By Ally Mullord
Community organisations are set to benefit from a new fund aimed at reducing family violence.
The Family Centred Services Fund, announced yesterday by Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment Tariana Turia, will provide over $13 million of funding in the 2011/2012 year.
Frontline organisations working directly with families and whanau will receive over $9.25 million of the funding, while another $2.641 million has been approved for co-ordination services working to bring together frontline organisations.
A further $780,000 is currently unallocated, and will be used to target areas of high need and address gaps in service provision.
Ms Turia says the groups are funded to work with New Zealand families living with violence, and “help them build on their own strengths and work out their own ways to change the anti-social practices that lead to family violence”.
She says before “long-lasting change" can be achieved, families need to “take responsibility for their own members” and be given "tools to transform their homes and lives into places of safety and wellbeing”.
The fund approved 166 of 293 applications; 121 for direct services, 35 for co-ordination and 10 for a combination of both.
This is on top of the 25 organisations already funded under the previous Family Violence Whānau Ora Fund, which was rolled into the new fund.
Some of the organisations receiving funding under the scheme are Women's Refuge, Relationship Services, Presbyterian Support and NZ Ethnic Social Services.
The new fund was announced on the same day as the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Plunket, Awarua Social and Health Services, and Invercargill Police in a bid to reduce family violence in Southland.
The MOU aims to enable better sharing of information between agencies, something Plunket area manager Barb Long says will help provide “a fence at the top of the cliff approach” to family violence.
Invercargill Police Family violence co-ordinator Sergeant Greg Baird says informal relationships have been in place between the organisations for some time.
“What the MOU does is formalise these relationships and provide a process for dealing with at risk families and support them to care for and raise their children safely,” he says.
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