Family violence is one of New Zealand's most serious social problems. Aotearoa has among the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the developed world, with family harm calls among the most common responses for New Zealand Police. The sector responding to this harm — refuges, social service providers, kaupapa Māori services, perpetrator programmes, prevention education — is large, complex, and chronically underfunded relative to the scale of need.
For funders, family violence is a high-stakes, high-complexity domain. This guide covers what funders should understand about the sector before making grants, and how to support family violence prevention effectively.
Family violence encompasses a wide range of harm including intimate partner violence, child abuse and neglect, sexual violence, elder abuse, and other forms of family harm. The organisations responding to it span multiple types:
Crisis and refuge services
Women's refuges and specialist family violence services provide immediate safety to people escaping violent homes. They operate crisis lines, emergency accommodation, safety planning, and court support. These services need reliable, flexible operational funding — not project grants that don't cover core costs.
Perpetrator accountability programmes
Programmes working with people who use violence (most commonly, but not exclusively, men) address a critical gap: without intervention with people who cause harm, violence continues and communities cycle through the same families. The Integrated Safety Response (ISR) and safe to talk programmes, and kaupapa Māori approaches like He Waka Tapu and Te Kupenga Whakaoti Mahi Patunga, work in this space.
Prevention and education
Primary prevention — stopping violence before it starts — targets norms, attitudes, and environments that enable violence. School-based respectful relationships programmes, community education, and public campaigns work to shift the social norms that underpin family violence.
Kaupapa Māori services
Māori whānau are disproportionately affected by family violence and are often better served by culturally grounded kaupapa Māori services than by mainstream providers. The Te Rito family violence prevention strategy and He Korowai Oranga provide policy frameworks, but Māori-led services remain underfunded relative to need.
System change and advocacy
Organisations like Shine, Family Violence New Zealand, and Te Ohaakii a Hine / TOAH-NNEST work on systemic reform — policy advocacy, sector coordination, workforce development, and data systems that help funders and policymakers understand the scale and nature of family violence.
Family violence is one of the hardest domains in which to measure impact. The challenges:
Secrecy and disclosure: Family violence often isn't disclosed until crisis point. Prevention programmes reach many people, but only a fraction of outcomes are visible.
Long timeframes: The effects of early intervention, prevention education, or perpetrator programmes may take years to manifest — far beyond typical grant reporting cycles.
Attribution: Did violence stop because of a programme, or because circumstances changed? Isolating programme effects from other factors is extremely difficult.
Risk from bad metrics: Measuring the wrong things can distort services. A refuge measured on "clients moved to independence quickly" may rush people out of safety; one measured on "crisis calls resolved" may discourage clients from calling back.
Funders working in family violence should invest in sector-level evaluation rather than expecting individual grantees to prove impact on their own. They should also be sceptical of simple output metrics (numbers helped) that don't address whether safety was achieved.
Fund operational costs, not just projects
Services working with families in crisis cannot operate on project funding alone. Core costs — staff, buildings, 24/7 response capacity — need reliable multi-year operational funding. Project grants for one-off programmes are less useful than core operational support.
Multi-year commitments
Short-term funding is particularly damaging in this sector. Organisations providing crisis services cannot wind services up and down based on one-year funding cycles; staff who leave take institutional knowledge and relationships. Three-year or longer funding commitments are important.
Support kaupapa Māori approaches
Funding should reflect the disproportionate impact on Māori whānau and actively support kaupapa Māori services, rather than forcing Māori service providers to fit into mainstream programme models.
Balance immediate response and prevention
There is a chronic tendency to fund crisis response (because the harm is visible) over prevention (where success is invisible). Funders can consciously rebalance by dedicating a portion of family violence funding to primary prevention programmes.
Avoid tokenism on perpetrator programmes
Perpetrator accountability is politically complicated and often avoided by funders who prefer to support victims. But without addressing the people who cause harm, the cycle continues. Funding well-evidenced perpetrator intervention programmes is essential to long-term prevention.
Fund sector infrastructure
The sector's effectiveness is limited by workforce capacity, fragmentation, and data systems. Funding sector coordination bodies, workforce training, and shared infrastructure has multiplier effects across the whole system.
Effective family violence funding typically includes:
- Multi-year operational core funding (3+ years)
- Clear outcomes (safety and wellbeing of those affected) rather than activity counts
- Flexible use of funds within agreed purposes
- Regular relationship-based check-ins (not just formal reporting)
- Commitment to listening to sector expertise about what works
The organisations doing this work have profound knowledge about family harm, what helps, and what doesn't. Funders who approach the sector as genuine partners — listening before designing programmes, supporting sector expertise, and funding flexibly — get better outcomes than those who impose programme designs from outside.
In New Zealand, central government is the dominant funder of family violence response — through the Ministry of Social Development, Te Puna Aonui (the cross-agency family violence and sexual violence joint venture), and the justice and health systems. Philanthropy plays a complementary role, typically:
Understanding what government funds (and doesn't fund) helps philanthropic funders identify where they add distinctive value.
Tahua's grants management platform helps funders manage complex multi-year grant portfolios in challenging sectors — with the outcome tracking, relationship management, and reporting tools that support effective family violence grantmaking.