I completely agree with your skepticism but based on the description of the service I expect it to land on the good side. The problem with a lot of poverty foc

I completely agree with your skepticism but based on the description of the service I expect it to land on the good side. The problem with a lot of poverty focused charity is that it is, essentially, a payment to a vulnerable person to be dehumanised. Fortunately, that means we can assess a poverty charity easily: do they humanise the people receiving help? Allowing people to come into a store and shop and engage with bespoke support is very humanising, because it’s just removing money from the equation, it does not take away agency or trust. The support they’re offering is not one size fits all, or a jobs-pipeline, rather, it’s whatever the customers need help with — essentially, what someone with money pays for! There’s certainly the possibility that even a well designed service can become a karma-mill for the middle-class, but in this case, I think we can be quite optimistic. That said, “life coach” has terrible connotations in the US but I think that’s just something lost in translation.