What that means to me is—again, I go back to my previous comment—whatever is getting in the way or causing someone to experience housing instability or homelessness. Again, I will go back to my youth homelessness days, when I've often said to our staff that they could be working from a housing perspective. Some staff are working from an employment perspective and some from a mental health or addictions perspective. Those are just variations on the theme. Your job is to support that young person about whatever is not going well for them in their life and address that, and then the outcomes will follow.
Wraparound support is that you show up to work one day, and whatever's not going right for the people you're trying to support, that's your job: helping them navigate those challenges and then some of the other outcomes that you would like to see them achieve. In 25 years of work, I've never met a young person who didn't want a better life: their life was just in a very different place right then. It's being realistic about what the challenges are and making sure the support is there.
We did a lot of work with pregnant and parenting young moms. It wasn't about offering them parenting skills—important skills; don't get me wrong—but if you support that young woman as a human being first, give her what she needs by way of support and access to decent, safe, affordable housing, the first thing she wants to do is go to school and create a better life for her and her kids—that's the first thing—and then she wants to go to work.