Member for Gosford Liesl Tesch says a Labor commitment to extend funding cycles for community services from one year to five years if elected in March will benefit a host of organisations on the Central Coast.
“Community services are vital the community,” she said.
“For far too long, the sector has been forced to focus on administrative red tape due to the one-year funding cycles.”
Tesch said 25 per cent of community service workers are employed on short term contracts, according to a NSW Council of Social Services Report.
“Organisations are forced to compete, rather than collaborate,” she said.
“The applications are onerous and often differ among the various government departments.”
Tesch said longer term funding would foster greater job security for many thousands of women workers as well as provide organisations the freedom to plan into the future.
NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns said longer term funding would equate to more time spent helping people and less time bogged down in paperwork to get funding.
“We’ll make sure that community service organisations can focus on serving the community, rather than reapplying for funding over and over,” Tesch said.
“Changing the funding cycle to five years will impact over 7,800 non-government organisations such as neighbourhood centres, domestic and violence, child, youth and family services, community mental health services and drug and alcohol services.”
Interim CEO of Coast Community Connections Sharryn Brownlee said the move would save hundreds of hours of repetitive work – year after year.
“To have a five-year cycle will allow the sector to focus on delivering services to clients,” she said.
Source:
Media release, Jan 12
Member for Gosford Liesl Tesch