I work with homeless people and illiteracy is often a major part of why they're in that situation in the first place. If you can't read the forms you need to fill out for housing, social assistance, or medical care, you don't know what you're signing up for. If you can't read job applications, you can't know if you qualify for a job or not. If you can't read, you can't fill out a resume or a job application properly.
Not only that, you can't be warned about the dangers around you. My area has several places putting up warnings about drug poisonings and tainted drug supplies in the area, but that doesn't matter because most of my clients are reading at a 3rd grade level (if that) and can't read the words like carfentanyl let alone know what it means for them. We put up signs with instructions on how and when to use Narcan but if my clients can only follow instructions through pics, those words are useless.
My clients end up in hospital a lot and are often released with a pamphlet of instructions for how to take care of themselves once released. They may as well print out the instructions in Russian for all the good it does for my clients, who can't follow along! They cannot understand the tasks they are supposed to be doing for their health and it means that they often end up as frequent flyers in the ER for ailments a literate person would have been able to tend to on their own.
I could get more into this and maybe I will one day, but if we really want to do something about homelessness, we need to be doing something about the literacy crisis.






















