This winter our family has tried a microgreen share, offered by The Working Centre for a twelve-week period. It seemed both winter and myself in these unsettled and distracting times were curled up in a quiet, incubating mood. My son Jonathan had unexpectedly given me a start-up kit, seeds, trays, and an LED light to get our family started with microgreens at Christmas.
Sometimes small groups working together, both in and around The Working Centre, burst beyond the borders of The Working Centre’s beehive buzz into places of teaching and learning all over town. Special moments in such small groups remind us exactly what structures of aliveness can feel like. I call these “inside out” structures, where atmosphere and feeling precedes a clear plan.
Stories are a human anchoring place in the work of The Working Centre. They move forward in time, binding the teller and the listener together. A story can be told all at once, in a rushed burst of feeling, or with restraint and reserve, over longer periods of time. Sometimes a story is a sum total of silences, gaps, awkward confusion and regret, tears, missed appointments. It is sometimes thought that stories related to employment are relatively straightforward. Is not a resume a straight up request, a simple request to put a person’s life on paper, in order to achieve a job?
What did the pages of Good Work News look like before Andy Macpherson came along?
For most of us – new readers or old-time subscribers to the paper – that would be hard to say. Fact is, the intricate body of black and white drawings featured in Good Work News over the past decade’s issues have constituted a full bodied “music be-tween the words” that have ex-pressed the heart’s core of The Working Centre for a growing body of subscribers, volunteers, visitors, and project staff.
The Working Centre’s crowded seminar rooms and meeting areas at 43 Queen and 58 Queen have witnessed a bubbling up of activities – discussion, writing, focused life history conversation, and sometimes debate — among the New Canadians who visit to learn more about how they might move forward their lives and professions in Canada.
The phrase “good jobs, bad jobs, no jobs” has been adopted by some observers of the Canadian job scene as a thumbnail sketch of all that is afflicting the work force this decade. A complex global trade picture, a madly speeded-up work day, relentless credential requirements for all kinds of jobs, and a constantly uncertain employee/employer contract are facts of life today for most groups and classes of workers.
Elena’s eyes light up with delight. After a five concentrated ninety minute sessions with a counsellor at The Working Centre at 43 Queen, the final copy of her resume that has been collaboratively sweated over for the past month is finally printed – a well earned destination. Both employment counsellor and career changer have scrutinized the resume carefully, not just once or twice, but many times indeed. And what a resume it is. Elegant yet down-to-earth, Elena’s carefully crafted resume is intended to carry her forward into a professional career development path beyond the “survival job” level that she has been working at for several years in this community.
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.
