Stephen Billing’s Blog

Spare a thought for those who are working in the non-government organisation (NGO) sector. Imagine this scenario.

The users of your service do not pay for it. Instead a central funding organisation contracts you to provide certain services to certain numbers of service users for a fee. Imagine that you are providing long term residential services to elderly people who experience mental illness. Over periods of 10 years or more your staff providing the care would develop deep relationships with these users of your services.

Now, imagine you are funded by a contract that is renewed annually. The process of negotiating the contract takes several months so you start negotiations for your June contract in February in order to have everything finalised for the new financial year starting in July. You have some tweaking and improvements you want to make to the contract so you signal them early.

Your contract is one of many for the procurement person you deal with, and because it still has four months to run you are not on their priority list. Weeks go by without response from your contract / relationship manager. Things get urgent, but eventually the contract expiry date passes and a new contract is still not finalised.

You carry on providing services (the alternative is to make vulnerable people find a new place to live), perhaps securing a temporary extension of the contract to enable this happen. The extension also runs out before finalising the next contract.

Eventually your new annual contract is finally signed by both parties, just in time to start negotiating the next year’s contract.

This time there has been a change in personnel in the procurement group of your funding organisation and the new person has no experience of mental health. You find yourself explaining in detail the services you offer, sometimes to what seem like deaf ears.

The new person knows nothing about the agreement in principle you had with the previous contract manager for improvements to the services and you find you have to start all over again. But you are not back to square one. You are at square zero, because the new person does not have experience of your sector, you have to explain context, history, unique factors of your sector, and go over, once again, prior discussions you had with their predecessor.

According to research published this year by Platform, which is a connector of NGOs providing mental health and addiction services, this is a relatively typical experience of a mental health / addiction NGO with a funding organisation – typically a District Health Board.

It is certainly typical of those mental health NGOs I have worked with. Imagine what it must be like to be a CEO of an organisation working in such an environment. The uncertainty is palpable, and because the clients are not the ones who pay for your service, you have many masters. As you can imagine, this environment makes mental health (and other) NGOs extremely vulnerable.

I take my hat off to those CEOs and senior leaders in NGOs who are able to keep their organisations stable and productive in such unconducive conditions. And I take my hat off to the support workers who are so pivotal in the lives of those who experience mental illness. Support workers develop long term relationships with those they support. Sometimes these people are very hard to relate to, and support workers develop relationships which may be as close as, or closer than family relationships. What an accomplishment!