By Joe and Stephanie Mancini
Published in December 2016
Editors Note: This article is the speech that Joe and Stephanie gave at the 41st Interfaith Community Breakfast organized by Interfaith Grand River this past May.
Over these 34 years, living and working in downtown Kitchener, The Working Centre has sought to build an alternative model of community building. This work has taken place, while all around us the ecological, economic and cultural landscape has been under constant stress.
Even in 1982, it was clear that the growth economy had come up against its worst enemy, ecological limits.
Back in 1982, we started walking with a new group of workers, the “contingent labor force,” workers who were without steady, full-time jobs, plucking away at lower waged jobs that were part-time and temporary.
We have watched the increase in depression, anxiety and addictions. We know a leading cause is when psycho-social integration is trumped by individualistic behavior. Another leading cause is an economy that fails to give people meaningful work.
These experiences provoked our efforts to rethink the meaning of work in urban centres. How, in an effective, practical way, can work be reshaped so that it provides citizens with a livelihood, and knits people together into the fabric of family and community life?
How can work improve our environmental footprint?
Common Work for our Common Home is about provoking new ways of thinking about the interrelationships between work, our natural environment and service to community.
What is Common Work?
Our starting definition of Common Work is the effort to re-embed economic life into participatory, craft-centred social relationships that generate new structures of solidarity that help people to fulfill their dignity by serving community.
For 30 years we have experimented with a philosophy of work that reduces bureaucracy, increases hospitality, gives priority to relationships, and seeks to locate responsibility at the point where the work is accomplished.
In all these projects, the main goal is to teach the healing nature of service.
We consider it a blessing that over 30 projects have emerged that are serving meals, recycling bikes, recycling clothing and computers and furniture and housewares, growing food, creating community gardens, building a market garden and a greenhouse, growing microgreens, renovating housing, providing housing, providing supportive housing to the persistently homeless, supporting people through our housing desk, revitalizing old buildings, offering medical care, dental care, psychiatric supports, providing a job search resource centre, public access computers, computer training, employment counseling, training supports, making soap and body care products, creating day labour projects, a moving service, walking with the homeless, walking with youth, working with older workers and with New Canadians, supporting refugees, operating a café and a commercial kitchen, helping people with taxes etc. We call all these projects Community Tools, involving the work of over 600 people – 100 workers and over 500 volunteers, the majority of whom are people seeking community, including those who have been left out of the regular work force.
Work always has the potential to lead to meaningful relationships. This happens when people can plan the terms of their work; work in a structure that is flexible, which allows room for people to commit fully to the tasks at hand. A dynamic work culture is best described as a place where decision-making is decentralized, and the workers have the freedom to improvise with energy and creativity.
At The Working Centre, this is complimented by ensuring the overall goals are known and respected. All work is relational, and it is through relationships that our integrated but decentralized model is worked out.
As Zinnat Bader described it,
“It is the social ethos with which The Working Centre operates, the respect they give people, the dignity they accord people, all people are treated at the same level and that kind of service, that kind of quality of support, you don’t see enough of.”
Common Work means teaching the skills and theories that model equitable and meaningful relationships at work, at home, and in communities.
Our Common Home
We are reflecting on Common Home as a tribute to Francis’s letter Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home.
Francis reminds us of the interrelatedness of all cosmic life. He writes:
“Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love of God.”
Francis urges us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, and to learn to give and not simply to give up.
A century ago, Teilhard de Chardin wrote:
“The success of humanity’s evolution will not be determined by ‘survival of the fittest’ but by our own capacity to converge and unify.”
We take this to mean that the way we work, the way we use resources, the way we consume the fruits of the earth, needs to be in balance with the Earth’s carrying capacity. Evolution is calling us to greater complexity, greater responsibility, and a deeper respect for diversity.
The way we work and consume directly affects our Common Home. Look around and see, strewn throughout our habitat, the waste heaps, polluted waters, abandoned lands and buildings.
Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth made it clear that we have “violated the norms of limitations, so upset the chemical balance of the atmosphere, the soil, and the oceans, so exploited the Earth in our use of fossil fuels, that we are devastating the fertility of the planet and extinguishing many species of wildlife.”
We now inhabit a planet in climate change suffocating with greenhouse gases, chemical pollution, and biodiversity loss.
Laudato Si’ is a theology that challenges a selfish world of disconnectedness by calling all people to a new world of interrelatedness. Loving is moving away from what “I” want towards what the world needs. Francis calls this liberation from fear, greed and consumption.
But there is more. Oren Lyons, a faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation, is glad that scientists have now determined that humans share 100% of the DNA of flowers. “It is about time they figured that out,” he says, “indigenous people have been telling the white man this for 400 years.”
All of us, Everything on the earth, we are All related. This is what our aboriginal brothers and sisters have been telling us for a long time, and we are happy Francis is joining them.
For all of us, this means matching our words with action through embracing a simple way of walking on the Earth.
From Individualism to Integrated Wholeness
In last December’s Good Work News, we highlighted a quote from Ilia Delio’s book The Unbearable Wholeness of Being:
“Love is a consciousness of belonging to another, of being part of the whole. To love is to be on the way toward integral wholeness, to live with an openness of mind and heart, to encounter the other – not as stranger – but as another part of oneself.”
Delio wants us to understand our interdependence, by seeing this as our evolutionary role, modeling the integral wholeness of love as a fundamental part of our being. Our actions are significant and they can be aligned towards love and wholeness, as opposed to greed and individualism.
Yet, our institutions are stuck with process models that lead to stagnation. They impose ever new layers of regulation, designed to enhance top-down power. They de-humanize and de-centre the human being. They thwart integrated wholeness.
The Working Centre model has been to rebuild from the bottom up. We need to create communities where conscious love is fostered and acted on.
Borrowing from the philosophy of personalism as practiced by The Catholic Worker, The Working Centre adapted six virtues as our commitment to teach the Common Good in word and action:
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Serving Others
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Living Simply,
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Rejecting Status,
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Work as Gift,
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Building Community,
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Creating Community Tools
These virtues match E.F. Schumacher’s definition of Good Work which is to use your skills and abilities, despite our regulated world which prevents many from working. For those unemployed or excluded, offering their work as gift is a deep form of service.
Good Work is using your talents to serve others.
And Good Work comes alive when accomplished in community, working with others. Every day at The Working Centre, Community Tool projects create a virtuous circle. Inclusive work changes our culture.
We see it in the joy people feel when they serve others, we recognize the satisfaction that comes from rejecting status, we sense the freedom that comes from offering work as gift, and we see how living simply makes Good Work possible. This is faith in action.
This is moving beyond charity by spreading agency widely, to make possible the choice of building community.
Our Common Home needs Common Work
The Working Centre is simply a model of work and community that incorporates the virtues at its heart. Our book, Transition to Common Work describes how that work has taken root.
This community stands in contrast to a world where our environment is under siege and most work has been bureaucratized.
How can each of us explore new ways of working that help to heal our home and our work?
John Ralston Saul quotes Chief John Kelly’s vision, “as the years go by” he said, “the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religions are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality, you are right here with us.”
Common Work for our Common Home is like the growing Aboriginal circle. We are all called to align personal action with integrated wholeness. We can all join this new interdependence and help the circle to grow.
