Stephanie Mancini

Knowing Our Neighbour

Stephanie Mancini March 1, 2025

This year’s Mayors’ Dinner theme, Knowing Our Neighbour, is about the positive social connections that engender dialogue and reciprocity. We all know the importance of neighbours. Can we become neighbourly people in the widest sense, can we strive to find positive ways to build community? The Dinner this year comes at a time when there is a discouragement for the divides that we see around us. Neighbourliness, the ability of people and groups to talk to each other, help each other out and learn from each other is a pathway to building community.

Closing King Street Shelter

Stephanie Mancini March 1, 2025

We are now one and half months from the closing of King Street Shelter. King Street Shelter has come out of a line of innovative and highly responsive approaches The Working Centre has brought to the dramatic increase in homelessness, combined with the opioid drug crisis. We have created a place of belonging where people come together in a congregate setting to share living every day.

Harden Not Our Hearts

Stephanie Mancini December 1, 2024

Driving through rural Ontario, it is not unusual to see signs with Christian messages surrounded by colourful leaves at this time of year. I was struck recently by one sign that read, “Harden not your heart”. As we were driving by this sign, we were also receiving updates from our shelter team that there were four overdoses happening at the same time.

Change Over Time

Stephanie Mancini September 20, 2024

We are starting to get ready for the Point in Time (PiT) count, which is a national coordinated effort to take a snapshot of how many people are experiencing homelessness in one night. It is important to recognize the many ways that homelessness is increasing in our communities, especially for people just trying to cope as best they can. Encampments demonstrate that we no longer have an effective social structure response to homelessness.

Standing in Solidarity with the Unsheltered and Unhoused

Stephanie Mancini December 1, 2023

Standing witness to the harshness of our world is painful and draws a deep lament – across the world, on the earth that sustains life, and in our own community. The lament is important, standing with eyes wide open as witness, and feeling the pain. If we don’t lament, this despair can turn into anger, into fear, or indifference.

How UA Interim Housing Offers Integrated Supports

Stephanie Mancini September 30, 2023

University Ave (UA) Housing emerged out of the triple emergencies of Covid, high homelessness, and a severe opioid epidemic… The reality for those facing homelessness was becoming increasingly intense. The Working Centre was witnessing these issues through our work with St. John’s Kitchen, Street Outreach, and SOS. We spent 2019 trying to draw system attention to these issues, and by 2020 and the arrival of Covid we leaned in to create and deliver practical responses. We worked constantly to help draw attention to the fact that our current frameworks were no longer meeting the needs of this growing group of people experiencing homelessness.

Reflections on Common Work

Stephanie Mancini June 1, 2023

At The Working Centre, we are forty some years into this work, feeling deeply rocked by the increasingly stark reality of people who are being left out of housing, people facing the deep dislocation of poverty, a lack of housing, a poison and highly addictive drug supply. Our hearts are broken apart and broken open over and over again as we stand witness to people facing increasing hardship.

Responding to Homelessness in Waterloo Region

Stephanie Mancini March 1, 2023

This year’s Mayors’ Dinner focuses on Responses to Homelessness. We are pleased to celebrate the many diverse efforts it takes to make change happen in the face of the daunting, disturbing and often tragic realities we face as a community.
We have leaned in with everything we have as an organization, and have been on the front-lines of this tragedy, hardship and injustice.

Responding On the Ground

Stephanie Mancini December 2, 2022

Those of us responding directly to the day-to-day survival needs of increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness in our Region knew that we needed immediate action. A phone call to Fr. Toby Collins at St. Mary’s Church in downtown Kitchener led us to hosting a month-long people-sleeping-on-the-floor pop-up shelter for 200 individuals in November of 2019. Since then there have been many positive changes.

Shelter and Housing with Eyes Wide Open

Stephanie Mancini April 1, 2022

Every night this winter I have gone to sleep noticing the weather; thinking deeply of the growing number of people who are living without housing, living without shelter, alongside of those who are living without housing security.

The numbers of people make this reality palpable and urgent. The September 2021 Point in Time count documented 1085 people without access to housing. These numbers have names, and are people we see every day.