Making Home is a visual journey depicted through portraits, daily life, graffiti, writings on the walls, and inanimate objects to shed light on housing and opioid use over a two-year period in Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario. The photography is inspired by street people and the people who help them. Places and locations depicted in the text and photographs relate to programs and community tools created by The Working Centre, a community-based, socially active non-profit organization based in Kitchener.
Making Home is a visual journey depicted through portraits, daily life, graffiti, writings on the walls, and inanimate objects to shed light on housing and opioid use over a two-year period in Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario. The photography is inspired by street people and the people who help them. Places and locations depicted in the text and photographs relate to programs and community tools created by The Working Centre, a community-based, socially active non-profit organization based in Kitchener.
Joe Mancini, co-founder of The Working Centre, contacted me in August 2020 to tell me about A Better Tent City, an experimental tent encampment that featured tiny houses. The Working Centre (TWC) was collaborating with Ron Doyle, a philanthropic person, on the ever growing homeless situation. Ron was allowing a group of people to live in tents in a large commercial building he owned and in tiny houses on the parking lot.
Joe Mancini, co-founder of The Working Centre, contacted me in August 2020 to tell me about A Better Tent City, an experimental tent encampment that featured tiny houses. The Working Centre (TWC) was collaborating with Ron Doyle, a philanthropic person, on the ever growing homeless situation. Ron was allowing a group of people to live in tents in a large commercial building he owned and in tiny houses on the parking lot.
Conversations with Joe revealed a change in The Working Centre focus from a employment to housing. I have been photographing TWC since 1983 and found this change significant and important.
It is especially important to do this kind of photography — one on one, six feet or closer, in the same space breathing the same air—in these times of fake news, false facts, and great differences of opinion leading to public anger and even hostility.
We are thankful that Doug MacLellan has immersed himself in The Working Centre community. Making Home documents the unique spirit and commitment that was driven by the COVID shutdown. These photos capture the energy of the people and the projects in a dance of service and community building.
– Joe Mancini
A 2021 survey conducted by The Region of Waterloo found that at least 1085 individuals were experiencing homelessness in Waterloo Region.
Joe and Stephanie told me about a temporary shelter—”The People’s Temporary Shelter,” said Stephanie—at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. I photographed the church’s gym conversion to a shelter and later the daily life inside.
Making Home is a timely name. We use it to describe the 44 units of housing that will be built at 97 Victoria North in downtown Kitchener. Since 2006, this is where St. John’s Kitchen has offered services supporting the growing reality of homelessness. For the last five years this work has been done in the midst of an epidemic of synthetic drugs.
– Joe Mancini
Making Home also captures a dramatic time, bracketed by the COVID pandemic, that started some years earlier with the spread of easily available opiates and crystal meth drugs. We have witnessed overdoses and overdose deaths along with growing homelessness.
– Joe Mancini
Here’s my main take away. People help people, no matter what. Another take away, people given a place to stay in the spirit of hospitality even if only for a night gain a reprieve of some sort.
A last take away, there is goodness in the work of helping and it looks perfectly normal. Listen to someone, show a person the way to get to a shelter, look after their dog, and be there when they shoot up. Decency. Ordinary. Good enough.
Making Home is available for purchase through Black Moss Press.
Photographer Douglas MacLellan
Canadian independent freelance digital image maker–a photographer in other words–based in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. My work focuses on people I know and have met on my travels, what they do–usually in between the drama of their lives, and what they allow me to photograph.
