If you throw money at someone in need who trickled down into poverty due to, say, mental health issues, the money won't help very much until the person in poverty is treated as a whole and complex person. If a person stays at poverty level in a shelter for more than about 15-60 days (depending on the resiliency of the person) due to these health issues, a person starts to "learn to be homeless" and starts rapidly losing other life skills because common life skills are not being used anymore and a different set of skills is needed at street level. It does not take long to adopt survival skills and lose healthy life skills - and life skills don't just "bounce back" for most people on the first day they gain stable housing. This part of homelessness/poverty isn't a money problem; this is a social problem and an oppression problem involving restriction of healthy life resources and restrictions of healthy human relations/contact.
I think we need to examine myths and truths surrounding poverty and all get our heads away from the problem as being mainly a financial problem. In Halifax, the people who