Anyone who lives and works in the Northern Territory knows that delivering services here is different. The vast distances, jurisdictional overlaps, and remote realities require deep local knowledge for impact to be meaningful and lasting.
As someone who grew up in Alice Springs, is raising a family in Darwin, and has worked across the NT and Federal governments, directly with Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs), and now as a Social Impact consultant with Social Ventures Australia (SVA), I’ve seen the same story play out many times.
Driven by the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, governments are increasingly outsourcing service delivery to ACCOs. On paper, this looks like progress. In reality, simply handing over a contract is not the same as setting an organisation up for success.
Programs meant to improve access to healthcare or lift outcomes for kids at school are announced with a big splash. But by the time they reach places like Groote Eylandt or Central Australia, they often result in fragmented service delivery, duplication of effort and, ultimately, a failure to shift the dial on key outcomes.
The root cause is a structural flaw in how these services are funded. A false, systemically damaging narrative persists that the Territory is awash with cash. The reality is there isn’t enough money in the system to create long-term impact.
Governments and philanthropic funders are eager to pay for frontline service delivery, but rarely for the organisational ‘backbone’—the governance structures, human resources, IT systems, and strategic planning that make any service sustainable. We are expecting local organisations to deliver multi-million-dollar contracts with the administrative resources of a local football committee.
This leads to capital expenditure without operational expenditure. We frequently see ‘white elephant’ infrastructure where clinics or facilities sit empty because no one secured the long-term, flexible funding to staff and manage them.
But the waste isn’t just physical; it is programmatic and relational. ACCOs pour immense cultural time, organisational energy, and hard-won community trust into standing up new services. When those programs inevitably struggle due to a lack of foundational support, the government response is rarely to help build that capacity. Instead, they often simply pivot the contract to another provider, abandoning the organisation’s heavy relational investment and starting the exhausting cycle all over again.
It’s time for a shift. When we spend money on a solution, we must ensure the funding helps local organisations stand on their own two feet.
Related story: Putting children at the centre: Activating hubs to fix a fragmented system
We saw what is possible through our work with Aboriginal Housing NT (AHNT). By partnering with them to build their organisational muscle, AHNT was empowered to stand strong as an independent peak body. They have since worked closely with the community to shape systemic policy, including successfully advocating against the Remote Rent Framework to protect thousands of First Nations tenants from unfair rent increases.
The message for government and philanthropic funders is clear: we must stop funding isolated programs and start funding foundational capacity. It’s time to trust that local organisations, and ACCOs in particular, know what is right for their people, and to resource them properly so they can lead the way.
Renee de Jong
Renee de Jong is Director of Consulting (Darwin) at Social Ventures Australia, an Impact Consulting firm that works across strategic planning, program and policy design, capacity building, and outcomes management and evaluation.
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