Organisations working with and looking after children in care say that poor funding and planning is putting the care system at risk of collapse.
The Children's Residential and Aftercare Voluntary Association (CRAVA), which is being officially launched today, is made up of 15 groups providing homeless, residential, aftercare and outreach care to children and their families.
The organisations have come together because they are "finding it increasingly difficult to survive," said Director of Don Bosco Care Terry Dignan.
He said there have been ongoing funding issues for the voluntary sector for "decades".
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland on behalf of CRAVA he said: "We've come to a crux now [where] we feel the cost of providing the services and the funds we're getting are completely unequal.
"There's a huge inequity in the funding that we're receiving and we're finding it more and more difficult to maintain the quality of our services."
Attracting and retaining staff is difficult as the "terms and conditions don't compare in any way with the terms and conditions of staff of their counterparts doing the same jobs in the statutory sector," he said.
"There was a time pre the formation of Tusla when we were tied to salary scales, they were equitable.
"With the formation of Tusla, we re-designated organisations to a new funding model, and under that funding model the staff that work with us and all the voluntaries lost any connection to pay scale.
"So, effectively [the majority of] our staff are still on 2013 pay scales. Some of them are on no pay scales whatsoever."
The Government has a responsibility to step in and address some of these issues, he added.
"The children we work with are in our care, but they're actually in the care of the State," Mr Dignan said.
"The State is the corporate parent, and the State needs to meet their responsibilities now, by providing the adequate funding to actually address the issues that will cause a huge fracture in the service and threatens the sustainability of care."
