We want to thank all the volunteers, donors, and community partners who have supported our efforts to produce and distribute over 600 meals each day during the pandemic. Thank you to all those sharing the spirit of community through these challenging times especially the 2500 people and groups who donated over Christmas season. Here is a summary of the work we have accomplished.
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.
In the beginning of the lockdown, it was surreal. The streets were empty and our doors were closed. But the phones were going crazy because it was tax time, and since all appointments had been cancelled, people were starting to panic. We spent a good 2-3 hours every day just consoling people and letting them know that they weren’t alone, and that we were working to try to figure something out.
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 met Joe for the first time on a hot summer day. Joe was detained by the Canadian government at the Canada Border Services Agency Holding Centre in Toronto. After he was quarantined there for 14 days he was given a bus ticket to Kitchener where he had been living prior to the start of COVID-19. Joe arrived at our site broken and in tears. He had no money, no possessions, and no housing. So much had happened to him since the start of COVID-19.
We have collected stories from around The Working Centre community to provide perspective about how our work has changed and adapted during the pandemic.
Hacienda Market Garden is a place where the work of growing food enables relationship building. Relationships are formed between gardeners; between gardeners and the work and ecology of growing food; between our garden and a broad network of farms and farmers, retailers and customers, supporters and colleagues.
Worth A Second Look is much more than a second hand retail store. It is a gathering place, a community for St. John’s Kitchen folk, volunteers, and customers.
We admit to being overwhelmed! This is the first statement to make as we respond to unprecedented numbers of homeless people in our community, at a time when common spaces are locked-down in a COVID-world. Some 500+ people are homeless in our community. Hard stop on that statement. How did this number of people without housing get so high?
Can you imagine what it is to be homeless at this time? Nothing is open; even such a basic need as available bathrooms is unaccessible. Food is hard to find; and what you do find are the leftovers of our consumer lifestyle. Life is a bit wilder and people must focus on basic survival.
What was normal before COVID-19 was a world of ecological, economic, and social woe: climate change, the sixth great mass extinction, extreme wealth inequality, rising xenophobia, drug addictions, epidemic anxiety, depression, and loneliness. In a COVID-19 world what we need is not only a vaccine and a bail-out package – we need a new normal.
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.
