New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate believes non-profits can help improve social program delivery.
Kelly Lamrock said that will be the focus of a new report his office undertakes over the coming months.
“The non-profit sector has been more nimble, more responsive, and often more results-oriented than government because they have to be. They’re doing tremendous work with very little,” Lamrock told our newsroom.
The advocate released a scathing report in March which found New Brunswick must change how it manages social programs or risk their collapse all at once.
How It All Broke pointed to five central governance flaws in how the province has been organized since the mid-1990s and how they keep defeating social programs.
“We’re trying to move from the How It All Broke report, which looked at why government is sometimes more about following rules than getting results and looking to how it gets fixed,” said Lamrock.
“How do we find things that will actually make government responsible for getting results, for lifting kids out of poverty, keeping them out of danger, making sure they learn to read, making sure we get support to people before there’s a crisis and we overpay.”
Lamrock said people are used to seeing his office show up after something has gone wrong. Instead, they want to reform government to prevent issues from happening in the first place.
The newly-elected Liberal government has committed to making progress on fixing social policy governance — something the advocate said they are gratified to see.
“We want to make sure we’re providing our advice up front, not just showing up when it’s time to point fingers,” said Lamrock.
Lamrock and his team will spend the coming months gathering input, which includes a series of meetings with the non-profit sector and launching a new web portal in early 2025 for public feedback and submissions.
The goal, he said, is to release the new report sometime in late spring of 2025.
“There’s a lot of jurisdictions that have a number of interesting ways of improving that partnership, and we want to see what we can learn about what might work here in New Brunswick.”
