt Valley was a “valued” service provider.
“We currently have no intention of either reducing or ceasing funding for contracting for these services from Birthright Hutt Valley.
“We have not made any cuts to their services, and have increased their funding in recent years to support Social Worker Pay Equity.”
Szabo said the last time OT had increased Birthright Hutt Valley’s funding was in 2023 but staffing and operational costs had risen since then.
To help prevent the closure, she said the “ideal scenario is that somebody with access to funding of some kind comes forward and offers to help us”.
“We know there are philanthropists in our community, so that would be amazing.”
The Hutt centre is not the only one of its kind to face funding shortfalls.
In 2024, Birthright Whanganui closed after 65 years because it lost its $40,000 Government contract and it was unable to secure other funding.
In 2021, Lower Hutt’s Te Awakairangi Birthing Centre closed just three years after it opened.
After next month, the closest Birthright centres for Hutt families will be the Wellington centre in Thorndon and the Kāpiti Coast centre, the latter of which is currently closed to new clients.
Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.