Good news for outspoken mental health advocate Mike King’s youth mental health charity. Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey has announced the Government will continue to fund Gumboot Friday, the initiative set up by King’s group, "I am Hope”, until 2026.
Between now and then, Doocey says the foundation aims to deliver around 40,000 individual counselling sessions, aiming to reach as many as 15,000 Kiwis. He says initiatives like Gumboot Friday are helping to turn a corner in reducing wait times and increasing the workforce.
King, who is executive director of “I am Hope,” says it is nice for team members who do the hard work behind the scenes to meet Doocey.
In May last year, the Government assigned 24 million dollars to the Gumboot Friday to be rolled out over four years. In its first 12 months, the funding helped to deliver more than 30 thousand free counselling sessions, support an extra ten thousand young Kiwis and increase the number of counsellors registered to I Am Hope to over seven hundred, a 33% increase. King says every counselling session means a young person feels heard and supported.
In October last year, Gumboot Friday found itself surrounded by controversy when King -the initiative's founder- told Newstalk ZB “Alcohol is not a problem for people with mental health issues. It's actually the solution to our problem, until you come up with a better solution."
Despite calls from the labour party for the government to stop its funding, Doocey responded by saying that while he doesn't agree with the statements, King was still entitled to his own opinion.
Doocey says there are not many organisations that can get our young people off waitlists into counselling within just a few days. He called the relationship between the Government and I Am Hope a powerful partnership.
