Joe Mancini

A Busy Christmas Season

Joe Mancini March 1, 2025

This Christmas season was a busy time. We received overflowing generosity as the community responded to ensure many meals were available through the Christmas season. During mid-December, Maurita’s Kitchen on Queen Street was extra busy as over 1000 pounds of turkey were cooked and prepared for serving. In the final days massive quantities of potatoes, vegetables and gravy were produced and made ready. Altogether about 800 Christmas meals were prepared and served at St. John’s Kitchen, King Street Shelter and the Erbs Road Shelter.

An Alternative Path of Positive Cultural Change

Joe Mancini March 1, 2025

The Jesuit Disruptor offers a guide to embracing the animating spirit of the Gospels. Michael Higgins does this by documenting the changes percolating below the surface of Catholicism, rethinking democracy and reciprocity. Of course, the changes Francis has developed could all fall apart. Yet, Higgins produces evidence that the reforms themselves are the learning process. This book is about an alternative path of positive cultural change. A model in utter contrast to the one presently playing out in Washington. Francis is disrupting patterns, expectations, and the standard way of doing things, but not as a negative-malignant way of overturning old structures, rather with a focus on constructive goals through useful actions.

40 Years of St. John’s Kitchen

Joe Mancini December 1, 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.

In Memoriam: Cookie, Kelly, and Zack

Joe Mancini December 1, 2024

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.

Books for Sustainable Living

Joe Mancini December 1, 2024

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.

Searching for Wholeness

Joe Mancini September 20, 2024

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.

Acting Into Justice Provokes New Ways of Thinking

Joe Mancini June 1, 2024

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 Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart

Joe Mancini March 1, 2024

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.

The Drug Epidemic and the Social Housing Challenge

Joe Mancini December 1, 2023

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.

St. John’s Kitchen Returning to St. John’s Anglican Church

Joe Mancini September 30, 2023

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.

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