To celebrate the Christmas season, 800 Christmas meals were prepared at our commercial kitchen on Queen Street and were served at four different locations during the Christmas season. Chef Michael Bertling and volunteers cooked and chopped hundreds of pounds of turkey, potatoes, carrots and bread so that they could be served at four Christmas meals.
In June 2018, the Working Centre purchased the Water Street House with the intention of building a safe house for those homeless and dealing with acute medical and drug use issues. We had hoped that the house could also be the Safe Consumption Site as that would have combined resources together to ensure the house was viable. After a year of planning and ten months of construction the project has been completed.
This article, written by Arleen Macpherson, first appeared in the September 1999 Good Work News as a reflection on her 11 years as coordinator of St. John’s Kitchen. In 2002, Arleen joined The Working Centre Board of Directors. This year she retired from the Board after serving the last five years as President.
The Working Centre’s Resource Centre at 58 Queen Street South in Kitchener is a hub of activity providing a welcoming place for people to meet, and to find support for employment, housing, finances, community involvement, and much more. Each day is another opportunity to welcome Newcomers to Canada. Resource Centre hosts greet people in English, Amharic, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Spanish, Urdu, Tagrinya, and French – extending hospitality in whichever common language they can find together. This often includes various attempts at a sign language, laughter and mutual listing of languages as all try to find a way to communicate together.
I believe that there is a universal cry within the human heart to belong. Belonging is so important to the human heart and the human soul. When we feel that we belong, when we believe that we belong and when we are affirmed in our belonging, we can begin the journey of discovering that we are loveable, that we are beautiful and that we have a meaning and purpose in life.
When you walk into the Queen Street Commons Café, it quickly becomes apparent that something feels different. It’s hard to put your finger on what the difference is but newcomers to the space often look around them in wonder, trying to figure it out. When you step back and take a look, there are a myriad of things going on – people clustered at tables while others sit at their laptops or read a book, always people moving about, a constant buzz of lively conversation, dishes clattering and music playing. Café regulars walk in with purpose, greetings for those around them and the confidence of knowing that they belong and are welcomed. Each of these pieces form a strand of the complex web that is the Queen Street Commons Café, creating a space that is as intricate, delicate and strong as a spiders web.
We all want to belong, to feel accepted and included. This universal human experience applies across all cultures and relates to our connections with family, friends, neighbourhoods, and workplaces. We know there are negative consequences when people do not belong, when they are excluded or isolated from community life.
The New Story Group of Waterloo Region is a grass roots group that is committed to belonging within the context of community and social inclusion. In the fall of 2013, the New Story Group sponsored two days of conversations about Building a Community of Belonging. This important community work is being supported by the K-W Community Foundation in collaboration with a number of community partners.
This year we have reflected with gratitude on The Working Centre’s journey over thirty years. It was in the midst of high unemployment in the early 1980’s that the centre started working out a community response to unemployment and poverty. We quickly learned that the dispossession of tools was a main frustration. The original resource centre started with a public phone, a typewriter and a message service.
We invited people to assist this community idea. The cooperative message service was a way for people who did not have a phone, or sometimes even an address, to become involved in creating a message service that they could rely on and others could use as well.
You would think that working on your Masters Degree in Social Work would be daunting. Yes? How about helping out at any one of the numerous soup kitchens we have across this country. My experience at the St. John’s Community Kitchen (SJK) was far from this. I was actually overwhelmed by what I saw, felt and heard. But truthfully, that word “community” is what makes it happen. The experience I have helping at any kitchen is very minimal, a short stint in one northern town. What I brought with me is natural, simple, and ordinary.
Local democracy may be less about structured democracy and more about things that happen at the community level that connect people and cultivate sharing. Yet, even within this movement dedicated to inclusive community, people with disabilities are typically left out. What assumptions allow for the continued systemic marginalization of people excluded from generalized public considerations of “all people”? What ideas and principles of local democracy can help us to move away from this cycle of discrimination? How can Disability Studies deepen our understanding of concepts such as dependence, interdependence and reciprocity? And how can a social model of disability inform the development of democratic communities?
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.
