With spring finally here, Recycle Cycles is a vibrant hub of activity as people work to get bicycles ready for summer riding. Every week there are many faces in the shop, some new and some familiar, all busy cleaning and greasing, patching and adjusting. Two days a week are devoted to helping people repair their own bicycles. So far in 2005, over 200 bikes have been worked on in the shop.
In late March, I left Camp Ganadaoweh exhausted, bewildered, and excited. I felt a part of something important, and if it was not an earth-shaking event, The Justice re:Action camp had moved me.
When I arrived there, after a whirl-wind of planning, I decided that I would not look at the camp in terms of objectives. I would listen. It may seem strange to help plan a federally funded earpiece for youth in conflict with the law, but that’s how I felt. From the beginning of the first group discussion it was becoming clear that if nothing else, these youth who had been ignored by so many had our complete attention.
After returning to school from my summer at The Working Centre, I was immediately thrust back into the lineups, hassles, and general unpleasantness of life at university. Slowly but surely, I began to let my work with The Recycle Bike Camp become a passing memory in the haze of an incredible summer.
“Every community needs an oasis, and that’s what this is, an oasis,” says Brian Bartlett as we sit around a table, drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups.
The community of which he is speaking is the Mayfair Hotel at the corner of King and Young. Formerly a trendy hotel for visiting celebrities, The Mayfair now serves another purpose: providing housing for those who simply can’t afford to pay much more than the $400 for rent. The City of Kitchener purchased the hotel and now Kitchener Housing manages the rooms and collects the rent.
Imagine you’re ten again, with fewer worries on your mind and more possibilities ahead of you. Adolescence is just a cloud of doom off on the horizon. Your life is so carefree that the flat rear tire on your ten-speed mountain bike happens to be the most burdensome woe you’ve experienced in recent history.
The Integrated Circle of Care is a fluid and collaborative approach followed by workers from different agencies weaving through St. John’s Kitchen. Within this approach, staff members from each agency are aware of their specific personal roles. However, the high level of collaboration between workers means that people can approach any worker, without knowing their agency association or specific role, and still receive support – either that worker will support the person directly, or they will introduce the person to another worker who can support the person more appropriately.
This approach makes relationships more natural and support more accessible. Workers from different agencies are easily approachable, meaning that people build relationships with multiple workers. Having relationships with different workers is important to a person’s support – it makes support from a trusted source easy to find, and means that people have a choice of worker to approach in any given situation.
In order to maintain a circle of care around a person, workers from different agencies ask for consent from the person for information to be shared between workers. Continuous communication between workers helps to ensure that people do not fall into gaps between services, and also that services are not duplicated.
