The $24m in government funding for the I Am Hope Foundation came with the promise that the charity would be able to scale up quicker than other services. One therapist worries there’s been no movement at all.

Six months into its first year of government funding, concerns have been raised about Gumboot Friday’s capacity to deliver on the counselling sessions the funding has promised. The charity will need to provide 3,333 counselling sessions every month for the next four years to be able to claim all of the $24m in funding afforded by the government earlier this year. If not, the Ministry of Health will be able to keep the funds.

In the financial year ending March 2023, the number of counselling sessions delivered through Gumboot Friday was 27,775 at a total cost of $3,756,748, or $135 per session. I Am Hope was overdue in filing its return for the financial year ending March 2024 (it was filed in late November), but showed a jump in counselling sessions to 32,101, about 2,700 per month. 

As part of its funding agreement, the mental health charity receives $150 per session (though some specialists may charge more and others less), capped at a parcel of $500,000 in funding every month. The Ministry of Health has said the funding is to provide 30,000 sessions for up to 15,000 rangatahi. This would not amount to $6m worth of sessions each year, but the ministry says any extra funds would be expected to be used on more counselling sessions. To use all six million dollars in its first year, Gumboot Friday would have to facilitate 40,000 counselling sessions annually, a 25% increase on the last financial year.

Counselling sessions through Gumboot Friday have historically been funded almost entirely by public donations. In the year ending March 2024, I Am Hope recorded donations revenue of $6,955,828, a nearly million dollar drop on the previous year’s donations. Those donations covered the cost of the counsellors but also helped pay for administration fees ($237,661) and staff salaries ($1,537,043), among other costs, with a deficit of -$1,399,521. It was the first year the charity recorded a deficit after building up millions in surplus in previous years.

As the $24m in funding will be exclusively covering counselling services, Gumboot Friday says it will need to continue to fundraise for administrative costs (staff salaries, equipment etc).

A Ministry of Health spokesperson told the Spinoff in early November that the ministry is confident that the funding will exclusively go to the practicing counsellors. “I Am Hope has regularly assured the ministry that the funding provided for counselling sessions is only being used for that purpose.”

In October, Gumboot Friday’s founder Mike King claimed the charity has 550 therapists available (and also put the waitlist figure at 580), but using the database itself will likely show far fewer practitioners.

Each day The Spinoff checked Gumboot Friday’s database in November, the number of practitioners available fluctuated between 280 to 310. Gumboot Friday has said not all counsellors will be available to view on the charity’s website if they have marked themselves unavailable, may be awaiting a new Annual Practising Certificate or are on leave.

If 300 counsellors marked themselves as available every day for the next four years, each counsellor would need to deliver 11 Gumboot Friday sessions every month for the next four years, on top of their own clinical work. 

Internal documents have revealed the Ministry of Health wanted to scale up the funding rather than spend the full amount from the first year.

“Phasing the value of the contract would enable the Gumboot Friday organisation to scale up their infrastructure and service capability more gradually,” a December briefing to mental health minister Matt Doocey said. “However, this option may not match current public expectations for the full commitment of $6m from year one.”

With the full $6m now available from year one, the speed of expansion has frustrated those waiting to offer their services through the charity. One therapist told The Spinoff they have been waiting for months to be onboarded with Gumboot Friday, despite one of the ministry’s justifications for its funding being that Gumboot Friday was “capable of scaling up service delivery quicker than an organisation that would need to build a whole service”.

Practitioner Lisa* applied to join Gumboot Friday’s database in August following a request from a client for the charity’s free counselling sessions. Though the charity advertised that it would be onboarding more practitioners in September, she’s still waiting to hear about her application status. She says “no therapist is ever looking for more work,” but all want their clients to be able to access meaningful help, including utilising some free sessions through Gumboot Friday.

As of early November, Lisa said she was one of 400 therapists waiting to be onboarded, but was told the charity can only take on another 150. Applications for new therapists to join the database closed in late August, and by late October, Gumboot Friday was still finalising its onboarding policy. In October, the Ministry of Health told The Spinoff the charity was now onboarding 100 new practitioners.

Lisa’s clients have the option of searching for a separate practitioner already in Gumboot Friday’s database, but she worries they still may not be able to receive the support they’re looking for. She works in a specific area of therapy, and in her region, Gumboot Friday currently supports no other practitioners like her. The charity told Lisa it has seen fewer applicants in her field, so special consideration would be given to address the gap.

The Spinoff posed a list of questions to Gumboot Friday about its onboarding process, the number of therapists currently available, and how it’ll meet expectations to upscale. The charity did not answer any of the questions, instead a PR representative asked that the questions be redirected to the Ministry of Health.

The slow process of a multi-million upscale

The procurement process for funding Gumboot Friday was criticised in a report released October 9 by the auditor-general John Ryan, who found the ministry did not fully inform ministers of the risks associated with the procurement of the contract. Ryan emphasised there was “no opportunity for a fair, open, or competitive process,” and that funding was focused on a supplier rather than a policy drive. “It is for the public service to ensure robust, fair, and transparent spending of public money – including selecting a supplier and ensuring value for money,” Ryan wrote.

The Ministry of Health said I Am Hope is currently in the scaling up process, and that the department has worked through some of the contractual requirements and obligations with the charity in the first quarter of the contract, which has also required an update to Gumboot Friday’s onboarding process.

In October, rural mental health practitioner Anna Sophia wrote for The Spinoff about her frustrations with what she saw as double standards in the requirements and processes for some Ministry of Health-funded counselling jobs compared to others. Sophia noted that to qualify for ministry-funded Health Improvement Practitioner positions, applicants must have a degree in counselling, which would disqualify even herself with a diploma in counselling and 30 years of practice.

“Many of the counsellors who receive payment from Gumboot Friday (via a Health Ministry contract) do not have counselling degrees,” she wrote.

The ministry told The Spinoff the requested changes to Gumboot Friday’s processes have now been completed and further onboarding is on the way, with Gumboot Friday “performing at the level expected”. 

King says the charity has delivered 100,00 free sessions to young New Zealanders since 2019, and though the minister of mental health minister Doocey has described Gumboot Friday as a “proven organisation” addressing issues, there is little research to show the scope of its impact. An oft-quoted figure used by Doocey and Christopher Luxon – that every $1 invested in I Am Hope results in a social return of $5.70 – comes from a report commissioned by Gumboot Friday from Impact Lab, co-founded and chaired by former National prime minister Bill English. 

Psychologist Dr Jess Stubbing says there is a significant lack of research in New Zealand’s mental health sector, including an absence of evidence showing whether Gumboot Friday’s free two-session model has a meaningful impact on struggling rangatahi. 

“The vast majority of mental health services in Aotearoa have little or no evidence as to the impact they have on those they serve,” Stubbing wrote for The Post in early November, “and almost none have any sense of the longterm outcomes of those services.” She says measuring the effectiveness of a therapy service by a social return on investment is controversial, and the public and NGOs should not solely rely on these analyses.

While Gumboot Friday works to upscale its offerings, around 400 separate providers offering services to children and families have had funding pulled by Oranga Tamariki (decisions the department has defended by saying the funding changes only affect underdelivering services). Sophia wrote I Am Hope’s funding “effectively took away the money from established organisations like ours with decades of service and a proven track record and left us powerless”.

At the end of  November, Gumboot Friday got in touch with Lisa to ask for her to complete a Child Worker safety check. She is still unsure whether her application will be approved.

*Name changed to protect identity.