AFTER more than 30 years supporting local parents and guardians, Parentline ACT has been shut out of the community services budget and may close down in a matter of months.

The service has struggled along with the help of volunteers since last December, when it lost an $800,000 ACT Government contract only nine months after winning it.

Manager Larissa Dann hopes a petition to Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and the Minister for Children and Young People, Joy Burch, will lead to new core funding – about $300,000 a year – to continue the telephone counselling service. She says the phone line’s value lies in immediate, anonymous and localised support, which helps families resolve issues before they become more extreme.

“Because it’s a unique service and we’ve done it for so long, because it’s for the community and it’s free, we would like to see our funding reinstated by the Government,” she says.

But according to the deputy director-general of the Community Services Directorate (CSD), Maureen Sheehan, that’s not likely.

“We need to be clear that all of the funding in the Children, Youth and Family portfolio is allocated,” she states with finality.

Supporters are sad and angry at the imminent loss of what they see as a unique and valuable local service. So far, 811 people have signed the online petition and many have left compelling messages of support.

Maureen Sheehan does not agree Parentline is unique, and denies its closure would create a service gap.

“I know Parentline likes to say there’s no phone line for parents [if it closes], but that’s not true,” she says, arguing that the new Child, Youth and Family Services Gateway, run jointly by Banardos, the YWCA, Woden Community Service and Belconnen Community Service, performs the same role. But she concedes that genuine and ongoing counselling would “most likely” come from other service providers via referral from the Gateway.

The Gateway has the same role Parentline was contracted for in 2012, known as the Information, Engagement and Coordination Service. It will have four employees when fully operational, and is mainly a referral service, as the name implies. It closes at 6pm, three hours earlier than Parentline did before their financial issues, and does not offer telephone counselling.

“The contract that we have [for the Gateway], which is same that Parentline had, doesn’t actually specify the provision of telephone counselling as an activity,” explains Chris Redmond, director of Woden Community Service. At most, the Gateway’s staff will provide what he calls “accidental or incidental counselling”, and Sheehan refers to as “initial counselling”.

“In the new Child, Youth and Family Services framework, telephone counselling wasn’t a component,” says Redmond. “It was what Parentline had done for a long time but that wasn’t required under the new framework.”

When it was implemented in 2011, Larissa Dann says Parentline had “no choice” but to tender for a role within the new framework, or go without public funding.

“The activity for which we felt we were most suited was the new Information, Engagement and Coordination Service,” she explains.

Winning the contract meant Parentline had to change focus significantly and become the “one-stop shop” for all youth and family support services in the ACT. The core expertise it had developed over decades – telephone counselling – was now “one small part of what they needed to do”, in the words of Maureen Sheehan.

A complex series of accusations, contradictions, claims and counterclaims followed the contract termination, but the bottom line is there is no place for Parentline’s original, 30-year-old service within the new regime. If it continues, it will be without the support of the ACT Government.

“We’re also, of course, looking at additional sources of funding, too; there are other philanthropic organisations which we can go towards to try and get some funding,” says Larissa Dann. “I think we’re a resilient organisation and we really want to continue, we think that we need to continue and we think that parents of Canberra really value us.”

To contact the Parentline ACT counselling service, call 6287 3833 between 9am and 5pm. The Parentline online petition is at change.org.