This release includes a range of material provided by I Am Hope Foundation (I Am Hope) to the Ministry of Health, along with information from the Ministry of Health to the Minister for Mental Health on the first year of implementation of the Gumboot Friday initiative:
- Briefing: Gumboot Friday Initiative - Update and next steps (H2025067783)
- Bi-monthly reports (from July/August 2024)
- Monthly reports (from July 2024)
- Weekly report items
As part of the National and New Zealand First coalition agreement, the Government committed to funding the Gumboot Friday initiative $6 million per annum. Cabinet approved new funding of $24 million over four years to deliver this commitment as part of Budget 2024. Subsequently the Ministry of Health (the Ministry) contracted I Am Hope Foundation (I Am Hope) to deliver services for one year, after which the Ministry, at its discretion, may choose to renew the contract annually for a maximum of three years in total.
The Services under this first year contract include the delivery of brief intervention counselling services for young people aged 5 to 25 years, inclusive, experiencing mild and moderate levels of mental distress/mental health and addiction concern.
The objective of the contract is for I Am Hope to deliver services which:
- provide immediate support to address the needs of children and young people experiencing distress through early intervention;
- are easily accessible for young people through an online platform;
- meet the developmental needs of children and young people;
- refer children and young people on to specialist services as appropriate and required.
I Am Hope operates an on-line platform that connects recognised counsellors (referred to as practitioners) with young people aged 5 to 25 years old, who can receive at least two free one-hours sessions on-line, via phone or in some cases through face-to-face delivery. The practitioners agree an hourly rate with I Am Hope and the Ministry reimburses I Am Hope $150 per hourly session, based on an expected average cost. Practitioners can engage young people directly as clients, through direct contact, or via the on-line platform.
The Ministry of Health has responsibility for monitoring the contract. I Am Hope has performed in line with the contract expectations for the first year of the service. Key information, indicative of the first year performance includes:
- Number of children and young people receiving counselling in the 2024/25 year was 10,1921
- Number of counselling sessions delivered was 30,842
- Cumulative monthly clients total was 19,068
- Average number of counselling sessions per child or young person was 3.0
- Number of counsellors registered on the Gumboot Friday platform is 728 an increase of 33% for year one
- Expenditure for year one was $5.172 million
The above numbers are not yet final, as there will be further invoices received and a small number of additional sessions counted in the 2024/25 financial year over the next month.
On 23 June 2025 the Ministry of Health varied the contract we have with I Am Hope for the delivery of Gumboot Friday for a second year, amending the terms to reflect learnings from the first year and to adjust performance following initial roll out and scaling.
This proactive release provides the monthly and bi-monthly performance reports that we received from I Am Hope in response to the service performance measure requirements set out in the contract for 2024/25 financial year.
In addition, we have been working with I Am Hope on some of the demographic information obtainable from its platform about the children and young people engaged in Gumboot Friday over the last year and some information that explains their reasons for engaging in the service and seeking counselling. This information is also provided in this proactive release.
The demographic, regional and issues data reflects clients engaged in sessions during months rather than unique individuals. It therefore is subject to potential double counting of individuals (as individuals reappear across months) and is not comparable with individuals captured through the unique identifier. It nevertheless provides additional information about the groups that are engaged in Gumboot Friday.
We have included the brief updates we have provided to the Minister for Mental Health and a briefing on expected performance for the first year following the third quarter of service delivery.
The Gumboot Friday initiative is a demand driven service, where the number of sessions delivered is driven in a large part by children and young people seeking to engage in the free counselling sessions and the availability of practitioners. At any given point the number of available counsellors on the Gumboot Friday platform and the timeliness of their availability for sessions is visible on the Gumboot Friday platform at help.gumbootfriday.org.nz/. There are currently over 400 of the more than 725 registered practitioners available. Practitioners that register with the Gumboot Friday platform may be active or inactive (they may be on leave or not seeing any clients), or available not available (some may be fully involved with their existing client base) or available and their response time is presented on the website.
The number of practitioners has increased as the service has on boarded more practitioners as part of its scaling up process in the first year.
There are two key service performance requirements the Ministry has monitored throughout the contract period.
- The number of sessions to children and young people aged between 5 and 25 years of age each month.
- The number of children and young people aged between 5 and 25 years of age seen each month.
We have been tracking the wait times and exits over the year, although they relate to only those children and young people that engage via the website rather than through follow-up directly with practitioners. The data can be confusing and requires some explanation. The wait times largely relate to first visits by new clients. Exits relates to individuals that engaged in counselling and were then inactive for the following four weeks. Overall they show children and young people engaging with the service are being seen relatively quickly.
As we implemented a unique identifier we identified that young people were often re-engaging in the service some months later, so the exit information has become less important. Across the year the average number of sessions per individual has been calculated at 3.0 sessions. This reflects at receiving two sessions with a number receiving up to four additional sessions depending on need.
The Ministry only reimburses I Am Hope for sessions delivered with a fee of $150 GST exclusive for each session reported. Some invoices from practitioners are received by I Am Hope outside of its reporting window to the Ministry, so on occasion the following month will reconcile the previous month’s payments. This can impact on the monthly totals as a result
The key deliverable in the first year was for sessions to be delivered to 10,000 children and young people (see Schedule 1, 15.1 in the contract for services). Additionally, we assumed delivery of 30,000 sessions in the first year as the provider scales up its service and coverage. We expected this will grow to a maximum of 40,000 sessions per year subsequently and an expected 15,000 children and young people based on the funding available to maximise potential demand.
A small amount of information in this release would not be appropriate to release and, if requested, would be withheld under the Official Information Act 1982 (the OIA). Where this is the case, the relevant sections of the OIA that would apply have been identified. Where information has been withheld, no public interest has been identified that would outweigh the reasons for withholding it.
Key redaction codes:
- S 9(2)(a) to protect the privacy of natural persons
- S 9(2)(f)(iv) to maintain the constitutional conventions for the time being which protect the confidentiality of advice tendered by Ministers of the Crown and officials
