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.
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.
By the winter of 2019, it was increasingly clear that growing homelessness was an overwhelming issue at St. John’s Kitchen. You could see it in the number of people sleeping on the floor of the Kitchen, desperate for simple places to lie down and get some rest. At the same time drug use in the washrooms was creating a new kind of chaos. Those without housing respond to dislocation by using increasingly powerful drugs.
It was at this time that David Gibson from Perimeter Development offered to bring together his longtime friend and architect, Joe Bogdan to help The Working Centre look closely at properties we owned or to consider other properties that could be used to build supportive housing. It was decided that the best option was to redesign the 97 Victoria N campus by rebuilding St. John’s Kitchen and adding 38 units of housing focused on those dealing with homelessness.
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.
