spinofflive
The Invisible Heart / HitPlay Productions
The Invisible Heart / HitPlay Productions

SocietyMay 25, 2018

What happens when social services become a private investment product?

Guest writer
The Invisible Heart / HitPlay Productions
The Invisible Heart / HitPlay Productions

A new documentary shines an important light on a new approach that seeks to radically reshaping the way social services are provided, writes geographer Tom Baker

How do we address poor health and education outcomes, high incarceration rates, and other pressing social issues? I’m guessing your top three answers do not include “make social services an investment product”, but around the world, a cast of governments, philanthropists, banks, and consultants have been doing just that, using a financial mechanism called a Social Impact Bond (SIB).

Here in Aotearoa, two Social Impact Bond-financed programmes have been going since 2017. One involve​s assisting people with mental health difficulties into work and the other aims to prevent disadvantaged youth from criminal offending. Both have gone largely under the radar of public attention.

Tonight, a thought-provoking documentary called The Invisible Heart screens in Auckland as part of the DocEdge festival. By following the rise of Social Impact Bonds in Canada and the United States, it raises a host of issues that need to be debated closer to home.

For those readers whose eyelids grow heavy at the sight of the words “financial mechanism”, please bear with me for a brief technical interlude. A Social Impact Bond involves private investors financing a non-government organisation to deliver social services. If those services achieve a series of outcomes — negotiated between government, the service provider and the investors — government repays the investors, plus an agreed profit margin. If the services do not achieve the outcomes, the investors lose part or all of their investment. In theory, government shifts the risk of failure to the private sector, but shares the rewards of success.

In this context, successful services are services that produce a win-win outcome, involving benefits for service recipients (eg stable housing, employment, improved health) and reduced long-term demand for publicly-funded services (eg less public spending).

While Social Impact Bonds might sound dry to most, their implementation is radically reshaping the way social services are provided. The debates surrounding this seemingly innocuous and technical sounding financial mechanism cannot be left to policy wonks and finance professionals.

Offering a way into these debates for all comers, The Invisible Heart examines the aspirational objective of Social Impact Bonds. Instead of private investment simply acting as an “invisible hand” that distributes goods and services according to the economic logic of profit, promoters of Social Impact Bonds claim we can harness the social conscience or “invisible heart” of markets to deliver improved outcomes for disadvantaged citizens.

More Reading

    Through engaging interviews with service recipients, social workers, investors and others, The Invisible Heart grapples, even-handedly, with the promises and perils of making social services into an investment product. We are told that private investment fills service gaps, enables innovative ideas to be tested and expanded, and brings more rigour to the evaluation of outcomes. We are also told that Social Impact Bonds are expensive to administer, systematically de-risked to entice investors, concerned with surface issues rather than root causes, and disconnected from democratic accountability and deliberation.

    As two Social Impact Bonds programmes continue without much public awareness in Aotearoa, The Invisible Heart reminds us of the need to discuss how we create the conditions for social wellbeing and who stands to benefit.

    Dr Tom Baker is a human geography lecturer at the University of Auckland. He is currently researching the global growth of Social Impact Bonds

    Keep going!
    Nicky_Hookers of Hawera (1 of 1)

    SocietyMay 24, 2018

    Life with the hookers of Hawera

    Guest writer
    Nicky_Hookers of Hawera (1 of 1)

    The Spinoff is proud to debut our Frame documentary series produced by Wrestler and funded by NZ on Air. The first is The Hookers of Hawera, about life in and around a small-town brothel named ‘Shh…’. Co-director Kim Vinnell explains how she came to the story, and what she learned along the way.

    When I first met Nicky years ago, we clicked. She, the tattooed former prostitute-turned-madam, living in a town most would call a pit stop. Me, the TV reporter with a fascination for brothels, dropping into her world for a few days. Over cigarettes and coffee, we talked mostly about sex. A firm friendship was born.

    A week earlier, the local paper had published a small write up on what I thought was a curious story. Shh…, a brothel, was raising money for a charity to help feed poor kids. The conservatives of Hawera were not happy. A good TV tale, I thought.

    But arriving in the tiny town on the Taranaki coast, I realised quickly just how wrong I was. Most people employed a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy when it came to Shh… and what happened in their rooms next to the hairdresser and the dentist on Union Street. They didn’t mind the hookers at all. The majority of the attacks came from screen warriors – who would never get out from behind their computers to do anything of consequence anyway.

    We did the TV thing, filed the story, and flew back to Auckland. But these women stuck with me. Their worldly intelligence, their patience with my naivety. I learned ways to use sponges which had never (and would never) have crossed my mind.

    But more importantly, they had really lived. Some people glide through life, never really touching the sharp edges that come with highs and lows. But not these women. They had brokenness and redemption, loyalty and love – the stuff movies should be made of.

    So, three years later, I came back.

    These days, Nicky’s business is struggling. She’s competing with freelancers who undercut her girls, and girls who try to take clients to do the undercutting with. She hasn’t paid herself in six months and is barely covering the rent. She says she stays open for the girls and the clients, and by the way she says it, I believe her. She’s juggling two kids, full time study to become a health and safety advisor, and does crossfit five mornings a week. The brothel is becoming more of a charity project than a business, I think.

    Nicky is candid about her own time as a working girl, in the very same brothel under a different owner some years ago. She did it for the cash, and happened to meet her husband in the process. Some people land on their feet.

    The working girls these days are very upfront about what’s on the menu, and what’s not. Greek for Tilly, not for Anne. Bi double for Harmony, and Anne, but not for Amy. Lydia is open to pretty much anything. You’d have to be comfortable in your own skin to do this job.

    We don’t often delve into worlds we struggle to make sense of, or which challenge us to think differently. Sex work, I reckon, is one of those worlds. But take a trip to Hawera, to chat with Tilly, Anne, Harmony, Amy or Lydia – and I think you’ll come out at the very least, satisfied

    Society