At The Working Centre, we are forty some years into this work, feeling deeply rocked by the increasingly stark reality of people who are being left out of housing, people facing the deep dislocation of poverty, a lack of housing, a poison and highly addictive drug supply. Our hearts are broken apart and broken open over and over again as we stand witness to people facing increasing hardship.
Our work, as it has been lived during the pandemic, has been hard and deep, relentless and beautiful, as we have stood with people who are left out in so many ways – of housing, of indoor spaces, of bathrooms, of safety, of work. Many of the updates in Good Work News reflect the breadth and depth of the activities we have engaged in, but these stories have not been enough to convey the depth of the numbers of people affected.
As we welcome the Spring, we also mark a year of COVID. We welcome the healing and renewal of warmer weather, the quickening of the earth. We have been reflecting, responding, enduring, and the challenges are not over. We have been understanding our work as walking forwards on two feet.
The Oxford word of the year turns out to be several words that all evoke the emotional roller coaster we have been riding. Lockdown, Anthropause, Super Spreader, Black Lives Matter, and Doom Scrolling are words and phrases that remind us of the fragility of our culture.
Since March, The Working Centre has been riding this roller coaster as we have constantly shuffled services and programs in order to react to the pandemic.
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.
How to tell the story of this work? Following are some reflections of a lively week of conversations, system changes, and creative problem solving.
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.
Over these 34 years, living and working in downtown Kitchener, The Working Centre has sought to build an alternative model of community building. This work has taken place, while all around us the ecological, economic and cultural landscape has been under constant stress.
In a recent gathering of people who work with the Community Tools projects, we reflected on the role of details in our work. Leading the discussion, Kayli noted that details form the tapestry of our projects and we are the weavers – intertwining the details in both a relational and practical way that accomplishes the daily work while building involvement and inclusion. In the Community Tools projects, the idea of following details seems like a background concept to the importance of welcoming people but as Kayli led us through the conversation, it became obvious that it is by following the details that we provide hospitality for people and open up new pathways for more people to join in the projects.
Our work is always very full, lively and dynamic. As the spirit of community grows, more and more people come to contribute, to find assistance, to be among others. One person in this mix can feel daunted by how much there is to do. But none of this is the work of one person – every piece, every project, draws together the work of many people – the spirit of working together.
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.
