Wishing on a star - a conversation with Dr Ang Jury, Chief Executive of the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges

Imagine an empowerment star shining across the community social services sector – a seven-pointed star in which all things are in balance and organisations are seen, funded and perform as strengths-based, holistic, outcomes focused entities. It may seem like wishing on a star, but there are some contract models in Aotearoa that are starting to come close. We look at the Women’s Refuge collective contract with the Ministry of Social Development as an example.

The eight year collective contract was signed between the National Collective of Women’s Refuges and Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in September 2023. Women’s Refuge had been concerned, like everyone, about inadequate funding. “We ended up negotiating a reasonable FTE rate and a structure that, while it's still not a princely amount, does actually come closer to recognising the costs of running the organisation,” says Chief Executive of the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges, Dr Ang Jury.

The National Collective holds the contract with the Ministry and they subcontract the affiliated refuges. “When something new comes online, that new contract is folded in,” says Ang.

Refuges measure their outcomes with clients using the Empowerment Star. This is one of many star outcomes tools developed by the Triangle Consulting Social Enterprise. The star has seven points of achievement to help clients engage in what they need to create change for themselves, such as safety, accommodation, money, support networks, legal support, work and learning, empowerment and self-esteem. The star is strengths based, holistic and supports self-determination.

We’re not here to argue the merits of the Empowerment Star as an outcomes measure but to consider what it would be like to be similarly empowered as a sector – to be seen and funded holistically. What would be the seven points of our empowerment star? Let’s use the refuge contract as a model.

The collective contract was built on a huge base of trust between the National Collective and MSD, says Ang. “One of the things that was very difficult was getting them to understand what the costs were to provide the service. So I took a wee bit of a risk and I invited them to bring someone on secondment for nine months into our national office and I gave her carte blanche to look at whatever she wanted to look at and to visit whatever refuge she wanted.”

Of course, building that trust and the contract took time – almost three years, says Ang. “There were a lot of people that needed to come on board, because while we had the support of one particular team at MSD, then it had to go through all of the other teams. It'd be fair to say that the funding and contracting team had a few worries about it. But, they're coming round now.”

An eight year contract is quite a luxurious position to be in, admits Ang, and also to have a national body to wear the administration of that contract so that everyone else is left to deliver on their kaupapa. That said, a degree of security doesn’t take away your vulnerability, she says. “We have a long term contract, but it still has that little clause that says ‘Subject to changes in ministerial priorities,’ that get out of jail free card that all ministries have in their contracts.” Ang says she still feels stability and anxiety in equal measures. “My antennae is up a lot more than it was five or six years ago for anything that might be a risk to us because there are things happening now that I would have thought unthinkable five years ago.”

One of the things that took time was how to agree what each party wanted from the contract, says Ang. That obviously required great trust and “a very careful pulling apart of shared aims and aspirations from both of us.” There were some very robust meetings, she says, “pulling things apart to the point where we could see whether we could actually achieve them or not.”

Ang says the contract is underpinned by a very high level strategic road map without any ongoing funding guarantees, “but at least we have in writing what we all want to do and how we’ll work together to achieve it. There were things that they wanted us to do and things that we wanted to have happen that are built into this partnership – things like growing particular strands of work, for example in the tangata whenua space or the children's space.”

While she acknowledges some refuges may see things differently, Ang does believe there’s a degree of self-determination in the collective contract. Some refuges may feel they’ve given up a degree of independence, “but they still get to do exactly what it is that they do every day in their refuges – having the collective contract gives you freedom to just get on with the work of keeping women and kids safe without having to renegotiate funding and changing reporting models every year.” Ang says the contract supports their freedom to operate on a foundation of Parallel Development and honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The only new structure they had to put in place was an HR system. The contract allocated 4-5 FTEs to each refuge. Each refuge could choose how it used that FTE to deliver core refuge services but the collective needed to provide non-identifiable data around pay rates, qualification levels, training programmes and professional development, “which was all good information for MSD and us to have,” says Ang.

Women’s Refuge provides an array of supports for women and children – accessing healthcare and counselling, support with MSD and budgeting, obtaining a protection order and legal assistance, finding a place to live, helping to fund activities for tamariki and establishing relationships with schools and teachers, even meeting basic needs like food, clothing, and much more. They already had robust data collection systems to report on the number of women and children they supported and the efficacy of services provided to them through Empowerment Star results. They were already able to see national trends and outcomes and enhanced this with the new HR system.

While the contract’s not perfect and Women’s Refuge remains vulnerable to policy changes, it's an efficient, stable way to run contracts and it protects smaller providers, says Ang.

Other organisations will understandably look on enviously at the degree of security and empowerment that this contract gives Women’s Refuge. So, could this type of contract model work elsewhere in our sector? Ang thinks it’s possible, but it would require an openness to risk-taking and levels of trust between the Crown and the sector that she thinks are hard to come by right now. “There is so much anger and so much distrust out there,” she says. It seems rebuilding trust is the big wish to put out into the universe.