By Joe Mancini
Published December 2002
The nature of The Working Centre is that it has clearly defined its approach and goals through daily action. You cannot help but see the results of the centre’s philosophic approach when you see the great work that so many people get involved with. The work of producing a meal and community each day at St. John’s Kitchen, fixing bicycles at Recycle Cycles, helping to teach and enhance sewing skills, preparing for a bartering fair, tutoring people who are engaged in the self-directed computer training, doing front reception work at 58 Queen while assisting job searchers or doing reception for the activities on the main floor at 43 Queen, which also includes acting as sales clerk for The Front Window.
The work that people engage in through The Working Centre and St. John’s Kitchen has the simple premise of teaching, assisting and building community. It is not unlike the live simply approach. How can you use your talents and energy in ways that enhance the community around you while avoiding the worst of consumerist culture? Many engage in this work by developing a new understanding of creative work. They get excited about helping people in very basic ways. They quickly recognize that they have joined a community of people who want to support each other.
This philosophy is a very open approach to enhancing community services in downtown Kitchener. It works because so many people are committed to helping the community grow. It also works because it respects the basic nature of how things develop. Whether it is the world of ideas, community or biology, experience has demonstrated that creative ideas are best supported by an environment where other diverse, decentralized activities are taking place. The core of any project is always important. However, energy and ideas need to be cooperatively and not so cooperatively passed back and forth through numerous interdependent links. This is the web of community connectiveness that sustains projects that are rooted in the community.
This fall The Working Centre has had the opportunity to connect with people coming from a wide perspective of interests. These informal connections add greatly to the potential community building that is possible. Here are some of them. Stephanie outlines a whole bunch more that are related to employment, job search, new Canadians and transportation in her article on page 4.
The Win-Win Steering committee led by Alison Burkett has put forward an innovative approach to creating affordable housing, by building on existing resources. The details of that project are described on page 4 of this issue.
The Kitchener Downtown Community Collaborative has worked hard at looking at different approaches to providing outreach workers to assist people who find themselves homeless in downtown Kitchener and also to compliment this work with a creative day labour project. The collaborative is also looking at ideas and projects around neighbourhood and housing supports.
The people at Achievement in Motion and GROW have offered St. John’s Kitchen gardening space in a way that can link up with a project that has already established itself.
Agreey Omondi from the Ugunja Community Resources Centre in Kenya has been doing a Canada Crossroads placement at Steckle Farms this fall. He has made connections with many community groups to seek out ways to link with his project in Kenya. He came to The Working Centre to learn about BarterWorks and Recycle Cycles. He is very interested in the group from Montreal – Cycle North-South that has sent used bicycles to South Africa by shipping container. We are excited by this opportunity to repair 400 bikes for shipping. Bikes are durable and fixable and thus can be useful for many years once they reach their destination.
We had a very interesting visit from Paul Chorney the Executive Director of the West Broadway Community Development Corporation. The project is representative of neighbourhood community initiatives that integrate housing with practical projects that help people development community and support.
At the CMHC Affordable Housing awards conference in Toronto we met people from the Quint Development Corporation of Saskatoon. They were also given an award for their affordable housing project that uses a cooperative model that building community supports while helping people attain home ownership. We also met other groups such as the Creighton/Gerrish Development Association in Halifax and the Stella Burry Corporation in Newfoundland that had creative innovative housing projects where community building was as important as the housing.
Another connection for us was the completion of Geeta’s thesis on affordable housing processes which focuses on how groups and individuals can participate in the development of housing as a constituent part of revitalization. Such as process gives people a stake in their living conditions and changes the circumstances of their housing. “Any such strategy that includes local decision-making also acknowledges how people’s ideas can shape outcome and this possible only through flexible design”.
Different themes run through these connections. Some of these connections are about groups of people looking at models of working cooperatively without one group holding all the power. Other connections are about learning new ways to think about housing. It is not enough to just build boxes. People are searching for ways to be connected with their neighbours. The mixing of ideas, practical projects and people committed to working out ideas makes for a growing, healthy community.
