Woden Community Service’s Evatt Preschool: WCS, one of Families ACT’s 31 member organisations, is doing more with less every year. Photo: Thomas Lucraft.
Welcome to the third article in this series outlining the vital work of Canberra’s community sector and the challenges it faces.
Today, Will Mollison, Executive Officer of Families ACT, provides his perspective on working in the sector.
I retire at the end of this month after 13 years working in the not-for-profit sector in the ACT. The passion and commitment of those who provide essential support to the Canberra community have made this the most enjoyable time of my career.
But as I look back on this time, I am deeply concerned that the funding shortfalls that were clearly evident in the not-for-profit sector over a decade ago have not improved but have grown more pronounced.
The community sector has always represented excellent value for money. Efficient and enterprising, it has become practised at extracting maximum value from every funding dollar it receives. But sadly, this is out of necessity because the ACT Government has never paid the true cost of delivering the services it commissions and has been allowed to assume that what funding it provides is sufficient to get the job done.
It can be argued in this respect that the community sector has been its own worst enemy and should not have signed up to contracts that failed to adequately cover staff salaries and critical administrative costs. But this would overlook the community sector’s basic value proposition that it is expert at identifying unmet community needs and addressing them.
In a nutshell, the community sector is sandwiched between its concern for people and the anaemic funding it receives. Unfortunately, the reward for its compassion has been to see its funding shrink in real terms.
At the same time, the ACT population has been growing, from 405,000 in 2011, when I joined the sector, to 478,000 in 2024. However, this has not been recognised in additional resources, even though Government revenue has increased substantially from land sales and the accompanying growth in rates.
For some time now, ACT Government policy has espoused an inclusive Canberra where people can participate equally in all that the Territory has to offer. The Chief Minister’s announcement of a Wellbeing Framework in 2019 envisioned a progressive jurisdiction that based its decision-making about expenditure on the wellbeing of the community and where “ACT Government and community work in partnership to lift the quality of life of all Canberrans, particularly those with lower wellbeing than average”.
The core business of not-for-profits is addressing major barriers to people’s wellbeing, such as poverty, trauma and homelessness. Ongoing underfunding of the services they provide undermines the ACT Government’s social justice agenda.
The community is crying out for the government to listen and work in partnership with them to ensure a thriving and sustainable community sector that is accessible to all Canberrans. This can’t happen unless the government increases funding and investment in the community sector.
Without adequate funding, the commitments in the Wellbeing Framework will not be fulfilled and this will ultimately impact the quality of life of all Canberrans.
The next article in this series is from Travis Gilbert, CEO of the ACT Shelter, who will focus on the housing crisis.
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