The One-Page Document That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Anchored to: the case manager’s need for an authoritative practitioner reference

I’ve quoted this case manager before, because her ask was so simple it’s almost embarrassing that the field hasn’t answered it: “I need something I can reference when I’m trying to figure out where to send clients.”

Not a training program. Not a certification. A one-page reference that plainly distinguishes crisis-informed from generic financial literacy, so a referral decision doesn’t depend on which program description a case manager happened to read first.

That document doesn’t exist yet, at a field-wide level. It’s part of why I’m developing a practitioner’s guide of my own, something a case manager could actually keep on her desk: a glossary of terms that get casually conflated, a straightforward comparison chart, and decision trees for the situations that come up constantly, like whether to address a question about investing when someone’s facing eviction next week.

None of this is complicated to build. It’s just never been prioritized, because the field has spent more energy debating definitions than building the practical tools that would make the definitions usable.

If you had one page to hand every new case manager in your field, what would you put on it?

Author: Sandra Roussel
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