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.
After considerable remediation work on the building at 256 King, we are ready to open our doors. We have intentionally crafted the space at Fresh Ground to be an oasis of brightness and calm, with close to 1,000 plants helping us to build fresh ground as a gathering place.
We are introducing a new menu that celebrates community, sustainability, and the joy of sharing meals. This menu will be available at Fresh Ground, in take home meals and catering options.
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.
The Working Centre campus at 256 King East has been undergoing significant renovations as we prepare the spaces for a substantial re-creation. There are three paths of change that we have been navigating. The first is the necessity of moving Worth A Second Look Furniture and Housewares Thrift Store from the main floor of 97 Victoria N to make way for the housing construction project that will start in early October 2023.
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.
Our King Street shelter welcomes 70+ people a night. We have now been operating out of this new emergency shelter at 1668 King Street East for almost two months now. We are renting the space from Stephen Litt of Vive and Woodhouse Properties who plan to start construction on two rental apartment towers in June of 2024.
Have you been following our journey of creating low-barrier shelter options for the growing numbers of people living outside? We started with a pop-up shelter at St. Mary’s Church in 2019, and then moved to the old Tim Hortons at the corner of Frederick and Lancaster. These were temporary, open-space attempts to ensure people were safe in the winter months.
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.
As many of you know, the property that we have called home for the past 10 seasons has been for sale for some time. Recently it has become clear that with so much uncertainty surrounding the sale of the property, we cannot continue moving forward as usual. For that reason, we have come to the incredibly difficult decision to close the garden for the season ahead.
The road to the Working Centre Market Garden is not through country fields of corn or soy, barley or hay, rather it runs though city streets and neighbourhoods. You can arrive on the Number 6 bus, or by bike or foot, if not by car. And when you arrive, you are met with sun shining through the fruit trees, or raindrops on puddled paths, and the call of a robin or a wren as the osprey circle overhead. You are met by gardeners, eager to tell you stories if you’d like to listen. Eager to have your help with some weeding, or eager to get in a harvest and share it with you.
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.
