By Stephanie Mancini
Published in December 2016
We are heading into the months of gratitude for The Working Centre. These are months where the day-to-day challenges get harder for people as the days darken and the weather gets colder. Maybe it’s the fact that so many people reach out and support our work financially as the year comes to an end, but the steady donations and messages of good will come in the midst of everyday challenges that certainly do not seem to lessen as the years go by.
Last year we were getting ready to welcome Arabic speaking New Canadians – this year we are looking to find work for people as they come to the end of their year of funded support. It’s not just the job search, it is adjusting to all the ways that trauma leaves its shadow as people settle in a new country; it is mourning together as a young 25 year old man dies at a work site; it is aligning the important supports of Ontario Works with sporadic employment income; it is keeping awareness of the many people left behind in Syria and in camps who are the family members of our new neighbours. It is welcoming our Arabic speaking friends to step outside of their cultural traditions and adapt into Canadian traditions and ways.
We have also spent this year actively supporting those who are most persistently homeless in our new housing units. This is careful, thoughtful, relationship-based work. It’s not just the housing that makes a difference, although it helps. It is also knowing each person and how best to be a good neighbour, especially in the complexity of issues between residents when they confront one another. How do we support people who become ill? How do we invite everyone into acceptance and inclusion? How does that change us and expand our capacity to respond creatively to the people before us? How do we bring respect and compassion to the moment when someone breaks a window or punches a wall as an expression of their frustration and fear? Opportunities for solidarity and respect arise as we get called into the hospital to support people – how do we continue to care for this person in the way they would choose; how do we share their story with the hospital? How do we stand with people who are unable to see their loved ones because of a severe division in the family?
The work to support Syrian refugees is important work, so too is providing long-term housing to people who normally only get access to poor housing which often breaks down and starts the process of homelessness over again.
There are others who we meet daily – like the many young people going through depression and others with high and crippling anxiety, a young mother trying to support her child as a single parent, an older worker adjusting to lower income and different work opportunities, a person with a developmental disability seeking work that recognizes their strengths.
There is no easy bridge between everything working out and the sense of failure around complex social issues. Problems can sometimes be worked out, especially when friendship and hospitality have helped to clear the way. Other problems have deeply ingrained psycho-social responses that take a village of supports and years to help work it all out.
There is joy in the service of walking with people through these many complexities. We don’t do this as hardship – we do it as love, respect, compassion and solidarity. We learn every day about ways we can be more generous and continue to open to the person before us. We share these stories not in a way that talks loosely about people’s lives, but more as a statement of what it is to share together our humanity and compassion.
This joy is shared as the wider community contributes to this work, as people continue to be involved in making this thoughtful work possible. We see it each day, such as one group’s effort to collect socks that keep feet warm in the winter months; to touring our spaces as class after class visits to learn about our creative community development work; the on-line donations that appear daily; the bundles of mail that contain people’s annual donation; the many people who volunteer day after day to make this work possible. This gratitude grows as we celebrate the many ways Working Centre is part of the K-W community and the ways the community supports this radical commitment to a person at a time.
