Content note: This article mentions family violence and sexual violence.
In May, Birthright Hutt Valley closed its doors. After 60 years of supporting solo parents and their tamariki through hardship, family violence, housing crisis and poverty, it simply ran out of money. The Oranga Tamariki funding that kept it afloat had not increased since 2023, while operational costs kept rising and competition for philanthropic grants intensified. The funding gap proved impossible to close.
Birthright was the only specialist social service for single-caregiver whānau in the Hutt Valley. Its social workers helped families navigate WINZ, supported survivors of family violence, advocated in the Family Court and provided practical help through the Whānau Room. In the weeks after the closure was announced, whānau visited the Birthright office to ask where they could turn next. The staff had no answers for them.
“OUR WHĀNAU HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO”
On the day of closure, PSA member, Sarah Szabo, said:
“The team is all devastated. My heart, personally, is hurting for the whānau we’ve supported over 60 years. We’re going to leave a huge hole in our community and our whānau have nowhere else to go. There are no other services in the Hutt Valley like Birthright.”
Now, another closure is coming.
RespectEd Aotearoa, Wellington’s specialist sexual violence prevention organisation, will shut in August. It was established in 2015 by Wellington Rape Crisis, WellStop and the Wellington Sexual Abuse HELP Foundation to address a recognised gap in prevention services. For a decade, it has delivered education in schools, workplaces, prisons and communities. Hikitia!, ACC’s flagship, community-led programme, was halted in May 2025, cutting off funding RespectEd had been relying on. A programme RespectEd delivered for wāhine Māori on remand in prisons was also cut by Corrections in 2025.
Since then, the organisation has pursued every available option to stay afloat, but it has now exhausted its reserves.
WIDESPREAD CONCERN IN THE COMMUNITY
PSA member Juliet Leeming, a social worker at RespectEd, is upset about the upcoming closure:
“It makes me sad to think that we will not be able to carry on with some of the programmes we do. For instance, one of my favourites is ‘Friends Whānau Flirting’. It's a programme with intellectually disabled people in Wellington, in the high schools, and it's a programme that has been one of my favourites to deliver. We're working with really amazing students who are learning skills that will help keep them safe.
“We know that disabled people are at really high levels of risk for being victims of sexual violence. This programme gives skills and tools to students who can then understand what a healthy relationship is, what is acceptable and what behaviours are not acceptable.”
There is widespread concern about the loss of an organisation like RespectEd, and what it signals for the future of sexual violence prevention and community public services in New Zealand. An open letter was signed by concerned organisations, calling on the Government to fund RespectEd and sexual violence prevention more broadly. It is now open for public signing: Fund Sexual Violence Prevention - Together.
ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
These two closures are not isolated. They are the visible edge of a much wider squeeze on the community public services sector. Across the country, small organisations that hold communities together are facing the same pressures – flat or falling government contracts, rising costs and a philanthropic sector that cannot absorb the overflow. Government cuts have forced more organisations to compete for a shrinking pool of philanthropic grants, effectively starving the sector.
The Government’s answer is the Social Investment Fund. However, in 2025, analysis from Hui E! Community Aotearoa found the $47.5 million annual amount was less than the decrease in funding to the sector. Of the 187 organisations that applied for funding in the first round, only seven were successful.
Additionally, to access the fund, organisations must report on their work in far more detail than before – complex, skilled work that smaller providers don’t have the capacity to take on without diverting resources. Small specialist organisations like Birthright and RespectEd – doing relationship-based work, deeply embedded in communities – simply can’t compete with the large service providers.
THE COST OF PREVENTABLE HARM
PSA members work in and alongside these organisations and understand what is lost when these vital services close. Families are turned away, and harm that could have been prevented shows up somewhere more devastating, and more expensive than what it’d cost to prevent it – in a hospital, in a prison or in a crisis call at 3am.
PSA National Secretary, Fleur Fitzsimons, said:
“Without a change of course, Birthright Hutt Valley and RespectEd Aotearoa will not be the last to fall. The blame for this, and the consequences of collapsing services and rising harm, sits squarely on this Government’s shoulders.”
