Financial Mentor - I can actually give them hope

Shanice Adair, City Mission Financial Mentor says it makes her happy to help client manage their money and regain hope.

Our team of three financial mentors work from rooms right alongside the shelves and trolleys of our self-serve foodbank. Because of the demand on our foodbank, we can only provide food parcels once every seven weeks - it is a crisis service to help people at particularly tough times.

But if we spot an individual or family coming to us every seven weeks, then that’s a flag, and we steer them to our financial mentors for a closer look at the situation.

 Shanice is one of our three financial mentors and she says she usually has a box of tissues on the desk where she interviews clients.

It’s sad how often the tissues are needed to dab eyes.

Shanice finds many clients will start sobbing when they are confronted by how much of a money problem they have. They have come stressed and worried anyway, but to assess the size of the problem she needs to ask a series of questions and as the numbers build, it will suddenly hit them how bad things are.

“Money is everything to people. Money puts a roof over our head and food in our stomachs. It gets us from A to B. And I feel when you're stressed about money, you're stressing about providing for yourself or your family, and that stress is just so different to other kinds of stress I've seen with people.”

But she also reassures them that there are things that can be done to help manage debt and they have come to the right place to share the load and get a plan together.

Shanice has a special insight into what our clients are facing because of her background. Most come to us overwhelmed with debt that has been worsened through high interest loans and buy now/pay later contracts.

Before Shanice worked with the City Mission as a financial mentor, she had worked for 18 months with Work and Income and before that she worked for five years with a short-term lending business.

“Here, it's like I can finally do the good for the people I've been seeing for the past seven years,” she says.

“People come in here and I can actually give them hope. I can make them a goal budget and show them the steps on how to get there. Being able to see there's a change I can do for people from when they walk in the door to when they leave is a huge thing for me.”