Sure. Thanks for your question, Ms. Smith.
I would say that three of the key services that probably need to be offered are the opportunity for immediate exit, long-term sustainable housing, and life-skills programs. When I say life skills, I'm not talking about general life skills. All of our life-skills curricula have been written by women who worked as prostitutes or were involved in sexual exploitation, so when we're talking about budgeting, we're actually looking at it. First, we have a conversation about what is our actual relationship with money. We come at it from a very psycho-educational perspective, and then a skills-based perspective next. So the life skills are extremely important, relationships with others.
It's particularly important for women who are going to go back to school or find a job sometimes have struggled with their relationships. Interestingly, we find in particular that they can struggle with their relationships with other women, mostly because for the majority of their lives, they've been groomed and trained in how to relate very well with men and have not had as much opportunity to relate well to other women. So we really pride ourselves on establishing a sisterhood sort of model, a mutual model, where everything we do is based on mutuality. We don't believe for a second that we are experts in anybody else's lives. They are the experts in their lives, and they tell us what services they need to help heal or to move on, or whatever next step in their life they want to take.
Thirdly, I would say it's extremely important for there to be opportunities for advanced education or employment training for women so they do have alternatives. We know that poverty is a huge underlying contributing factor to prostitution and exploitation. When we can equip women with the skills and the financial resources to do something about that, they become extremely successful and get to actually follow paths and achieve goals that they really have.
We do have our partnership with the police services. We receive funding from various levels of government, from a lot of private donors. Our provincial government helps us out a little bit with some money through civil forfeiture, which is related to crime prevention. That is an opportunity, I think, to leverage the federal dollars as well. Also, our partnership with the municipal government, the City of Calgary, provides us with some opportunity to provide the attachment bonding at work with moms and their children, if they've been separated for a long time. When their children are returned to them, that can create all sorts of new issues and challenges, so our municipal government helps us out that way. We've developed excellent relationships, really, with all of the political parties in Alberta because we're non-partisan, obviously.
So, yes, I think there are a lot of opportunities with this bill, and that's why I love Canada. I'm such a proud Canadian, and I love how innovative Canadians have been around issues like homelessness. Now in Calgary we're looking at ending poverty. As a country, we're talking about prostitution and what works best for women. I really mean it when I say that we need to be proud of this bill and that we can make a real difference for Canadian girls and women.