By Stephanie Mancini
Published in March 2021
As we welcome the Spring, we also mark a year of COVID. We welcome the healing and renewal of warmer weather, the quickening of the earth. We have been reflecting, responding, enduring, and the challenges are not over.
We have been understanding our work as walking forwards on two feet.
The foot we have leaned into strongly during COVID is the work of responding to poverty, homelessness, and a poison drug supply. We have created Covid safe environments; faced Covid fear for people working in the sector; walked with Covid denial for many who face the stark realities of drug-induced death rather than Covid induced symptoms; faced the challenges of finding people a place to live when the numbers of homeless far outflank available housing units; supported a variety of new housing options – Water Street House, University Ave housing, motels; we have served delicious meals for 600 people a day; supported the job search of many seeking work; and problem solved the financial boondoggles of a changing income support landscape. Challenging, meaningful, beautiful work.
This work is ongoing and intense. We hope to enhance this work with support for new housing options, and support access to a safer supply strategy responding to the powerful drugs that are holding so many hostage.
And we continue to strengthen the second foot of our work – enhancing our responses to Climate Change, and to reimagine creative community examples that help to support the concepts of limits, of making and doing, of nourishing the soil and living sustainably. We have work to re-open our community spaces, our community tools projects, and to build on learning and doing as a community.
We keep one foot in helping to heal and respond to the dislocation of our times; and the second foot will lead us forwards to new ways of being. If we have learned anything from this COVID crisis, it is that we can make changes quickly and with agility but it is much easier to have models to build on, and people committed to acting together. The Winter we have been through reminds us that the dislocation we are enduring is unbearable. The Spring reminds us that our planet has limits and is a gift that sustains us. Stay tuned to Good Work News and to our soon-to-be-ready new website as we walk together on two feet.
