Download submission - Berry Street

SUBMISSION TO THE
STATE SERVICES AUTHORITY
REVIEW OF GOVERNMENT FUNDED
FINANCIAL COUNSELLING SERVICES
JANUARY 2008
For further information in relation to this
submission please contact:
Gerry Brown
Senior Internal Consultant
Policy & Practice Development
Berry Street
p: 03 9429 9266
e: gbrown@berrystreet.org.au

Profile of Berry Street
Since 1877, Berry Street has been providing services to Victoria’s vulnerable children, young
people and families. Incorporated under the Associations Incorporation (Amendment) Act 1997
with a voluntary Board of Directors, Berry Street is now the largest independent child and family
welfare organisation in Victoria.
Berry Street provides a range of services for children, young people and families in a number of
different locations. Services include: home-based care; residential and reception care services;
intensive youth services, including youth support, outreach, employment and housing services;
child abuse prevention programs; mediation and family counselling; education & employment
programs and a school; family violence work & networking; domestic violence outreach; financial
literacy and counselling programs; adoption & origins information; a publicity and recruitment
unit for volunteer caregivers; a children’s contact service; a sexual abuse prevention program;
community development and support programs and a Statewide intensive therapeutic service for
children and young people (Take Two).
Berry Street works across Victoria, from 19 offices and another 35 worksites, with the majority of
services in the Gippsland, Hume, Northern and Southern regions. Berry Street employs approx.
385 (EFT) staff and has the support of over 208 carer households and 419 volunteers. The budget
for 2007/08 is more than $33 million.
The Berry Street Strategic Plan for 2007-2010 outlines our current strategic objectives within the
five key goal areas of: Services; People; Resources: Community; and Knowledge. The Plan
reaffirms our commitment to deliver the highest quality services and to promote a learning culture
to support the development of new service responses to identified and emerging needs.
Financial literacy and counselling programs
Berry Street Financial Counselling Service
Berry Street’s Financial Counselling service is located in the Northern Metropolitan sub-region.
Berry Street has a service agreement with the Department of Justice to provide the financial
counselling service. The funding enables the employment of 1.75EFT financial counsellors
(salary and salary on-costs only). No administrative support is funded. Counsellors are based at
Berry Street’s Eltham office.
The service has been operating for the past twenty years and is well established, used and
respected, with good relationships with referring agencies, including Centrelink, local
community and acute health services, General Practitioners, Churches, housing support services
and other Government services. Open access sessions are held in local shopping centres and
visits are made to other services such as hospitals and homelessness refuge. A federally funded
emergency relief service is also provided by the same group of staff and brings in a wider group
of more geographically dispersed users of the service.
The service is both free and voluntary.
The service works with a very diverse group of service users, a good proportion of whom suffer
from significant vulnerabilities. Many have psychiatric problems and are referred from acute
psychiatric hospital. The service has also received significant numbers of referrals from the
refugee community. The majority of people using the service are reliant on Benefit payments
and have a very low income.
The service is currently meeting required performance standards with an initial phone
assessment that is followed up within 5 days.
The casework provided concentrates on the relief of current financial difficulties through
advocacy, identifying the implications of different options involved (including payment plans
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Review of government Funded Financial Counselling Services January 2008

and, where relevant, bankruptcy). These are relatively brief interventions to empower people
to make decisions about their finances. Some additional work is also undertaken with people
who require support with ongoing budgeting.
As well as self and third party referrals, the service also provides support to clients engaged in a
number of Berry Street programs in Northern Region, including Family Violence Services and
Youth Services. In these cases the service is more focused on early intervention and education.
The service does not work to strict geographical boundaries, but accepts referrals from people in
need who are able to access the service. The service is working to capacity and in the 2006/07
year, staff worked with 450 clients. As a result of the limited resources available in terms of
staffing and time, increases in demand result in higher levels of prioritisation and a reluctance
to advertise the service more widely.
As a Berry Street service, staff are subject to all of Berry Street’s corporate standards including
the values, equal opportunities, OH&S (including safe working environment), code of conduct
and casework supervision.
Despite a strong background in delivering financial services which are preventative and offer
early intervention, Berry street has found that there are a wide range of situations that can lead
to financial hardship for families, many of which cannot be prevented because of the structural
roots of the problems.
Berry Street Financial Literacy Programs (NOT Government funded)
Saver Plus is a financial literacy and matched savings program that assists families on low
incomes to improve their financial literacy, develop a savings habit and build assets for
educational purposes. Participants' savings are matched $1 for $1 (up to $1,000) to help pay for
their own or their children's education. Between 2006 and 2008 Saver Plus will be delivered to
5,400 people in 18 communities across Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT by
Berry Street, The Smith Family, The Benevolent Society and the Brotherhood of St Laurence in
partnership with the ANZ Bank.
MoneyMinded is a financial education program developed to equip people with the knowledge
and skills to successfully manage their day-to-day and longer-term financial matters.
