City allocation process to become more rigorous for FCSS
Lethbridge Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) tabled its 2019 allocations for adoption at the city council meeting on Monday, handing out about $3.15 million in funding to about two dozen organizations and programs in the city. But, warns City of Lethbridge manager of Community Social Development Martin Thomsen, the allocation process is about to get more rigorous starting next year.
“We are doing some strategic planning around FCSS funding to ensure we are making evidencebased decisions,” confirms Thomsen. “Instead of just giving money out because we want to be very purposeful and evidencebased on who we give the money to. And then measure it to ensure we are getting the outcomes we desire.”
FCSS funding is shared 80/20 between the province and City, and is intended to invest in preventative organizations and programs in Lethbridge.
“Often we put a lot of money into what I call emergency response activities, and if we were to invest early in the preventative stage you would get something like 10 times the value,” Thomsen says. “If you don’t do that prevention, the emergency response side would be something like the Supervised Consumption Site.”
Thomsen explains more fully what he means.
“The Supervised Consumption Site is an emergency response,” he repeats. “For those who use it, those folks are kind of like at the far side of the spectrum where they are drug users. We are putting a lot of money into the emergency response of simply keeping them alive, right? To give them, hopefully, another day to make that good decision. When they do, it is a huge amount of time and money to take that person and get them off drugs and back into being a productive member of society.
“Whereas if you were to have invested in that person in the early years, say in an area such as early education, hopefully that person never goes down that wrong pathway in the first place. We are starting to see (in Lethbridge) a lot of the outcomes of not investing in a lot of those prevention areas for a lot of years.”
This is why FCSS will, starting next year, begin to look for stronger measures and objective results through a new analysis framework from organizations that use its funding — to ensure that spending is the best bang for buck in the City of Lethbridge, says Thomsen.
“Next year will be an interesting year because we will have all of the information from our research and analysis we are doing,” he states. “Hopefully, we will be able to say we are giving this money to this group because.”
For a full list of organizations which received FCSS funding for 2019 see the Lethbridge City Council agenda for Oct. 15.
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