The Community Hub - Bringing People Together in London, Ontario
Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada &
London Cares Homeless Response Services
The Community Hub
More and more in our local community, we are seeing people struggling with mental health and addictions with nowhere to go and the system in place to support them often feeling intimidatingly difficult to navigate.
Both the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada (CSJ) and London Cares Homeless Response Services (London Cares) serve these individuals in need in their own ways. The Sisters of St. Joseph operate St. Joseph’s Hospitality Centre – a place individuals can visit to get a hot meal and find fellowship. London Cares is a housing-first organization that prioritizes getting individuals into homes and providing wraparound supports after. While organizations like these have been getting better and better at serving the needs of their clients over the years, the underlying issues have been getting worse.
“When I first started, we’d serve maybe 150 individuals a day,” says Bill Payne, Coordinator of the St. Joseph’s Hospitality Centre. “Over the last 26 years we’ve seen more and more people come in with increasingly severe substance abuse and mental health issues. We serve about 400 meals a day now.”
Thanks to a Community Vitality Grant, the CSJ and London Cares will collaborate on The Community Hub, a new location that will house many of the support services our most vulnerable citizens need, all under one roof. With additional partners in Regional HIV/AIDS Connection and London InterCommunity Health Centre potentially offering services out of the new location, the Community Hub will make navigating our city’s support systems easier for everyone.
With the COVID-19 pandemic complicating so many lives throughout the city, the need for simplicity has never been more apparent.
While closures and restrictions have certainly impacted service delivery, the sense of closeness and community that accompanied shared spaces like the soup kitchen is an equal loss.
“I think the thing that’s struck me the most is that at the soup kitchen, while it's obvious we do food, it has always been about community, and because of the physical distancing guidelines designed to keep everyone safe, we’ve lost some of that,” says Bill. “Our folks are so resilient and I'm so proud of how they face their situations with a smile, and how they’re able to pass that smile along to me.”
“it has always been about community”
The Community Hub aims to be a model for the future of service delivery, centered around collaboration between partner agencies to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to seek and receive the help they need to thrive. Taking a trauma-informed approach and providing specialty training to staff will ensure that service comes from a place of compassion and understanding.
Ultimately, the Community Hub is about bringing people together, both agencies and people in need of support, building community, encouraging a greater understanding of the issues our city is facing, and collaborating on solutions to help our most vulnerable populations.
“I don't think we're under any illusion that we're getting rid of poverty or we're going to solve everything,” says Bill. “My hope is that with the Community Hub, we’ll have made a hospitable, welcoming place that makes life just a little easier for our clients.”
“There is no doubt there is a crisis in supportive housing, mental health and addiction in our community. At the heart of the collaboration to create a hub with these amazing organizations is community. Community is the most radical idea to create substantial change. We have collaborated for two years from a base of shared values. We will offer services in shared space and hope to create a welcoming environment where people can more easily get the supports they need.
-Sister Margo Ritchie, Congregational Leader for the Sisters of St. Joseph”
A Community of Exchange
I’m looking out from my kitchen table at ice covered trees today. I’m home because of the weather, but usually I’d be working at another table in a windowless office at the back of a building on Barton Street in the east end of Hamilton, Ontario.
I work at a not-for-profit café called 541 Eatery and Exchange, where our mission is to welcome everyone to the table. That’s a bold statement! For the past four years we’ve opened our doors 6 days a week for 12 hours. The ‘we’ is about 15 staff, mostly part time, and 200 volunteers. The volunteers help do everything – cook, clean, do the dishes, serve our customers, and work alongside our youth outreach worker. Because of them we’re able to keep our payroll costs low, and that translates into really low prices. In case they aren’t low enough, we have a pay it forward system that uses buttons as café currency. No, you don’t have to bring in buttons with you! We have a jar full of buttons that ‘cost’ a dollar each. A customer can buy as many as they like, and transfer them over to another jar. Those buttons are then available to anyone without money that day, to put towards anything on the menu. You can use 5 buttons every day, so long as another customer pays for them in advance.
This simple system means that our customers are a mixed crew. It’s not unusual for business people needing a quick lunch to be lining up with one of our community who sleeps rough in the local park. It seems to us to be a sign of God’s kingdom. It isn’t always heavenly – sometimes people are having a difficult day, sometimes customers don’t get along (that’s true for everyone, no matter how they pay for their order). But in general we’ve made deep friendships with people we otherwise would never have met, and have come to love people who get overlooked.
In a couple of days I’ll lead the funeral service for one of our regulars. Most of our staff will be there, along with many customers. Margaret was a character. Forthright, a wearer of extraordinary hats, she was completely dedicated to dressing up for Halloween or Christmas or Easter. She tended to talk during worship on Sunday afternoons at The Meeting Place, the congregation I pastor that meets in the café. She sat at the same table every morning, where she played the board game Trouble with a decided competitive spirit. Margaret found a welcome at 541. She had a place at the table, and we will miss her.
Rev. Sue Carr
Executive Director
541 Eatery and Exchange
Celebrating an Impossible Dream
On Friday, September 28th, about 100 gathered at Austin Doran Hall in the Mount Community Centre in Peterborough, Ontario for the annual special evening that highlights poverty and the need for food security in our area. The dinner, determined by lot, was either Oven Roasted Chicken Supreme with Decadent New York Style Cheesecake for dessert or a typical food bank meal of penne noodles with canned tomato sauce and cookies. This menu spoke loudly of the disparity that exists in opportunities for food choices, and called us to be more aware of the struggles some face in providing good food for their families.
