For the past two years, Joanna Miller has been leading a quarterly Memorial Service at St. John’s Kitchen. Each quarter we have remembered up to 25 people who have died during that time from the wider community of those connected to the St. John’s Kitchen community. Here is part of the reflection by Joanna from the service held at St. John’s Kitchen on May 27th, 2025.
Each year we witness many deaths within the St. John’s Kitchen community. Kelly, Zack and Cookie were three men who were long time contributors to the work of community. Their contributions go back 25 years each, as part of the Job Café, a term we use for our part time work force. Job Café has contributed in hundreds of ways to the Kitchener downtown.
Remarks from the Memorial Service for Rev. Dr. Oscar Cole Arnal at Christ Lutheran Church, Waterloo, Ontario, June 15, 2024
“I was taught that giving is better than receiving and that we’re here to help our fellow sojourners, not ignore them when they are in difficulty” In these times of multiple challenges and crises, we reflect upon the work, lived experience, and compassion of Anna Kaljas.
Roman Dubinski has been an integral part and significant contributor to The Working Centre for 26 years. Roman began volunteering as a Board member with The Working Centre in 1996. He joined after retiring from the University of Waterloo, on the recommendation of Ken Westhues who was a member at the time.
Roman said he was drawn by The Working Centre’s mission and actions to help the unemployed, which he thought was a worthy cause. The Working Centre reaches people, many of the most vulnerable in society who could “fall through the cracks”, and he felt it was an honourable thing to do. The Working Centre was about supporting people as it sought to create a world that was livable and affordable.
This winter we were saddened by the death of Sally Lerner, a long time professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo. In the early 1980’s she helped form The Working Centre’s ideas on how to respond to growing unemployment. She had an active presence, engaging the community to critically think about the meaning of work. Sally was known for her ability to facilitate students to choose their own educational adventure. Many of her students found their way to The Working Centre and enriched our work.
With deep sadness we announce the death of Lawrence Crawford, after living a life of music, discipline, and kindness for 85 years!
Larry’s family includes Ernie in Brantford, Mary in Toronto, Tom in North Dakota, Steve in Vancouver (and all of their families); dear friends Shirley Crawford Speers and Chris Entz, along with his adopted family at The Working Centre, his church community at Grace Communion International, and his endless music-making friends and co-musicians.
It was a sad day at The Working Centre when we learned that Michelle Snyder had died of COVID at home in mid-June 2021. Michelle was a dedicated worker whose contribution was legendary.Her ability to work cheerfully by finding jobs within Working Centre projects that needed her energy was a constant gift.
Michelle’s ability to work long hours and her thoroughness on every job was a rare quality. In the last 10 years we have called on Michelle for hundreds of cleaning jobs. The hardest jobs were apartment clean ups, made necessary when someone was moving, a death or a change in units. Michelle could wade through sometimes very chaotic situations, but she had a calming, supportive presence as she worked her way through messes.
On September 20 we hosted a community barbecue and memorial at St. John’s Kitchen. A time to bring the community together before we end up back indoors. A time to mourn the many people we have lost since the start of COVID. We have been careful about these moments, not wanting them to be an event that spreads COVID. Only this fall have we started to believe that we could gather again somewhat safely, even as we know that the fourth wave is before us.
What a delight the day was – so feeding of the human spirit. We filled the Worth a Second Look parking lot, with people gathered in clusters across the large space, music playing, barbecue fired up, with the food line all socially distanced as people gathered for their lunch.
Though it has been many months since we lost Ron Doyle, we still walk around wondering when he will show up. Ron’s heart was so big that he could fill a room with ideas and then follow through on those ideas with unrelenting energy. We couldn’t help but miss Ron intensely in May and June as we looked for a new location for his beloved A Better Tent City (ABTC). It was only in mid-June, when the City of Kitchener offered the Battler Road site, that ABTC had a place to go and it was easy to imagine Ron hardly able to contain his joy. He would have loved watching the organizational precision of the volunteer crews dismantling, insulating, and loading the tiny homes on to trucks to move them to their new location.
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.
