By Rebecca Mancini
Published March 2024
This year, the Mayors’ Dinner helps us to reflect on the importance of determined hopefulness in the face of despair. Determined hopefulness is not a gentle wish for the future, it is an intentional act to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. It will take courage and it will take care.
Looking at the world around us, the need for courage is clear. The fact that the climate is changing is no longer deniable as ecosystems around the world show the impact of rising temperatures and we see increasing forest fires, floods, species going extinct and large swaths of lands no longer able to sustain life. We see increasing numbers of wars, of unequal justice being meted out, of resources being withheld, of people being displaced, of politics being played out while people die.
In the face of these horrors we are constantly asking, how can we keep looking, keep listening? If you have the choice to look away, then you are in a position of privilege. These catastrophes don’t effect everyone equally. We are witnessing the growing gap between those who can close their eyes, and those who live the consequences.
And so, we must take care. Take care of earth, take care of all life. To take care is to choose to not turn away, to choose to act with intention, to infuse our systems with compassion. As Astra Taylor says in her Massey Lecture:
“Taking care is a revealing phrase. It implies forethought and vigilance while also reminding us that by providing care for others, we are, at the same time, receiving something in return. When we say we are “taking care”, we can mean we are being careful or, alternatively, that we are giving care; to take care of a person, animal, plant or place is to protect and nurture something beyond ourselves. But as we all know from experience, this is not an entirely selfless enterprise. Taking care of others rewards and replenishes us, and helps ensure we are cared for in return.”
By taking care, we are embedding ourselves in community, and in community, we can often find the first steps that bring us towards responses to some of our greatest challenges.
Often in times of insecurity, of deep grief, of growing anxiety and of complexity, people turn to systems to make sense of things. We are seeing this in the rise of bureaucratic systems and programic models that aim to reduce complexity and create quick answers. While this may seem like it will make things easier, it actually creates more hardship by reducing the capacity for creative response, wider participation and the stretching of resources that is a happy result of community action. Instead of throwing our hands up and saying it’s impossible, we as a community can come together to create change.
We start the work by focusing on the tangible things around us that seem most pressing. The fact that people are living outside in temperatures that feel like -16 degrees should be something we all care about, something we might be able to do something about. We have done much locally, invested $20m in local taxpayers’ money to shift the impact of homelessness, far more than most municipal governments, and yet the issues rage ahead of us. More people are living without shelter than we can accommodate in existing responses. Again and again, we face feeling powerless to make meaningful change happen. But when we hit a cold snap and sent out a request, we quickly had enough people who gave of their time to make sure that people could come inside to our warming centre. While the negative narrative is often given a stronger voice, there are even more people are who are committed to acting with compassion and integrity to share the resources that we have.
The Working Centre has recently been set back by the end of our experiment at University Ave housing. The Region has opted to award this agreement to SHIP, a Peel-based agency newly active in Waterloo Region. University Ave has been an experiment in the practice of radical love, of a Housing First approach that works, not to kick someone out for behaviours, but to hold space for them over time and through great complexity in order to invite them back into meaningful engagement, particularly in the face of the ravages of homelessness. The change in this contract signals that we have stretched this radical love beyond the scope of our funding partners, who are seeing the importance of well-maintained property as a measure of care for people. We are proud of the knowledge that we have offered housing to a group of people who would not have found another place to live, people who have been unable to manage impulse control due to brain injury, drug use, mental health challenges and trauma.
The loss of this approach is deeply worrying as we witness daily the suffering of people who are living without housing or shelter in our affluent world. We need to act into creative solutions that surround people with love and hope and the knowledge that they are cared for. We have despaired this change and we have learned so much. We continue to challenge our system partners who are often unable to engage with us in these deep learning experiences as we all work to respond to the harsh realities of homelessness and a toxic drug supply.
We are constantly challenged to explore how we can live and act into irrepressible hope – a hope that acknowledges the realities around us and continues to act into the change we need with optimism. Throughout history, there are many beautiful examples where people have acted into what seems impossible and created positive change. As Toni Morrison said “No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity”.
These ideas have inspired the theme chosen for the Mayors’ Dinner this year. To Take Courage, To Take Care is a daunting and bold attestation to our commitment to hope.
Join us for the Mayors’ Dinner, and in the ongoing editions of Good Work News, as we lean in together to learn and practice what it takes to be people of hope.
