There are no opportunities for local communities to innovate in the way they provide social services, writes Laura Black.
The old saying is build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
It's not quite true - even the world's best mousetrap needs good marketing - but the idea that innovation that results in something desirable or useful will be rewarded, is still with us.
New Zealand has a grand tradition of innovators in fields as diverse as sport, electronics, mountaineering, filmmaking, arts and literature, and medicine.
Every aspect of life has at some time had a Kiwi tinker with it, trying to improve it.
Some of those tinkerers have been rewarded with recognition and success, some have seen their good ideas stolen, and some have, well, needed better marketing. For a while, New Zealand led the world with our innovative approach to the most vulnerable.
The time when we were at the top of every OECD league table for good life outcomes - fantastic though that seems, as we thrash around at the bottom now - is within living memory.
Yet what few innovations in social services we make today, many of them not designed for our communities and our conditions, are generally imported from overseas.
Is there a link between these two things: that we languish at the bottom of the table and that we don't seem to be innovating ourselves?
With one ''but'', I suspect there is. My ''but'' is: there is actually an awful lot of innovating going on in social services in New Zealand.
It's just that there is nowhere to go to get support.
Think about it like this.
Say the Methodist Mission comes up with a fantastic new way of working with folks who are struggling.
It reduces the amount of time required to get to a good place by 75%, and on average delivers 150% of the minimum outcome.
It's so innovative we even have a way of helping staff stay automatically on track with the new tools. (All true, by the way.)
To run this, the mission will need staff and gear, and some promise that the money to pay for those will continue for a while because otherwise people won't apply for the jobs.
So much, so standard. But there is nowhere to get this money, nowhere to show off the innovation, no way of bringing a better way to the attention of whoever it is that could make the decision to green-light the programme.
Government funding - which is the only year-on-year funding - doesn't have a slot for ''we tried this, you'll really like it'' ideas.
Government funding, far and away the largest pool of dollars, is often completely allocated for years in advance.
And Government funding isn't tailored to regional needs.
Dunedin gets the same Community Investment Service programmes that Taranaki does, despite having different employment and industry opportunities, different population growth rates, different demographics, different wage rates, different housing needs, a major prison (Taranaki has none), and differently constituted service providers.
It's mad and maddening.
So a social service provider, a social worker, a nurse, an activist, a mum or dad at home, or even a business person, may come up with a world-beating way of helping people into better life outcomes but, in all likelihood, it will struggle to see the light of day.
Nowhere in in the way we run social services is there an opportunity for a local community such as Dunedin or even Otago to say: ''hey, we can show you something different, that fits us better, that will really work'' and for it to be supported.
There's something desperately wrong about that.
Laura Black is director of the Methodist Mission in Dunedin.
