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.
As St. John’s Kitchen prepares to return to St. John’s Anglican Church, it is fitting to reflect on our long journey together. For 21 years between January 1985 and July 2006 a continuous free weekday meal was served at lunchtime in St. John’s gym. During those years, every weekday between 100 – 200 people came through the church gym. The Working Centre had started using the St. John’s gymnasium two years earlier in January 1983 for the St. John’s Unemployed Workers Centre.
I have a huge passion for pets, and have been witness to them bringing people together in magical ways on many occasions. When I first started working at the University Avenue (UA) interim housing project, one of the things I absolutely loved was that folks were welcome to bring their pets to live with them. Knowing how deeply attached many community members are to their pets, it brought me immense joy to know they didn’t need to be separated from them or choose to remain on the street to stay with their pets.
Are you able to meet your basic needs like showering, clean clothes, using a restroom, accessing food and clean water? Have you been hospitalized or used a crisis service? Have you stayed in a holding cell, jail or prison? Have you been attacked or beaten up? Do you have planned activities, other than just surviving, that make you feel happy and fulfilled?
These are questions that might not cross your mind on a day-to-day basis but are front and center for many people in our community, folks our teams walk with each and every day.
This year’s Mayors’ Dinner focuses on Responses to Homelessness. We are pleased to celebrate the many diverse efforts it takes to make change happen in the face of the daunting, disturbing and often tragic realities we face as a community.
We have leaned in with everything we have as an organization, and have been on the front-lines of this tragedy, hardship and injustice.
Those of us responding directly to the day-to-day survival needs of increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness in our Region knew that we needed immediate action. A phone call to Fr. Toby Collins at St. Mary’s Church in downtown Kitchener led us to hosting a month-long people-sleeping-on-the-floor pop-up shelter for 200 individuals in November of 2019. Since then there have been many positive changes.
University Avenue Interim Housing (UA) is an apartment complex that consists of 80 dorm units meant for those who were unhoused and in need during the height of the COVID pandemic. At UA, shelter, a consistent food source, and community-based resources are available for all residents. It has been operating for almost two years, enabling a community to foster and a support system to be built.
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.
Students participating in the Community Engagement Option are once again being welcomed into Downtown Kitchener. This immersive and cross-disciplinary educational journey is delivered jointly by The Working Centre and Laurier, and brings a diverse range of community voices into the classroom. The option, now in its 8th year, continues to offer students insights into key community concepts like social inclusion, local democracy, and community enterprise.
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.
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.
