By Joe Mancini
Published in December 2020
The Oxford word of the year turns out to be several words that all evoke the emotional roller coaster we have been riding. Lockdown, Anthropause, Super Spreader, Black Lives Matter, and Doom Scrolling are words and phrases that remind us of the fragility of our culture.
Since March, The Working Centre has been riding this roller coaster as we have constantly shuffled services and programs in order to react to the pandemic. At first St. John’s Kitchen served takeout meals from the door, then we moved the food distribution to the parking lot and recreated St. John’s Kitchen as a separate space for the unsheltered, offering washrooms, showers, laundry, meals and drop-in. Meanwhile we restarted Job Café and increased our support to a number of encampments. In August we started renovating Maurita’s Kitchen in order to create a commissary kitchen to prepare up to 600 meals each day, and then we moved to set up the University Avenue residence offering interim housing to 80 people.
In the resource centre on Queen Street, we had to quickly adapt to support job searchers by reimagining the layout of our formerly open-concept resource centre while also helping people to search for work, to file income tax, or to understand the multiple income support programs that were available. The front of 58 Queen became a hub helping 60 people every day, especially during the early days of the pandemic when the all the downtown streets were eerily empty.
At the end of November, on a sunny but briskly cold morning, groups of people were gathered around the Worth A Second Look parking lot, some were lined up for the takeout meals while others were going through bins of clothing that were also being distributed. It was a reminder of the tremendous generosity that has been offered throughout the summer and fall around St. John’s Kitchen.
What is remarkable about this work is the energy of staff and volunteers to serve more people than ever and to do it in new ways, in such a short period of time, adapting in incredible ways.
In the midst of the lockdown and the anthropause, it is not hard to imagine that when we emerge from this pandemic, we are not going to neatly fit back into old patterns. It is easy to list the many changes that are on everyone’s mind.
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With more and more people marginalized from full-time work, how will the structure of the labour market change?
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The substantial reduction in commuting, traveling, and shopping has created new habits that directly address the climate emergency. We now have license to rethink housing, how can we share the abundant housing resources that already exist?
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How can our cities learn to create structures that involve people in the work of community – expanding urban agriculture, supporting self-provisioning skills, creating social structures like community tools that help people to live with less money, developing new initiatives to expand learning opportunities?
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How can we take ethical action to make the practical changes we seek?
These are the questions as we look back to our accomplishments, acknowledge the cultural shifts that are taking place and build on the opportunities to create new ways of acting.
