Strengthening communities through investing in services for outcomes, and building partnerships with communities
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The social service providers that we partner with have extensive knowledge of and connections with their communities, which we rely on to reach the vulnerable people and families who need the most support. This year we launched the Community Investment Strategy to strengthen our partnership with the community sector as we work to make purchased social services more cohesive and with a stronger focus on results.
Strengthening our community providers
We work with some of the most vulnerable people and families in New Zealand. In addition to the services we provide directly, we purchased over $330 million in social services from non-government organisations (NGOs) over the last year to support these vulnerable children, young people and their families.
Community Investment Strategy
The Community Investment Strategy, published in June 2015, sets out a clear direction for our future investment in social services and how we will work with communities and the NGO sector to achieve better results for the people with the highest needs.
The Strategy signals a renewed focus on service effectiveness to help us understand what works and makes a real difference in people’s lives. As our evidence in this area grows, we will make investment decisions to shift funding to where it is needed most and has a demonstrable impact.
To support our work, Superu (formerly the Families Commission) administers the Community Investment NGO Evaluation Fund. The Fund helps social service providers to demonstrate the impact of their programmes on communities and to share what works with the sector.
The Fund’s two areas of focus are:
- advice and expertise that will target providers who want to build sustainable capability in evaluation design and in monitoring systems and improvement in data collection and quality
- programme evaluation to understand how innovative programmes achieve important outcomes for groups in high-priority locations.
Results-based contracting
Through the trials we conducted to test new ways of measuring client results, we gained valuable insights into the best way to design results-based contracts and support providers to move to results-based reporting.
We have included these insights in the plan for implementation of the Strategy over the next three years.
We will move all Community Investment-funded services and programmes to results-based contracts by 2017/2018, with clear performance measures aligned with the Results Measurement Framework[17]. This approach means that the rationale and evidence behind purchasing decisions will be transparent to providers, communities and the Government.
Community Investment
In 2014, we brought together Family and Community Services and the funding and contracting functions of Child, Youth and Family into a new Community Investment group. This is part of our commitment to working differently with our partners in communities and the social sector to support vulnerable children, young people and adults.
Building partnerships with our communities
We have continued to build partnerships to help communities identify issues and find local solutions. This means being flexible so we can work together more effectively.
An example is our continued support for the development of the Make It Happen Te Hiku initiative in the Far North. This work helps align the social development initiatives of the Te Hiku Social Development Accord with the work of other iwi, government agencies, philanthropic organisations, local businesses and local government.
We have also continued to work with the private sector, our social sector partners and communities to find solutions that work. These include:
- partnering with Fonterra, Sanitarium and local school communities to expand the KickStart Breakfast programme into over 830 schools. More than five million breakfasts have been provided since the expansion of the programme and 78 percent of surveyed schools report that students’ concentration levels have improved as a result
- our four-way Community Finance partnership with the Bank of New Zealand, Good Shepherd New Zealand and The Salvation Army. The partnership provides affordable no-interest and low-interest loans to people on lower incomes, mostly for cars and car repairs. The first year of the pilot has been evaluated and the lessons learned will be applied to the ongoing design of the initiative.
Spotlight on testing new ways to measure client results
To prepare for implementing the Community Investment Strategy we conducted trials to test new ways of measuring client results. The trials covered six service types and involved eleven providers. Key themes emerging from the trials have informed the development of our implementation plan.
We worked with two Family Start providers who successfully used a client results framework to expand their existing performance measures into new client-focused result measures.
With a number of families/wh?nau disengaging from mainstream services and support, the providers were keen to test ways of measuring positive client engagement as an important result in its own right. They also tested more objective ways to measure long-term results for children and their families, and explored client data matching between agencies.
The trials included informative discussions to help providers work through the purpose and intent of their measures and how their data could be collected, recorded and reported on.
Footnotes
[1] The Framework provides a direct link between Better Public Services targets and major Government policies such as the Children’s Action Plan, the results sought for vulnerable New Zealanders, the performance of providers and purchased services, and the actual results for clients. It reflects a results-based accountability methodology to ensure that we focus on the right results, measure the right things, and are certain that our work is making a measurable difference in people’s lives.
