It is hard to understand why the ACT Government, which controls an annual budget of more than $5 billion a year, has been content to allow SHOUT (Canberra Self Help Organisations United Together) to wither and die for the want of around $110,000.
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First funded during the International Year of the Disabled in 1981, the organisation evolved into a uniquely Canberran success story that, despite being run on the smell of an oily rag, has touched the lives of thousands when they needed help the most.
SHOUT is an umbrella organisation which provides administrative assistance and other support for more than 47 self help organisations with up to 6000 clients across the ACT on an annual budget of less than $130,000 a year.
Member and affiliate member groups include the ACT Down Syndrome Association, Canberra Region Kidney Support Group, Heart Support Australia, Parkinson's ACT, People With Disabilities ACT, Prostate Cancer Support Group ACT Region, Diabetes ACT, Royal Society for the Blind, Solace ACT and Technical Aid to the Disabled ACT to name a few.
As a point of contact for member organisations, a referral point for people seeking help with an unforeseen crisis and by offering member and affiliated groups access to infrastructure and high level administrative support, SHOUT has delivered a massive multiplier effect.
Funding that would otherwise have been spread thinly across dozens of groups has been concentrated in a way that allows quality services to be accessed by all.
SHOUT is the type of operation you would expect to be embraced and celebrated by a government concerned about the welfare of its citizens.
As it stands, unless the ACT Government is willing to stump up $110,000 to keep the doors open for another year the doors of SHOUT's office in Pearce will close for the last time on May 31.
The saddest part of this sorry tale is that SHOUT's existential crisis is a slow motion train wreck the ACT Government has seen coming since the announcement of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Disability ACT, the organisation responsible for funding SHOUT up until recent times, is to be closed down at the end of this financial year because of the NDIS.
SHOUT, which has been pleading with ACT Health for alternative funding since last August, has been told by Territory ministers it should seek funding from the NDIS even though many of its member groups have a health, not a disability, focus, and even though it does not meet NDIS funding criteria.
The ACT bureaucracy, pushed outside its comfort zone by an administrative change it has seen coming for more than five years, appears to have put the needs of thousands of ill and disabled Canberrans into the too hard basket rather than risk coming up with an innovative solution. It is time for the ACT Government to find a way to break this impasse and help keep this low-cost, highly valued community organisation doing what it does best - serving our community.
