The Region of Waterloo National Housing Day 2024 Planning Committee acknowledged The Working Centre Family with this year’s Christine Wilson Outstanding Housing Community Worker Award!
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.
Dear Friends, this past year has been a year of movement and renewal. The structural steel beams creating a third floor for the 44 new housing units at 97 Victoria symbolizes the energy throughout The Working Centre, directed towards building and shifting spaces that make a difference in people’s lives.
Each year we witness many deaths within the St. John’s Kitchen community. Kelly, Zack and Cookie were three men who were long time contributors to the work of community. Their contributions go back 25 years each, as part of the Job Café, a term we use for our part time work force. Job Café has contributed in hundreds of ways to the Kitchener downtown.
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.
Pope Francis calls the beatitudes the path to joy and true happiness for all humanity. What is the work of shelter – it is walking with those who are left out, it is the call to be merciful, it is mourning those who die, it is seeking right action for those dispossessed. During these last five years, The Working Centre has walked with thousands dealing with homelessness, many of whom are caught in the concurrent cycle of mental health and addictions.
Throughout the winter our focus was on safe and warm shelter spaces. We are now able to provide 100 beds at the King St. Emergency Shelter and 80 beds at University Ave (UA) residence. Both locations include a food servery, washrooms, showers, laundry, primary healthcare, and housing supports.
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.
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.
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.
