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.
Each year we witness many deaths within the St. John’s Kitchen community. Kelly, Zack and Cookie were three men who were long time contributors to the work of community. Their contributions go back 25 years each, as part of the Job Café, a term we use for our part time work force. Job Café has contributed in hundreds of ways to the Kitchener downtown.
This issue’s collection of books point in new directions. The Working Centre is bridging two gaps between a homelessness crisis and climate change. The depth of homelessness was made real by The Working Centre naming over 900 people who are homeless. Each day we see in the news scathing hot temperatures, swaths of forests burning and villages washed away by surging water.
All around us, we have seen higher levels of anger expressed in political and social environments. You see this in relation to politics, you see it in the eyes of enraged drivers, and we have seen it in our community as people reconcile the realities of more and more people experiencing homelessness and drug addiction, especially around shelters and spaces that support people most at risk.
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.
The main message of Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity is How Can We Come Together. When CBC IDEAS asked Astra Taylor to give the Massey Lecture, they were inviting a Canadian who has been acting on the insecurity that has provoked the Occupy generation. Since her Occupy days, Taylor’s projects include the Debt Collective, a US based operation which supports those who have taken on overwhelming debt to pay for education, rent or bail. Taylor is very familiar with the causes of the insecurity she writes about.
All shelter spaces are full. The 230 shelter beds that the Working Centre has established in the last three years have helped to double the Region’s shelter capacity, but there are still 200 people camping and without access to shelter. There is little movement of people in our shelters as housing costs are beyond any social assistance cheque. Underneath the despair of reduced housing options is a burgeoning drug problem.
As St. John’s Kitchen prepares to return to St. John’s Anglican Church, it is fitting to reflect on our long journey together. For 21 years between January 1985 and July 2006 a continuous free weekday meal was served at lunchtime in St. John’s gym. During those years, every weekday between 100 – 200 people came through the church gym. The Working Centre had started using the St. John’s gymnasium two years earlier in January 1983 for the St. John’s Unemployed Workers Centre.
How did the numbers of homeless grow so rapidly in the last 5 years? Here are some of the underlying social factors that are contributing:
By 2013 the gathering forces of industrial synthetic drug production broke out from the margins making powerful drugs like fentanyl and crystal meth widely and cheaply available.
Sky high rents are leaving many out of the housing market. The definition of despair is having a $600 social assistance cheque when the cost to rent a room is $800.
In late May 2023 we held an open house at the new Queen Street Apartments. Brent Davis of The Record summarized the project well, “the apartments are located in the Bricker Block, the same historic block of buildings where The Working Centre has grown its roots since 1985, the new apartments will provide convenient access to the centre’s hub of income, employment and community supports.”
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.
