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”