In early January 2025, St. John’s Kitchen will mark 40 years of serving a daily weekday meal in downtown Kitchener. The journey to ensure that the door of St. John’s Kitchen is open each day to continually serve the daily meal and to be a place that people count on, is a major part of our 40 year story. It is also a story of a changing place, of responding to dramatic changes on the ground.
This winter, outreach workers have estimated that more than 150 people are homeless without a place to live. This means that daily shelter for this group is a constant battle for survival. Sometimes they will get a place at an emergency shelter when there is an opening, other times they stay with a friend, other times they gather in a room where others are squatting or winter camping.
To celebrate the Christmas season, 800 Christmas meals were prepared at our commercial kitchen on Queen Street and were served at four different locations during the Christmas season. Chef Michael Bertling and volunteers cooked and chopped hundreds of pounds of turkey, potatoes, carrots and bread so that they could be served at four Christmas meals.
After being put on the back burner out of pure necessity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Working Centre’s Community Dental Clinic is once again open. This news has The Working Centre Director Joe Mancini smiling. Food and housing became the immediate priorities throughout the pandemic. Those needs combined with complexities surrounding health regulations, led to the dental clinic, which had been operating since 2014, being temporarily shuttered in 2020.
The Working Centre has been walking with the reality of homelessness for a long time, as the contours have been developing since the 1980s. Over the years there have been times when the issues causing homelessness are lessening, but they never fail to begin to rise again. It was only in 2014 when it seemed that homelessness was declining. There was hope that 100 units of social housing would make a decisive difference. By 2019, The Working Centre was counting more than 250 people outside the shelter system who were without housing just around downtown Kitchener. That number now exceeds 1,100 people in the shelter system or experiencing homelessness in the Region.
As a stay-at-home mom, Gwen Gerencser held several part-time jobs prior to St. John’s Kitchen (SJK), such as a bus driver for her children’s elementary school and a retail employee at The Beer Store. When her children began to get older, she started to look for an organization to volunteer with where her availability could be flexible, and SJK was the perfect fit.
Gwen describes volunteering at SJK as incredible, as she was able to cater her volunteer hours to her schedule, and the time she dedicated was met with immense gratitude. She wanted to provide help wherever needed, which is exactly what she did – through serving food to community members and washing dishes, a role that always needed more hands.
UA has provided an opportunity for many individuals that were considered ‘too problematic’ for shelter, couples that were forced to be apart, and furry friends to all have a place to call home. While there are still rules, like don’t set fires in the building, keep the hallways and stairwells clutter free, the individuals staying at UA get the chance to make this space their own. There is no one telling them they have too many belongings, they can decorate their rooms however they want, they can leave the light on all night without having to worry about keeping someone else up, they can keep it as messy or as clean as they want, it is theirs.
We have collected stories from around The Working Centre community to provide perspective about how our work has changed and adapted during the pandemic.
At last year’s Mayors’ Dinner we focused on Person-Centred Grassroots Healthcare. In the words of Dr. George Berrigan: “We had no bureaucratically designed program or procedural guidelines to work under. In effect, what we did was use the approach of the famous professional tennis player, Arthur Ashe, who tackled his problems using the SUD method: Start where you are! Use what you have! Do what you can! Our immediate barrier was gaining trust which took a lot of listening and attention, being adaptable, open and especially non-judgmental. We worked hard at keeping our promises. We knew our care had to be backed by consistency, respect and kindness.
Perhaps like many an angsty young adult, I was once enamored with the idea of revolution — Rage Against the Machine was a staple of my music collection.
Believin’ all the lies that they’re tellin’ ya
Buyin’ all the products that they’re sellin’ ya
They say jump and you say how high?
You’re brain dead
You got a bullet in your head
There have been times in my life when I was drawn to the idea of tearing down systems. Shouting “cus the man!” and all that felt good. While I still get a kick out of this kind of music and am encouraged to see people standing up to challenge the system, I now think that if rage is not rooted in relationships it is empty.
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.
