Yellowknife (Feb 25/05) - Volunteer and non-profit groups need stable, ongoing funding to be more effective, agree people who attended a Yellowknife workshop last week.

That starts with telling government that the on-again, off-again funding process doesn't work, said Lani Cooke during the Funding Matters workshop.

"We have to start talking openly to government. We can't be afraid they will cut back funding if we don't tell them directly what we think," said Cooke, NWT representative of the National Voluntary Sector and executive director of Yk Association for Community Living.

Cooke said volunteer sector organizations deliver quality services, yet are at a disadvantage because they must go through "masses of paperwork" to get that funding.

The purpose of the one-day Funding Matters workshop was to discuss the funding relationship between voluntary non-profit sector organizations and government.

"There are some real issues in the way in which they are funding and there are big barriers to doing the work they would like to do because of the way in which they are funded," Cooke said.

Katherine Scott, vice-president of the Research for the Canadian Council on Social Development in Ottawa, told the group that voluntary organizations are "struggling."

"A large part of that is how they are funded," Scott said.

"It's not necessarily a question of the level of funding, it's actually how they are funded. It is creating financial instability," Scott said.

Lyda Fuller, executive director of the Yellowknife YWCA, said stable funding for non-profit organizations would have a huge impact.

"It's our sector and the capacity that allows new approaches to service delivery.

"We can react more quickly than the government can to a lot of social issues, so we need to have capacity," Fuller said.

"How we are funded affects our ability to have that capacity."

Helen Balanoff, acting executive director of the NWT Literacy Council, said funding is always an issue for non-profit organizations. "The literacy council has no core funding. All of our funding is project-related, so that doesn't give us very much flexibility. And most of it is year-to-year funding," she said of the instability of the funding process.

"We'd like to be assured we could carry on from year to year," she said of the council's operations.