This issue’s collection of books point in new directions. The Working Centre is bridging two gaps between a homelessness crisis and climate change. The depth of homelessness was made real by The Working Centre naming over 900 people who are homeless. Each day we see in the news scathing hot temperatures, swaths of forests burning and villages washed away by surging water.
The main message of Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity is How Can We Come Together. When CBC IDEAS asked Astra Taylor to give the Massey Lecture, they were inviting a Canadian who has been acting on the insecurity that has provoked the Occupy generation. Since her Occupy days, Taylor’s projects include the Debt Collective, a US based operation which supports those who have taken on overwhelming debt to pay for education, rent or bail. Taylor is very familiar with the causes of the insecurity she writes about.
It is encouraging to see a resurgence in awareness and understanding of the ideas of Ivan Illich. Much credit for this revitalization goes to David Cayley and his staunch determination to keep the flame alive. Earlier this year, Penn State University Press published Cayley’s latest work, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. This book is a masterpiece of storytelling that unpacks the insight behind Illich’s writings while intertwining his influential work on the ground as a priest, activist, itinerant scholar and founder of an alternative education culture in Cuernavaca, Mexico. This book is truly Cayley’s gift to the reader, providing a key to help decode our tumultuous world.
In June of 2019 Canada officially declared the climate crisis an emergency. But are we acting as if this were really an emergency situation? Author Seth Klein contends the Canadian government is not stepping up to the urgency of the moment. He argues for a wartime level of mobilization to respond to the climate crisis, modelled after Canada’s response to the Second World War.
This week, Globe & Mail headed its new Climate Change section with the statement, “We knew this was coming.” Increasingly, people and institutions are getting the picture. It is not just the four major hurricanes that have recently made landfall in North America, nor that California is suffering under drought conditions in the midst of a heat wave producing extended 50° C temperatures. Nor is it the scale of dramatic wild fires, or the fear of the smoke filled toxic air that is filling cities up and down the North American west coast.
How do we understand depression and why is it so prevalent in our society? Johann Hari’s Lost Connections Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions explores how community can save our depressed culture and give us a fighting chance in a materialistic world.
Wilkinson and Pickett are on to something. The title of their book is catchy. People immediately think that it suggests that we need to look at old problems with a New Spirit. The catchy title causes people to think about their own work and to wonder about the systems that they are dealing with. Worse, what about the overarching social issues such as poverty, homelessness, and climate change? Do we ever need a New Spirit!
A review of Now or Never: Why we Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future by Tim Flannery.
Nations that export fossil fuels often find it grossly inconvenient to believe in man-made climate change, and understandably so. Who really wants a responsible carbon budget that respects the finite nature of the atmosphere and the oceans when you can make a killing by exporting dirty oil? Real innovation might even result in a loss of hydrocarbon jobs and easy revenue for lazy governments, and that’s bad.
This book discusses mental illness and its stigma, but it also talks about recovery and readmission into society. Each idea connects to produce a well-rounded account. It includes facts, statistics, and information, as well as heart-wrenching private stories dealing with mental illness. It can be an emotional rollercoaster.
Today, the government has put a halt to constructing low-cost housing. Jack Layton works against the norm. That is, he struggles to work against public indifference to the problem of homelessness. Today the homeless are banished from our society and left to anguish on their own, like they did before. Writing about homelessness is good, but acting on it is even better.
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.
