Remarks by Joe Mancini at the 35th Annual Mayors’ Dinner
Published June 2024
Pope Francis calls the beatitudes the path to joy and true happiness for all humanity.
What is the work of shelter – it is walking with those who are left out, it is the call to be merciful, it is mourning those who die, it is seeking right action for those dispossessed.
During these last five years, The Working Centre has walked with thousands dealing with homelessness, many of whom are caught in the concurrent cycle of mental health and addictions.
This journey comes with a deep commitment, a holding of a heavy weight. This extra work is a necessary start to change this structure of injustice.
It has meant working 24/7 providing wide reaching supports with an infrastructure designed to react to complex problems. This intensive work is done in the midst of a drug crisis that continues to grow.
So much has been accomplished and so much more to do. Let me reflect on The Working Centre’s accomplishments these past few years:
The development with the Region of 230 shelter spaces has changed Waterloo Region.
Developing the ability to produce and distribute over 700 meals a day, 200,000 meals a year using over 800,000 pounds of food from the Waterloo Region Foodbank.
Maintaining and growing our employment work, last year helping over 5000 people with their job search.
Building 21 units of housing on Queen Street South. In June, a year after construction started, 34 new tenants moved in. They included single women with children who were living in shelters or were precariously housed, coming to Canada from countries like Peru, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Albania and Kosovo.
Working with Perimeter Development to start construction on 44 units of specialized housing for the long term homeless and a new home for St. John’s Kitchen.
In a former time, Emerson said, “Souls are not saved in bundles but one by one.” In the work of shelter, it is about the person who is in front of you. It is not about saving, it is about offering a pathway back to the common good.
We are in awe of our workers who open their hearts each day as they;
- Deal with addictions and mental health episodes like delusions, anger outbursts, paranoia, and violence;
- Respond daily to multiple overdoses and deal with long-term effects like acquired brain injury;
- Respond to those who need a bed when the shelters are always full
- Deal with head lice, bed bugs and cockroaches;
- Provide meals and support for up to 400 people each day at St. John’s Kitchen;
- Accept the harshness of winter which means there is a desperate urgency around the meals, washrooms, showers, and harm reduction supports;
- Doing the work of opening up warming spaces by taking extra shifts during frigid cold spells;
- Visiting encampments to support those who are living in inhuman conditions;
- Providing care to those with medical needs such as congestive heart failure, diabetes, punctured lungs, incontinence, amputations, frostbite, and cancer;
Yet in the midst of all this, shelter workers have assisted 75 people this year to move from shelter to various social or supportive housing.
TWC has specialized in providing spaces that are low barrier with deep harm reduction. This is the work of building a community of trust for people who could not make it in the shelter system.
It is here that we witness the piling on of trauma, anxiety, confusion, and drug seeking. Dealing with the violence, the hoarding, the bone crushing pain of drug withdrawal. It requires a commitment to hold people with compassionate loving care. It is necessary work. To NOT do this means pushing people out into the cold. The despair, embitterment and abandonment will only pile higher.
The despair is already there – the lack of housing options, the scarcity of meaningful work, the lack of nurturing relationships – are voids that drugs fill, that worsen mental health. The drugs merely mask over what has been lost.
Is addiction, mental health decline and homelessness the definition of chaos, or is chaos a society that allows these realities to proliferate?
Determined Hope is partly the ability to see far down the road, to hold on to the belief that change happens over time. It is people acting into justice that provoke new ways of thinking. It is the culture that changes over time, as more people grasp the change that is possible.
When there were 250 people without shelter in November 2019, change was coming. TWC responded, working with the Region to open up shelter spaces. The narrative was no longer who deserved shelter and who did not. The question was how to create low barrier spaces that recognized a crisis that was leaving hundreds of people in the cold. Out of the depths of despair, new systems of justice and equality emerge. The work is just starting.
