One of the things I often tell people is this. They often want to buy a project or a specific program that's very time limited. What the people who arrive at our door need is ongoing, very consistent help. We need funding on an ongoing basis for the support services we provide.
Current federal programs fund predominantly infrastructure pieces in terms of the poverty reduction strategy or the homelessness partnering strategy. It's funding predominantly bricks and mortar kinds of things, and small pilots. That needs to convert to ongoing, sustainable funding for programs that have been proven to work. Supporting some of the staff time that's needed to provide the kind of help and support that people need to navigate the system and to access existing supports that are already there would be a major step forward.
I'll just come back to the point that we have to figure out ways to reward partnerships between sectors as well. Social services are encompassed in the health care sector. They're encompassed in the social service sector that's provincially funded here by the Department of Community Services. It's also within the federal funding for employment strategies. For example, a guy coming to our shelter would have three different case managers. If I add the incarceration piece, he may go into jail if it's a short time, but he may also have an additional worker in there for discharge planning and so on. That seems to me like a bit of a duplication. If there are ways to foster that partnership among all of those things and create a little bit better horizontal governance of some of that programming, that would also be advantageous.
I think the way to support that would be to offer an RFP for something like that, with a duration that you could then measure, with a research component.
Those are just some brainstorming ideas.