By Joe Mancini
Published December 2024
In early January 2025, St. John’s Kitchen will mark 40 years of serving a daily weekday meal in downtown Kitchener. The journey to ensure that the door of St. John’s Kitchen is open each day to continually serve the daily meal and to be a place that people count on, is a major part of our 40 year story. It is also a story of a changing place, of responding to dramatic changes on the ground. The first people who used St. John’s Kitchen in the early 1980’s all could go to a place they called home, if only at a rooming house. But now, 40 years later, we estimate that 80 percent of those who come daily to St. John’s Kitchen live unsheltered, without a home.
Before St. John’s Kitchen opened in January 1985, we had already operated a daytime drop-in at St. John’s Church for the two years previous. The church knew The Working Centre and welcomed us as part of a downtown church initiative to ensure people could get a daily nutritious meal. We started with two sinks for hand washing all the dishes. There were box freezers scattered throughout the church to hold donated food. We will never forget the original volunteers like Nellie, Rose, Mae, Don and so many others who worked in less than ideal conditions to make sure the meal was produced and cleaned up every day. Over time we renovated the kitchen, added a cooler and freezer. More importantly we became an integral part of St. John’s Church.
Yet by 2004, the growth of homelessness, the continuing high demand for the services of St. John’s Kitchen and especially the growing addiction and mental health challenges led the church to believe that we had substantially outgrown the space the church could offer. With the start of the Psychiatric Outreach Project, it was clear that after 21 years at St. John’s Church, we needed a new location that offered more space.
By providence, St. Vincent de Paul was open to selling the 97 Victoria N. building and The Working Centre was able to buy it with the goal of relocating St. John’s Kitchen to the second floor. The building was in a tired state and needed an extensive renovation. In July 2006, we moved St. John’s Kitchen from the church to our shiny new renovated space. The majority of the renovations were completed by crews that were made up of unemployed workers who often used St. John’s Kitchen. The new St. John’s Kitchen was built around an open kitchen where the daily meal was cooked while people gathered in the open dining area. The big windows on the second floor offered lots of sunshine and overlooked the train station and Victoria Ave.
By 2018, the reality of homelessness and a new wave of fentanyl and crystal meth addictions were a challenge to how the Kitchen operated. Long gone were the days when St. John’s Kitchen could be described as a community of people working together to cook and share surplus food. We were increasingly overwhelmed by those without any shelter options setting up encampments around the property. The number of overdoses and the general decline in mental health along with the survival culture of homelessness created conditions that shifted the Kitchen’s culture.
Even before the pandemic, we had started to plan a new kind of campus for 97 Victoria. It took several years to develop and fundraise towards the new vision. For two years the pandemic changed St. John’s Kitchen, but our ability to stay open and offer meals from morning till closing, public washrooms, a gathering space, showers, and laundry were vital to our community when so many places were closed.
As the planning for the Making Home project progressed, it became apparent the best place to relocate St. John’s Kitchen during the projected two-year construction period was St. John’s Anglican Church. St. John’s welcomed us back with open arms. In October 2023, it immediately felt like the early 1980’s when we first set up in the gym. However, the dramatically different circumstances of the homelessness crisis has challenged our return in ways that would have made it impossible to imagine the current reality of St. John’s Kitchen 40 years ago.
After some delays, construction for the new St. John’s Kitchen campus at 97 Victoria was able to start at full speed in February 2024. The announcement in September 2024 of the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings grant will help rebuild St. John’s Kitchen, recreating and continuing a 40 year history of involving the community in the serving of a free daily meal. At the same time the contribution of the Federal Government ensures that, through the use of heat pumps, electric appliances, insulation, solar panels and energy efficiency, the new building will achieve substantial reductions in carbon emissions. This beautiful, new drop-in space will extend the work of St. John’s Kitchen through the provision of meals, laundry, washrooms, welcome, connection to resources and healthcare supports for the most vulnerable. This new Kitchen will be fully accessible. With a courtyard in the centre of the project, the 44 units of housing, and the primary care health clinic, we are creating a place that will help people find routes of support for addictions, housing and mental health supports.
