Responding to Disruption

By Stephanie Mancini

Published in June 2020

We humans are creatures of habit, and we can follow these habits long after rational thought proves they are flawed. When our habits become disrupted, we seek the comforts those habits gave to us. This is an evolutionary survival technique – by seeking comfort and habit we reinforce the safety of the tribe. Now we face a time where our typical ways of relating lead to the spread of COVID-19; where our sacred supply chain and shopping habits are disrupted; where our many ways of distracting ourselves become tiresome and unsatisfying; where we have been forced to pause long enough to rethink the things we thought were important; where we recognize that our habits are in fact harmful to others, to the earth, and to ourselves.  

This issue of Good Work News peels these layers back even further – encouraging us in this time of transition, of disruption, to see the opportunity to reinvent some basic premises around growth and climate change. We will want to shut these thoughts out, but perhaps we also have to listen to the growing feeling of dissonance in our bellies, or the growing appreciation of bird song and gardens, and chalk drawings on the sidewalks. Reminding us to listen in new ways, helping us to see the opportunity in disruption. To reimagine together. Virus, flooding, riots, sickness – these images flood our brains while the birds sing and summer begins.

At The Working Centre, we have had the opportunity to engage this re-imagining, as we have had to reinvent our work in a COVID-19 world, closing many of our congregate spaces, yet still finding ways to respond with integrity and justice for many people who do not have a home in which to self-isolate, do not have supports around them. So many people have had their typical income streams disrupted, need help in new ways, or do not have access to the technology that has brought so many others together.

COVID-19 has laid bare the cracks in our social system – issues that were festering long before the virus outbreak. For the last two years (and the 36 years before that too!) we have been trying to draw attention to the impacts of homelessness and poverty on our community. Our cities have experienced economic growth but we have left behind a group of people becoming increasingly dislocated, frustrated and unwell. These past weeks, in the States, have reminded us of the price of systematic exclusion.We have joined within the community partnerships that make us stronger, contributing in significant ways to support the Inner City Health Alliance collaborative work, and to re-align our spaces and projects to respond collectively, and to add new partners into this growing effort. Community partners have leaned-in in new ways – achieving concepts we could only dream of before:

• We have integrated our health teams in the Inner City Health Alliance, joining with partners to provide more integrated and responsive healthcare options for those in shelter, those on the street, in a mobile context, and for those in supportive housing; aligning our protocols, practices and record keeping.

• We trained front-line staff in shelters, housing, food programs on appropriate use of PPE, made sure we had a good PPE supply, shifted our cultures and practices to promote safe distancing and alert COVID practices.

• We created a 24/7 call number for medical consultation, and implemented an isolation ward for those with symptoms, with a rapid testing response for symptomatic people and our staff.

• We hold tactical calls several times a week with broad healthcare and community service partners, aligning our work with in the wider Region of Waterloo COVID strategy, and with Public Health.

• Working Centre staff have spread out to work in a number of community settings – supporting the work of House of Friendship to provide 24/7 shelter and healthcare, supporting the YWCA and the Region in hosting the Kaufman Y 24/7 shelter for another 60 men, continuing to work on the street, in motels (we have over 30 people supported in motels outside of the formal shelter system as we support their intense healthcare needs).

• At St. John’s Kitchen we are serving meals in the parking lot of Worth A Second Look right now – some 150 to 200 per day. People standing in the heat/rain/sun/cold (all within the last month), just to collect a lunch… such a long way from creative community space at St. John’s Kitchen.

• St. John’s Kitchen is now operating as a collaborative Daytime Drop-In space for unsheltered, providing showers, laundry, washrooms, food – seeing over 70 people per day now. A beautiful collaboration with the Region and with redeployed workers from the City of Waterloo, the Region of Waterloo, Thresholds and Ray of Hope, where we are together seeing clear evidence of the need for more housing locally.

All this is good work, but in spite of it all, we see the needs of some 150 more people without shelter in our community. We are already heading into a world of re-opening spaces, where the efforts we have invested for those needing shelter seem complicated to maintain, but we need to be working now on more housing/shelter for people still left outside. Summer is short; it takes time and invested effort to build resources where people have access to shelters. In a COVID-world it is hard enough to imagine bathroom access, never mind shelter.

Let’s hold on to our dissonance. We need much deeper thinking to move forward. Our rich society needs ways to commit resources to the building of community.

We need a serious, strategic effort to add affordable housing – shared housing, smaller units, secondary suites, congregate settings – there are some good models from which to choose.

Unemployment and work will require serious consideration – our work worlds are changing, possibilities are emerging, and jobs for low-income workers are becoming more risky and different; we have a new interest in filling our supply-chain needs locally.

How do we build more capacity for bike shops, growing food, urban agriculture, creative re-use of housewares and furniture.

The opportunities are possible if we embrace the dissonance; nudge ourselves into staying in uncomfortable spots while we figure out new ways of working and being together. The ecology of the earth is demanding this attention, our human spirits are longing for it.