By Stephanie Mancini
Published March 2025
We are now one and half months from the closing of King Street Shelter. King Street Shelter has come out of a line of innovative and highly responsive approaches The Working Centre has brought to the dramatic increase in homelessness, combined with the opioid drug crisis. We have created a place of belonging where people come together in a congregate setting to share living every day.
By all counts, this shelter should not work. But it does. The people in the shelter change as people find housing, or move on due to conflict or an inability to keep living in a congregate setting, or move to a different shelter after a period of settling at King Street Shelter. The acceptance, the care, the unconditional regard offered to people is an important step in helping people to feel seen, to be known, to rest and be welcomed back into community.
Fr. Greg Boyle says, “people get hope from each other and from everybody supplying a dose of tenderness and care and everybody’s on the receiving end of it. It’s a way to engage full participation in cherishing love. Then you end up being the front porch of the house everybody wants to live in.” Being cherished accelerates the healing.
King Street Shelter is not all pretty, but no matter what happens we work to love past behaviour and touch the humanity of each person even if they are angry or psychotic or too unwell to live in a congregate setting. Whenever we can we look for the next place for people that recognizes the end of the current reality but encourages people forward to their next option. And many people fight not to leave because people find home and community in this setting with our staff team acting as buffer to the theft, the danger, the roughness of street life.
The limits are created by the ability of the wider group to tolerate the circumstances when someone becomes unwell. Sometimes the group shifts in acceptance, sometimes the person is asked to leave, sometimes the person impacts the wellbeing of our wider community neighbours. We see the hardship created when we ask someone to leave – a few weeks ago we gave someone a 2 week break and while outside he fell and hit his head and died soon after in hospital. Decisions made often have serious consequences. The choices we end up making about welcoming people into shelter can be life and death as we stand witness to the harshness of living unsheltered.
We walk people through the rolling wave of craving and withdrawal, and stand with them when the drugs are so toxic people drop into drug poisoning. We monitor epileptic seizures, calling EMS as needed as we come to know someone’s base level when they suffer from a seizure disorder. We literally walk with 5 women who use walkers at KSS – one who has serious fall risk, two that can’t move around at all without the walker. We supported a man through serious alcohol poisoning until he agreed to let us measure out a regular alcohol dose.
The health team from Community Health Caring, and The Working Centre’s Specialized Outreach Services team assess overall wellness, connect to specialists, support mental health and addiction needs and facilitate access to treatment options where appropriate. The Working Centre’s Justice Outreach Services supports people through court procedures and probation to help avoid unnecessary charges when court dates are forgotten because of the tumultuousness of living without housing. Ontario Health at Home has been assessing people for long-term care (approximately 10+ would qualify if they were willing to overcome their fear and leave what is familiar to them, a common situation for women as they age and fear loss of freedom). Community partners visit regularly to connect with residents.
The King Street Shelter Housing and Outreach team helps everyone become paper ready for housing opportunities. Starling joins to make these housing opportunities happen. Since April of 2024 we have supported 46 people to find housing. Ontario Works attends on site to problem-solve income support issues. Traverse Independence supports people with acquired brain injury, a common reality for people who are experiencing homelessness.
We are on a time-sensitive push to help 100 people to find their next-spot when the shelter closes. This is not something you can start too early because it leaves everyone unsettled and feeling unsafe. The KSS residents have become prioritized for options open within the Housing and Homeless system as everyone leans in to help close the shelter as thoughtfully as possible. This only means that people who are living outside have fewer options for coming inside as there is a limit in the number of spots available in the system. And we know there will not be enough spots for everyone before March 31. When the YW closed last year, 47 of the 60 women who were relocated at the closing ended up at King Street Shelter – solutions are not there for all, and we shuffle people around. Again.
The conversations with the team of workers at King Street Shelter are complex. We have invited people to bring themselves into this work, acting with love, and thoughtfully separating one’s mood on a particular day with the patience it takes to stand in this work. Fr. Gregory Boyle says – “Allow yourself to be reached, to be loving, to enter into relational wholeness. I allow my heart to be altered.” We work together on how this lives out day to day, how to trust one’s team, how to process one’s own stuff, how we hold a consistent place of care. As we navigate the close-down conversations we are grieving the loss of this beautiful model of shelter, and we are appreciating the way each person has brought themselves into this work.
The need for a low-barrier shelter has not gone away. In fact we could probably use 3 low barrier shelters as we respond to the consequences of extensive periods of living unsheltered, building on the learnings of what we have done already. The closing of King Street Shelter means more people will be living on the streets of downtown Kitchener, already overwhelmed with the volume of people facing homelessness and the related deepening of mental health challenges.
King Street Shelter is closing because the neighbours insisted the shelter did not belong in their neighbourhood. We are closing at a time when neighbourhood incidents have reduced and the shelter has found its stable culture after two years, a reasonable length of time when bringing together 100 people in a congregate space, people who are often deeply unwell when they enter the space. The building is still available but the commitment to close has been made.
As a wider community we need to make the choice to support low-barrier shelter options. The human cost of living unsheltered is unbearable to witness. The social costs increase as we add security and waste management to encampments, as we arrest people for aggression, theft and violence when they have nothing to lose, and the infections continue to grow from unsafe living conditions.
Making this choice is not only good for people living unsheltered, this is for the good of all of us. Fr. Greg Boyle again – “None of us belong, unless all of us belong.” “None of us are well, unless all of us are well.” We have learned this lesson through the pandemic, yet we continue to close down, close in and think we can push this away.