The focus of the evening was on the newly-completed Food Centre which is a significant component of this evolving dream. A name was given to the café, announced by John Good, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough, through whom an anonymous donation of $300,000 made this beautiful kitchen area possible. The name chosen is the Fulcrum Café, signifying the point on which this project turns or is supported. The café is already being used by the apartment residents, staff, volunteers, and friends and supporters of The Mount Community Centre.
Madelaine Currelly, CEO of the Community Training and Development Centre explained a very successful educational program in which unemployed applicants develop skills in cooking as they supply meals for Meals on Wheels, a day care centre and other groups. This kitchen also provides catering to groups within and beyond The Mount Community Centre, and the facility is available for rent at mutually designated times to budding entrepreneurs.
Guests at this annual event were brought up to date on further developments in this impossible dream. Board member, Bill Graham, outlined the progress and future plans for Phase 2 of the project. Christine Cannon, President of Shared Dreams for Independent Living, spoke of their position and excitement around this joint venture. Murray Rodd, Cabinet Member of the present fundraising campaign, shared that a dinner held in his honour as retiring police chief raised over $23,000 for the Mount Community Centre. In his closing remarks, Steve Kylie, Chair of the Board, mentioned that a Day Care Centre had just been relocated to this amazing place that continues to meet a multitude of needs in the Peterborough area. All were invited to view the Food Centre, and many took the opportunity. Once again those who attended were deeply touched by the evolving story of this impossible dream.
- Joan Driscoll, CSJ
‘BEE’ careful in being BEE friendly
Recently, on a car trip from Calgary to visit friends in Hay River and Yellowknife my travelling companion and I made a lunch stop in High Level, Alberta. While waiting for my soup and sandwich I picked up the local coffee news, the Muskeg Buzz. I came across an article in its Heard Around the World section titled, “Cheerios Will Send 500 Wildflower Seeds for Free to Save Bees." This piece encouraged readers to sign up for free wildflower seeds to plant to help save the honey bee. Maybe you have seen the TV commercial on the same topic. Currently, General Mills, maker of Honey Nut Cheerios, is focussing audience attention on the plight of honeybees through their corporate initiative, ‘Bring back the bees’. Their campaign, ‘Bring back the bees’ highlights the vital role bees and other pollinators play in food security, the economy and how bees and other pollinators face decline.
“Pollinators are critical to our ecosystems. Insect pollinators, both wild (e.g., many species of bees and moths) and domestic (honeybees), are in serious decline due to the combination of habitat loss, disease, pesticide exposure and climate change. These pollinators are responsible for an estimated one out of three bites of food that people eat, which is worth billions of dollars to the North American economy. Pollinators ensure the reproductive success of plants and the survival of the wildlife that depend on those plants for food and shelter.”*
A significant part of General Mills’ campaign is partnering with the Canadian, P.E.I. seed company, Veseys to offer free packages of wildflower seeds for planting. Last year, the 100,000 seed packages Veseys expected to give away went in a matter of days. The seed company scrambled to get another 100,000 packages to General Mills. This year’s projection is that General Mills is going to be giving away over 100 million seeds to Canadians.**
At first glance, this initiative seemed like a super-duper, winning idea to me. The intent to highlight the plight of the honeybee is wonderful and taking steps to address its dwindling habitat is to be applauded. With a little research I discovered, however, the method chosen to accomplish their goals has been called into question by Paul Zammit of the Toronto Botanical Gardens.***
Zammit bases his concern on the fact that all plants should not be planted in all locations. The free package contains a mixture of seeds some of which are non-native and perhaps even considered invasive in the location where they are being sent. The horticulturalist is quick to add that he likes that the campaign is getting folks like us talking about pollinators such as bees and supports the campaign efforts to urge us to take the opportunity to facilitate pollinators in our own backyards, balconies and outdoor spaces. However, his over-riding message is to take the ‘bee careful’ route to wildflower planting. Paul Zammit recommends first checking with our local flower societies or flower supply stores to select native flowers best suited to our locale in creating wildflower habitats for the bees in our neighbourhoods.
View https://youtu.be/JgZ-DLesdAU for other ways to help pollinators in your community.
Adding to your bee trivia ... did you know?
- Bees have terrific colour vision, that’s why they love showy flowers. They especially like blue, purple, violet, white & yellow.
- There are over 20,000 species of bees around the world!
- Bee species all have different tongue lengths that adapt to different flowers.
- The honeybee’s wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second thus making their distinctive buzzing sound.
- A honeybee can fly for up to 9 kilometers and as fast as 25 kilometers an hour.
- 1 in 3 bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators who spread the pollen that crops need to grow. That includes many of our favourite foods like apples, almonds, coffee and of course, honey.
Nancy Wales, CSJ
*Ontario Nature
**Seeds Given away in Cheerios promotion may be problematic, horticulturalist says – CBC NEWS posted March 26, 2017
***Seeds Given away in Cheerios promotion may be problematic, horticulturalist says – CBC NEWS posted March 26, 2017