MoneyMinded enhances financial stability not only for individuals but, by extension, the broader
community. The MoneyMinded program includes a diverse curriculum from simple personal
issues to quite complex legal issues. It is approved by the Financial Literacy Foundation as a
suitable financial literacy resource (see www.understandingmoney.gov.au).
Berry Street provides a two-day, free, training package for community workers, volunteers,
teachers, financial counsellors and carers. The training includes all resources required to
facilitate MoneyMinded workshops.
MoneyMinded recognises the importance of community educators and financial counsellors in
reaching those in the community who can benefit from a better understanding of money and
how it works. The program also highlights the long-term value of building sound financial
knowledge. Every person's financial circumstances are unique, and as such, they require a
different level of support and advice. MoneyMinded is flexible, enabling counsellors and
participants to select workshops that relate to a participant's need and encourages more
proactive consideration of their personal situation.
Outcomes include:
• More than 15,000 people have participated in MoneyMinded since 1 October 2005
• 93% of participants recorded a positive change in the way they managed their money
• At least 85% of participants completed the ‘Planning and Budgeting’ workshop
• Facilitators report the program to be highly adaptable and user-friendly
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Question 1
In what ways could financial counselling services balance casework
responsibilities with effective preventive and early intervention activity?
• What is the role of financial counselling service providers in prevention and early
intervention?
Whilst “early problem” and “crisis” interventions are both broadly delivered by individual
casework, “pre-problem” interventions are best delivered in through community education. As
identified, funding for this latter type of activity will always tend to be squeezed by the
continual rise in referrals for casework. To fund preventive work effectively, the budget needs
to be additional to the casework service (that is, not funded from the same, already small, pot
of existing funding). Preventive work should be guided by plans that are devised locally to
address the circumstances that are being identified through the casework service.
Similarly, services will always struggle to provide early intervention casework when they need to
prioritise people and families in crisis. To provide such an early intervention, services will need
additional, ring fenced funding. This would enable services to improve their accessibility. To
meet and categorise demand they will need clear, locally relevant guidelines on intake and
triaging.
• What forms of prevention and early intervention activity are most effective in alleviating
potential problems?
There are a series of structural issues that Governments, at State and Federal level, need to
begin to tackle:
• A more proactive approach is required from Government towards financial institutions
with exorbitant rates of interest; many of which target those with least resources to pay.
Such an approach should include both higher levels of regulation and publicity about the
various credit traps into which vulnerable people can fall when searching for financial
solutions.
• Housing affordability is at the heart of many families’ inability to meet other financial
commitments and Government needs to consider long-term solutions.
• The Consumer Affairs Department should publicise bankruptcy as a positive solution to
some chronic debt problems.
• Where charges are payable for essential services (for instance in housing, education,
health, child care, etc) the agency providing that service should be mandated to make
available information, advice and individual support in relation to:
• Ensuring that all relevant concessions are claimed;
• Providing interest-free, staged payment opportunities; and
• Providing information on further sources of advice for people who are unable to meet
charges.
• Advice needs to be universally available and delivered in a non-stigmatising manner (see
below)
• Credit Unions and Friendly Societies with socially responsible saving and lending profiles
need to be encouraged by Government.
Programs such as MoneyMinded have excellent outcomes, but long-term success of such
programs is limited in the face of structural poverty. Saver Plus is an excellent model in that it
rewards participants financially for prudent behaviour, but again, saving, at however minimal a
rate, is a luxury for many of the poorest families.
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• How can service providers identify client groups who might benefit from prevention and
early intervention activities?
Programs such as MoneyMinded provide basic financial literacy and are usefully available
universally. The community development and capacity building aspects of the program are
central to its success.
The introduction of practical financial management curriculum in the final years of secondary
education would provide some universal coverage.
Berry Street currently provides support to people who are, or are at risk of becoming financially
vulnerable, including care leavers, women escaping family violence, youth services and people
from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and would welcome the funding to widen
our support of these vulnerable groups in our community.
• How can other social services and other agencies contribute to preventing and minimising the
impact of emerging financial hardship and debt-related problems?
Financial Counselling Services have considerable experience and skills in supporting people in
financial crisis and their skills are best used in this field. Specialist financial counselling services
could usefully be funded to provide training to generalist caseworkers, social workers and
support workers from a variety of social service agencies to enable a basic level of financial
advice and support to be provided by multiple services. This would enable financial counselling
to be offered on a more targeted basis.
• How service providers overcome impediments, such as feelings of shame or embarrassment,
to encourage people who seek assistance before reaching a crisis point?
Transparency and universality are key to reducing stigma. Increasing the availability and range
of not for profit financial services will, over time, reduce the stigma of seeking assistance. At
present, Berry Street’s financial counselling service is unable to advertise as widely as it would
like in order to keep referrals to manageable proportions. The service thus remains inherently
stigmatising; as a service of last resort. Increased levels of funding would enable the service to
become more visible, accessible and less viewed within the community as a service for the
desperate.
