Specifically regarding financial literacy, I really agree that having money is more about managing money than it is about making money, assuming the minimum wage is high enough to be liveable and assuming that a person has enough money to support themselves. Our homelessness report card says that a $14-per-hour minimum wage would be adequate to sustain people with a healthy basket of services in living, including rent and so on.
At our shelter at Metro Turning Point, we have a trusteeship program that deals with the specific issue of financial literacy and specifically helps people who have had trouble with that in the past. But it's underfunded.
As part of a strategy, it would be really good to look at funding financial literacy and funding the full continuum, from actual trusteeship and managing someone's money with them to programming that builds their understanding, through to independence. Depending on their abilities, we don't see a lot of people who have extensive mental health issues or addiction problems transitioning off our trusteeship program for bigger pieces like rent. But we do see sometimes that we can up their personal money to help them pay for incidentals. They might begin by paying their own bill for the phone, because the consequence of losing their phone has less impact than would losing their apartment.
So those financial literacy pieces are very critical.