It is exciting to confirm that construction at 97 Victoria Making Home is moving into its final phases. When we moved St. John’s Kitchen and Worth A Second Look thrift store out of 97 Victoria in October 2023, we expected it would be an 18 month construction timeline.
We are now one and half months from the closing of King Street Shelter. King Street Shelter has come out of a line of innovative and highly responsive approaches The Working Centre has brought to the dramatic increase in homelessness, combined with the opioid drug crisis. We have created a place of belonging where people come together in a congregate setting to share living every day.
Construction continues on the Making Home project. The third floor addition including the roof, windows, walls and blue skin are all completed. The framing for the units on the third floor is complete along with plumbing, electrical and HVAC rough ins. Drywall is the next step. When you drive by 97 Victoria you can see the new windows donated by Strassburger Windows. They were installed in late November before the cold weather took hold. The second floor is now at the framing stage with progress towards completing plumbing rough-in and the HVAC rough-in along the main hallway.
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!
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.
This month we warmly welcomed two young men from Ethiopia, to Louisa Street. The keys to their rooms were a symbol of their new home in our community.
This year, the Mayors’ Dinner helps us to reflect on the importance of determined hopefulness in the face of despair. Determined hopefulness is not a gentle wish for the future, it is an intentional act to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. It will take courage and it will take care. Looking at the world around us, the need for courage is clear.
All shelter spaces are full. The 230 shelter beds that the Working Centre has established in the last three years have helped to double the Region’s shelter capacity, but there are still 200 people camping and without access to shelter. There is little movement of people in our shelters as housing costs are beyond any social assistance cheque. Underneath the despair of reduced housing options is a burgeoning drug problem.
Standing witness to the harshness of our world is painful and draws a deep lament – across the world, on the earth that sustains life, and in our own community. The lament is important, standing with eyes wide open as witness, and feeling the pain. If we don’t lament, this despair can turn into anger, into fear, or indifference.
This November we marked one year of community and hospitality at the Louisa Street Hospitality House. Over the past twelve months we’ve welcomed fifteen individuals from eight different countries seeking protection, asylum, and safety here in Canada.
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.
