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.
All around us, we have seen higher levels of anger expressed in political and social environments. You see this in relation to politics, you see it in the eyes of enraged drivers, and we have seen it in our community as people reconcile the realities of more and more people experiencing homelessness and drug addiction, especially around shelters and spaces that support people most at risk.
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.
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.
When a group of Canadian citizens brought the national capital to a halt for three weeks in January and February, 2022, the atmosphere on all sides was one of confusion. Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada’s capital – at least, not since anti-democratic forces besieged Parliament, which was then based in Montreal, and burned it to the ground. That was a little while ago: April 25, 1849.
At the beginning of May the Catholic Worker movement turned 90 years old. The newspaper Dorothy Day and her collaborator Peter Maurin launched still sells for a penny a copy. The hospitality houses they began still exist on the lower east side of Manhattan, feeding over a hundred people a day and housing some thirty-odd people. Meanwhile across the United States and around the world roughly two hundred hospitality houses and farming communes persist in the daily practice of the works of mercy and with the slow work of building a “new society in the shell of the old, where it is easier for people to be good”
The Federal legislation for a Canada Disability Benefit is exceptionally important news. This is a targeted benefit focused on improving income support for those with disabilities. Benefits delivered through the tax system are efficient and can be directed where they are needed most. We have seen the difference for families that receive the Canada Child Benefit which Ala Abdulkarem describes in the article, Helping New Canadians Access Income Supports. Ala leads our Money Matters project providing support to over 3000 individuals last year.
We are living through a climate emergency. But are we acting like it? Imagine you are in a crowded building – a school, a mall, maybe an office. The fire alarm starts to sound. But nobody does anything. They just keep doing what they were doing before: the students sit in class, shoppers keep shopping, and the office workers go about their business. It’s an emergency. But nobody is acting like it. To keep doing what we were doing before is not what we need to do now. Is this a parable for an age where we declare climate emergencies and go on acting like we always have?
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.
Windstorms follow any discussion about how the Western world can generate economic growth. Possibly this is because of the omnipresence of climate change’s unmistakable toll in the form of wildfires, forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, floods, and mud slides. Mother Earth is clearly rebelling and it is easy to see that excessive use of resources, excessive burning of fossil fuels, excessive dumping of chemicals is at its limit. A system devoted to economic growth continues to make the problem worse and change is desperately needed.
Increasingly the growth model is not adding up. Often economists recommend efficiencies to exploit opportunities to generate growth and jobs, all of which seems necessary to pay for increased government services. Yet, this very activity will increase the use of resources, carbon, and chemicals. The dilemma of this score card is real. How can we make different choices.
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.
