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Louisa House to Welcome Refugees

Published December 2022

The Working Centre was gifted a house on Louisa Street in the 2000’s.  

  • It had previously been a house welcoming women involved in the justice system, under the auspices of the Elizabeth Fry Society.

  • When The Working Centre first hosted the house, it became a place of transitional housing for women, many of whom were seeking respite as they re-established their lives after incarceration, abuse, and homelessness.

  • Louisa Street house then transitioned to become home for Threshold’s Extraordinary Needs Program, providing after-hospital care for people with severe mental health needs, to stabilize after a hospital stay.  Thresholds has now relocated this service to their Lawrence Ave facilities.

Now, this house will welcome refugee claimants who are often ending up in the shelter system due to the lack of safe affordable landing spots for people who are new to our community.

This house will offer hospitality, and a short term stay as people apply for Ontario Works, find hosts who welcome them as they stabilize in our community, and connect them to refugee serving organizations offering practical supports.

This project joins a long tradition of refugee supports offered by The Working Centre:

  • For 20 years we supported the Mennonite Coalition for Refugee Support, now Compass Refugee Centre

  • We actively hosted the Lancaster House as a place of landing in the 1990’s for hundreds of people who crossed the border and claimed refugee status in Canada

  • We consistently help refugees and New Canadians to find work, and access income supports as they become eligible for financial support in Canada

Isaiah Ritzmann, a long-term TWC worker will serve as host for the house, bridging people to community resources and connecting people with available housing opportunities or shared housing through Open Homes. Open Homes is a grass-roots network of families in Waterloo Region who offer medium-term housing for refugees.

Host families open up their homes and live in community with refugees, offering a place of safety, warmth, and relationships for people newly arrived in Canada.

Good Work News is The Working Centre’s quarterly newspaper that reports on our latest community building efforts and seeks out ideas which redefine work, consumerism, and sustainable living. First published in 1984, we have now published over 150 issues with a circulation of 13,000.

Subscribe to Good Work News with a donation of any amount to The Working Centre.

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The Integrated Circle of Care is a fluid and collaborative approach followed by workers from different agencies weaving through St. John’s Kitchen. Within this approach, staff members from each agency are aware of their specific personal roles. However, the high level of collaboration between workers means that people can approach any worker, without knowing their agency association or specific role, and still receive support – either that worker will support the person directly, or they will introduce the person to another worker who can support the person more appropriately.

This approach makes relationships more natural and support more accessible. Workers from different agencies are easily approachable, meaning that people build relationships with multiple workers. Having relationships with different workers is important to a person’s support – it makes support from a trusted source easy to find, and means that people have a choice of worker to approach in any given situation.

In order to maintain a circle of care around a person, workers from different agencies ask for consent from the person for information to be shared between workers. Continuous communication between workers helps to ensure that people do not fall into gaps between services, and also that services are not duplicated.

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