97 Victoria will focus on the combination of housing, health and community, supporting those most left out of services, and connecting people with mental health and addiction supports. We are excited that the building of the 44 new units of housing is well underway. Also exciting is that the foundation for the new St. John’s Kitchen building is set to begin in mid-September.
This month we warmly welcomed two young men from Ethiopia, to Louisa Street. The keys to their rooms were a symbol of their new home in our community.
This year, the Mayors’ Dinner helps us to reflect on the importance of determined hopefulness in the face of despair. Determined hopefulness is not a gentle wish for the future, it is an intentional act to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. It will take courage and it will take care. Looking at the world around us, the need for courage is clear.
All shelter spaces are full. The 230 shelter beds that the Working Centre has established in the last three years have helped to double the Region’s shelter capacity, but there are still 200 people camping and without access to shelter. There is little movement of people in our shelters as housing costs are beyond any social assistance cheque. Underneath the despair of reduced housing options is a burgeoning drug problem.
Standing witness to the harshness of our world is painful and draws a deep lament – across the world, on the earth that sustains life, and in our own community. The lament is important, standing with eyes wide open as witness, and feeling the pain. If we don’t lament, this despair can turn into anger, into fear, or indifference.
This November we marked one year of community and hospitality at the Louisa Street Hospitality House. Over the past twelve months we’ve welcomed fifteen individuals from eight different countries seeking protection, asylum, and safety here in Canada.
On August 28, about 100 people gathered at 97 Victoria Street for the official groundbreaking ceremony for our Making Home project. The event was a celebration of the many partners who have come together to make this project possible: government, corporate and community donors and supporters, as well as design and construction partners.
University Ave (UA) Housing emerged out of the triple emergencies of Covid, high homelessness, and a severe opioid epidemic… The reality for those facing homelessness was becoming increasingly intense. The Working Centre was witnessing these issues through our work with St. John’s Kitchen, Street Outreach, and SOS. We spent 2019 trying to draw system attention to these issues, and by 2020 and the arrival of Covid we leaned in to create and deliver practical responses. We worked constantly to help draw attention to the fact that our current frameworks were no longer meeting the needs of this growing group of people experiencing homelessness.
The Queen Street Apartments were possible because of a Rapid Housing Initiative grant through the Region of Waterloo and the Federal Government’s CMHC. The funding provided capital contributions for the rapid construction of new housing and/or acquisition of existing buildings for rehabilitation or conversion to permanent affordable housing. This project achieved its goal when the new tenants all moved in during June 2023, one year after construction started.
How did the numbers of homeless grow so rapidly in the last 5 years? Here are some of the underlying social factors that are contributing:
By 2013 the gathering forces of industrial synthetic drug production broke out from the margins making powerful drugs like fentanyl and crystal meth widely and cheaply available.
Sky high rents are leaving many out of the housing market. The definition of despair is having a $600 social assistance cheque when the cost to rent a room is $800.
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.
