Fri 12 Aug 2011 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Shaun Robinson The New Zealand AIDS Foundation has had to tighten its belt following a ten per cent drop in funding from the Ministry of Health. Executive Director Shaun Robinson says the cut for the current financial year, which began on 1 July, has been across the board. "There are things that we wanted to do that we can't do. We are running our services very lean," he says. The cutbacks have mainly been in administration. Robinson says while his predecessor Rachael Le Mesurier had a PA, he does not. He says the Foundation now has two and half full time employees in administration, where as eight months ago it had five. "We've tried to keep the frontline as resourced as possible. And we're looking hard at being as cost effective as we can in a whole lot of other areas, like how we use our money with the bank during the course of the year so we can minimise our interest, all those sorts of things of things that you need to do to run an organisation really effectively." Robinson says you don't have to be a rocket scientist to have seen in the political environment and last Budget that it's a resource constraint environment, and that's not going to change for the next few years. "I think if anything, it's likely to be worse next year, not better," he says. "We do have to put an increased emphasis on fundraising. Once the NZAF got steady funding from the Ministry I think the emphasis went off that. There's always been some but not a lot since the early years. One of the things that we're having to do now is build some of that back up. We have legitimate needs for fundraising." Robinson says a full-time fundraising position has been created and the NZAF is exploring different options. "But I guess the main thing is to look at a donor support base. This is an organisation that does a lot of really effective work in the gay community and we really need the gay community to give us some more financial as well as moral support to help us to do that," he says. "For example there are improvements in fast testing technology and we've had to say 'well we can't afford to implement those this year, we simply can't do that'. But it may be that down the track we can figure out a targeted way to use those in the most at-risk environments, if we can get gay business or a bunch of individuals to sponsor a certain number of tests, or something like that." Robinson says it can be a positive thing, to help engage the community in the work it is doing. "And in order to do that we need to really be communicating the value of what we're doing to people." GayNZ.com Daily News has an information request in with the Health Ministry about the reasons for the funding drop. You can discuss this gay New Zealand news story in the GayNZ.com forum
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Friday, 12th August 2011 - 11:47am