Question 2:
In what ways and at what stages in the recovery process could financial
counselling services most effectively respond to the needs of communities in
crisis?
• What type of financial support is required for communities in crisis (eg information about
payments and grants, budgeting assistance, advocacy, etc)?
Communities in crisis will usually have a normal profile of financial literacy. Many will be
financially literate and will require only information, encouragement to apply for grants (a rights
based rather than a charitable approach is key to reducing stigma) and support with advocacy
(particularly with insurance companies).
Other members of the community will have existing (often entrenched) financial problems that
have been exacerbated by the crisis. This group requires individual financial counselling.
The number of specialist financial counsellors is limited and whilst the first group’s needs may
be met by non-specialist services, the needs of the second group are currently required to be
absorbed by already overstretched services. Solutions include increasing the pool of trained
counsellors and training of volunteer counsellors (to operate with the support and supervision of
a smaller number of specialist financial counsellors).
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• What are the short and medium term impacts of an emergency on households’ financial
status?
This crucially depends upon whether the emergency has permanently affected the family’s
ability to earn an income and on whether adequate levels of insurance were in place prior to the
emergency.
Berry Street’s financial counselling service is increasingly being accessed by very small (usually
family based) businesses. Such businesses are less likely to have appropriate levels of insurance
to cover unforeseen losses either due to loss of work or damage to or loss of equipment.
Adequate insurance is often the first casualty of a struggling business, which leaves them
particularly vulnerable to crises.
Families left without an income stream or adequate insurance require medium to long term
(specialist) financial counselling, including impartial advice on realisation of remaining assets.
• Does demand for financial counselling services increase following an emergency and do
providers have capacity to meet extra demand?
Berry Street’s Financial Counselling Service’s experience is that the effect of the drought is of a
primarily long term nature. Reduced family incomes greatly increase the risk of household food
insecurity and transport difficulties resulting in greater social isolation. These longer term
impacts also serve to reduce individual and community resilience to emergencies, increasing the
likelihood that following an emergency, more specialist services will be required. The need for
financial counselling has indeed increased, although demand is affected by accessibility, both in
terms of geography and in relation to the overcoming the stigma attached to asking for help.
Berry Street would be committed to helping in an emergency situation, but is already fully
committed in existing work. The training of additional counsellors (paid or volunteer) takes time
and capacity needs to be increased, both to address existing demand and to enable some
capacity for emergency counselling.
• How might the needs of individuals, families and households following an emergency differ
from those who are experiencing financial hardship as a result of other circumstances (eg
illness, injury or the end of an intimate relationship, etc)?
The needs of a community in crisis are an acute reflection of the needs of communities in
general. Crisis exacerbates and makes more obvious existing problems that a family may have
previously kept to themselves. Families who are financially stable are able to prioritise
adequate levels of insurance and, generally, will recover from crises relatively quickly with
information and support.
The communities that are worst hit are those that are already experiencing financial stress such
as areas that have lost industries and jobs or communities that have suffered cumulative stress
because of rurality, rising fuel prices and drought.
Question 3:
What are the options for improving service integration in the financial
counselling service model?
• How does service integration currently operate at the local level?
The Berry Street Financial Counselling Service is well integrated both into the suite of other
Berry Street services (especially family violence and youth support services) and in the service
system in general from where it receives a high proportion of its referrals.
• What types of agencies are most relevant to financial counselling services (eg health
services, legal advice, housing support, consumer advocacy, etc)?
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Referrals to the Berry Street service are received from all of the above services and, in turn, the
Financial Counselling Service is well placed to refer the people it works with back into free or
low cost services.
• What are the constraints on more integrated service delivery?
One of the principle constraints is of the fragmented and dispersed nature of the service system,
each element covering different aspects of need and geographic areas. Other constraints
include the lack of availability of key services such as specialist legal advice (free at the point of
use) in many localities.
Many people who request help from financial counselling services feel their lives are out of
control. One of the roles of counsellors is to help them regain control and this includes
encouraging people to self-refer on to other services wherever possible to reduce the sense of
dependence on the counselling service. However, fast tracking of referrals of people in crisis
both to and from the financial counselling service is important and usually relies upon local
knowledge and the quality of established relationships between services built up by local staff.
• What kind of systems or tools could facilitate service integration?
There is a limit to the usefulness of formal tools in this area of work. Good communication is
key to building the necessary knowledge of and trust between professionals. This is built up
through:
• Having secure funding for the service to encourage staff stability;
• Funding financial counselling staff to have a role in leading communication with and
providing training opportunities for local casework staff from a large range of agencies;
• Funding local networks to bring together a range of community groups and agencies in an
area to share information and prioritise resources in relation to financial counselling.
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Review of government Funded Financial Counselling Services January 2008