By Thomas Fraser
Published March 2026
As we go about our days, we are each drawn into zones of seeming familiarity. Work, family, routine, the ordinary fabric of everyday life—sometimes so familiar as to be taken entirely for granted. But if we pay close attention, we may be struck by the hidden depths of the everyday. Suddenly, the face of the other ceases to be just another passing shape; instead, I am seized by a living Thou, revealing depths of vulnerability and transcendence. The objects that surround me, the ground on which I stand, cease to be bare surfaces and reveal layered histories of struggle and care, of lives lived and forgotten. And perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the places we call home, the spaces that either hold or refuse us.
Rarely do we reflect on the meaning of such words. But it’s worth pausing to ask: what do we mean when we speak of home? At once abstract and concrete, home signifies both a place of dwelling and a state of rootedness or belonging, deriving from the Old English ham (“dwelling place, house, abode”) and the ancient root tkei (“to settle, dwell, or be at home”).[1] When we speak of home, then, we are speaking not merely of a physical space or structure, but of our rootedness in a world of belonging. As the philosopher Simone Weil once put it, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”[2]
But what of those for whom rootedness is denied?
As I write these words, the season’s first snowfall is upon us. As temperatures drop below freezing, I am reminded that in 2024, more than 80,000 people in Ontario were unhoused, an increase of 25 percent since 2022 and enough to fill a small city. Of these, more than half were chronically homeless, their lives stretched across months or years without stable shelter.[3] In Waterloo Region alone, over 2,300 were unhoused, 78 percent of whom were chronically homeless and 41 percent living rough, subject to harsh environmental conditions.[4] As this current winter deepens, hundreds across our region face the same reality, including the folks we walk alongside.
These numbers, stark as they are, tell only part of the story. Behind each figure is a life, a Thou, for whom home has become a distant abstraction. For instance, one of the folks we support fled war in his youth, violently dislocated from everything he knew. Decades later, he still bears the scars of displacement, hoping to reunite with his mother before time runs out. His story is one among many. For others, perhaps it started with income that could no longer meet rising rents, a conflict that severed the fragile thread of stability, or a space that was unlivable to begin with. Perhaps it was an unexpected loss or injury, the strain of chronic illness and pain, or the absence of support in difficult times. Addiction, mental health struggles, survival strategies that themselves become traps—these too play their part, often stemming from trauma, adversity, and related stressors. The pathways are as varied as the lives they affect, complex and mutually compounding.[5]
Then there is the larger picture. These pathways do not unfold in a vacuum but are nested in broader webs of complexity: a housing system that treats shelter more as a commodity than a right, an economy structurally geared towards precarity, a drug crisis whose casualties are sons and daughters, and support systems straining to meet existing needs.[6] From this perspective, what at first might appear as personal failure or misfortune is recast as a kind of structural abandonment. What this in turn reveals is that we do not inhabit a neutral landscape, but a moral ecology that systematically frustrates the common good.
Recognizing this, we are confronted with the question of how to respond, and the answer begins, quite simply, with not turning away. Instead, we lean into the gap between what is and what could be, embracing what some call “the adjacent possible,” the emergent possibilities at the edge of each moment, each state of affairs.[7] In our shelter work, this means meeting basic needs while weaving webs of interconnected support: daily deliveries of food and supplies, on-site medical care, mental health and addictions services, housing navigation, employment and financial support, and specialized outreach services. It means life-saving interventions like overdose response, shuttle runs for a range of needs and appointments, help with ID and benefits, and cabin support for folks struggling to maintain their space. It means staff with diverse backgrounds and experience, trained in crisis response and the work of relational presence, building community through peer support and daily connection. It means working alongside neighbors, community partners, and emergency services. Most fundamentally, it means showing up each day with eyes wide open, understanding that change only starts where we are, in the grace and grit of each moment.
The moral ecology we inhabit is not fixed or inevitable. Like all living systems, it can change. Life itself, in its open-ended complexity, continually teaches this truth. Though greater than the sum of its parts, this ecology is made up of connections in which we, as agents, participate. As Margaret Wheatley has written, “we are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.”[8] Here at TWC, we know this in our bones, and it is faith in the promise of creative possibility that drives everything we do, from daily care to upstream advocacy and systems change. Grounded in humility, guided by shared virtues, and sustained through interdependence, we work to evoke a future in which, to quote Dorothy Day, “the final word is love,” a love made real through attention, encounter, and the patient work of making home.[9]
Thomas Fraser has recently started at TWC as a housing worker at Erbs Road Shelter.
1) “Home – Etymology, Origin and Meaning.” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2025. https://www.etymonline.com/word/home
2) Weil, Simone. “Uprootedness.” In The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, translated by Arthur Wills. Routledge, 2002.
3) Donaldson, J, D Wang, C Escamilla, and A Turner. “Municipalities under Pressure: The Human and Financial Cost of Ontario’s Homelessness Crisis.” HelpSeeker, 2025.
4) “2024 Point in Time Count Findings.” Region of Waterloo Community Services, 2024.
5) “What Are the Causes of Homelessness?” Homeless Hub, 2025. https://homelesshub.ca/collection/homelessness-101/what-are-the-causes-of-homelessness/
6) “About Homelessness.” CAEH, 2025. https://caeh.ca/about-homelessness/
7) Kauffman, Stuart A. Investigations. Oxford University Press, 2000.
8) Wheatley, Margaret J and Kellner-Rogers, Myron. “Self.” In A Simpler Way. Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1999.
9) Day, Dorothy. “Postscript.” In The Long Loneliness. HarperOne, 1997.
