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.
We are starting to get ready for the Point in Time (PiT) count, which is a national coordinated effort to take a snapshot of how many people are experiencing homelessness in one night. It is important to recognize the many ways that homelessness is increasing in our communities, especially for people just trying to cope as best they can. Encampments demonstrate that we no longer have an effective social structure response to homelessness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every night this winter I have gone to sleep noticing the weather; thinking deeply of the growing number of people who are living without housing, living without shelter, alongside of those who are living without housing security.
The numbers of people make this reality palpable and urgent. The September 2021 Point in Time count documented 1085 people without access to housing. These numbers have names, and are people we see every day.
On September 20 we hosted a community barbecue and memorial at St. John’s Kitchen. A time to bring the community together before we end up back indoors. A time to mourn the many people we have lost since the start of COVID. We have been careful about these moments, not wanting them to be an event that spreads COVID. Only this fall have we started to believe that we could gather again somewhat safely, even as we know that the fourth wave is before us.
What a delight the day was – so feeding of the human spirit. We filled the Worth a Second Look parking lot, with people gathered in clusters across the large space, music playing, barbecue fired up, with the food line all socially distanced as people gathered for their lunch.
We are now preparing 600 meals a day – delicious, fortifying food – that satisfies the need for comfort in hard times. We are working actively with the Food Bank to support this increasing need for food; we have renovated our Queen Street building (Maurita’s Kitchen) to help us to involve more volunteer help as we prepare large quantities of food (something that was easier before COVID). Where we have traditionally embedded our food production in common spaces, we now have to re-invent our spaces for volunteers to be involved in safe ways in this food production. The numbers of people needing food have grown exponentially! We are close to doubling our food preparation to meet the current food needs in our community.
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.
