The Bricker Block story has its roots in 1877 when David and Aaron Bricker purchased the site after a catastrophic fire burned through the Royal Hotel and properties around it. Aaron Bricker established a successful Blacksmith and Livery service out of a wood frame building that he built after purchasing the property.
For over 20 years The Working Centre has been hosting Community Enterprise projects like Queen Street Commons Café, Recycle Cycles, Worth a Second Look Housewares and Furniture, and Computer Recycling to name a few. Community Enterprise projects are practical and productive examples of enterprise. They are active and working businesses that also focus on building community and inclusion.
Gathering in public spaces helps to build community and awareness of one another – in our similarities and our differences. The Mayors’ Dinner, now in its 37th year, is a public gathering that brings 900 people together annually, to celebrate commitment to the common good, to gather, and to support The Working Centre. At this year’s Mayors’ Dinner, we will highlight community endeavours that foster the habit of supporting public places.
It has been a long journey since Wednesday October 31, 1984. That was the day, during a late afternoon meeting held by the Core Area Ministry Committee, when a decision was made to develop a downtown community meal service. The discussions that resulted in St. John’s Kitchen had been going on for more than a year. Churches and social services were recognizing that many people living in the downtown struggled to access a daily meal.
This Christmas season was a busy time. We received overflowing generosity as the community responded to ensure many meals were available through the Christmas season. During mid-December, Maurita’s Kitchen on Queen Street was extra busy as over 1000 pounds of turkey were cooked and prepared for serving. In the final days massive quantities of potatoes, vegetables and gravy were produced and made ready. Altogether about 800 Christmas meals were prepared and served at St. John’s Kitchen, King Street Shelter and the Erbs Road Shelter.
In early January 2025, St. John’s Kitchen will mark 40 years of serving a daily weekday meal in downtown Kitchener. The journey to ensure that the door of St. John’s Kitchen is open each day to continually serve the daily meal and to be a place that people count on, is a major part of our 40 year story. It is also a story of a changing place, of responding to dramatic changes on the ground.
After considerable remediation work on the building at 256 King, we are ready to open our doors. We have intentionally crafted the space at Fresh Ground to be an oasis of brightness and calm, with close to 1,000 plants helping us to build fresh ground as a gathering place.
We are introducing a new menu that celebrates community, sustainability, and the joy of sharing meals. This menu will be available at Fresh Ground, in take home meals and catering options.
As St. John’s Kitchen prepares to return to St. John’s Anglican Church, it is fitting to reflect on our long journey together. For 21 years between January 1985 and July 2006 a continuous free weekday meal was served at lunchtime in St. John’s gym. During those years, every weekday between 100 – 200 people came through the church gym. The Working Centre had started using the St. John’s gymnasium two years earlier in January 1983 for the St. John’s Unemployed Workers Centre.
The Working Centre campus at 256 King East has been undergoing significant renovations as we prepare the spaces for a substantial re-creation. There are three paths of change that we have been navigating. The first is the necessity of moving Worth A Second Look Furniture and Housewares Thrift Store from the main floor of 97 Victoria N to make way for the housing construction project that will start in early October 2023.
Those of us responding directly to the day-to-day survival needs of increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness in our Region knew that we needed immediate action. A phone call to Fr. Toby Collins at St. Mary’s Church in downtown Kitchener led us to hosting a month-long people-sleeping-on-the-floor pop-up shelter for 200 individuals in November of 2019. Since then there have been many positive changes.
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.
