Hope is a choice. Hope is a disciplined and spiritual practice that sustains our work. These do not feel like hopeful times as we witness the despair of people living without shelter or housing, as we receive the growing anxiety of people looking for work in a tightening labour market, as we witness the tightening of funding options and increasing administrative burdens
Carol Taylor is widely known for her volunteer work with several different groups over many years, and has a long history of being a supporter of causes and organizations in her roles as senior staff member, Board Member and Committee Member. Her work and quiet leadership style have had a positive impact on many people’s lives and have strengthened our community.
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.
Community Dental has been fortunate to receive a grant from the Accerta Health Access Foundation Grant to support volunteer Dentists and Hygienists to provide dental services to those individuals who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. We appreciate the help of Joe Cheira, Co-ordinator for Government Relations and Advocacy, Ontario Dental Association for helping to make this grant possible. This year there have been 9 dentists and 2 hygienists who volunteered at Community Dental and three other volunteers who help in the clinic.
The Queen Street Apartments were possible because of a Rapid Housing Initiative grant through the Region of Waterloo and the Federal Government’s CMHC. The funding provided capital contributions for the rapid construction of new housing and/or acquisition of existing buildings for rehabilitation or conversion to permanent affordable housing. This project achieved its goal when the new tenants all moved in during June 2023, one year after construction started.
After being put on the back burner out of pure necessity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Working Centre’s Community Dental Clinic is once again open. This news has The Working Centre Director Joe Mancini smiling. Food and housing became the immediate priorities throughout the pandemic. Those needs combined with complexities surrounding health regulations, led to the dental clinic, which had been operating since 2014, being temporarily shuttered in 2020.
University Avenue Interim Housing (UA) is an apartment complex that consists of 80 dorm units meant for those who were unhoused and in need during the height of the COVID pandemic. At UA, shelter, a consistent food source, and community-based resources are available for all residents. It has been operating for almost two years, enabling a community to foster and a support system to be built.
As a stay-at-home mom, Gwen Gerencser held several part-time jobs prior to St. John’s Kitchen (SJK), such as a bus driver for her children’s elementary school and a retail employee at The Beer Store. When her children began to get older, she started to look for an organization to volunteer with where her availability could be flexible, and SJK was the perfect fit.
Gwen describes volunteering at SJK as incredible, as she was able to cater her volunteer hours to her schedule, and the time she dedicated was met with immense gratitude. She wanted to provide help wherever needed, which is exactly what she did – through serving food to community members and washing dishes, a role that always needed more hands.
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.
Sometime in early January, local news ran a story on the impacts of sub-zero temperatures for homeless citizens in Waterloo Region. The shelters were beyond capacity, people were being sent to motels during frigid nights. Since the end of December there had been many bitterly cold nights.
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.
