Transition to Common Work : Building Community at The Working Centre

Joe Mancini, Stephanie Mancini

Description

The Working Centre in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, is a widely recognized and successful model for community development. Begun from scratch in 1982, it is now a vast network of practical supports for the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed, and the homeless, populations that collectively constitute up to 30 percent of the labour market both locally and across North America.

Transition to Common Work is the essential text about The Working Centre—its beginnings thirty years ago, the lessons learned, and the myriad ways in which its strategies and innovations can be adapted by those who share its goals.

The Working Centre focuses on creating access-to-tools projects rather than administrative layers of bureaucracy. This book highlights the core philosophy behind the centre’s decentralized but integrated structure, which has contributed to the creation of affordable services. Underlying this approach are common-sense innovations such as thinking about virtues rather than values, developing community tools with a social enterprise approach, and implementing a radically equal salary policy.

For social workers, activists, bureaucrats, and engaged citizens in third-sector organizations (NGOs, charities, not-for-profits, co-operatives), this practical and inspiring book provides a method for moving beyond the doldrums of “poverty relief” into the exciting world of community building.

Sujets

• Virtues
• Religión
• Overdevelopment
• Contingent work
• Producerism
• The commons
• Social enterprise
• Urban agriculture
• Regional Municipality of Waterloo
• Reciprocity
• Religion
• Libération

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771121620
• Langue: English

Extrait

Transition to Common Work
The Six Virtues
The six virtues on which The Working Centre is based are celebrated in this illustration by Kitchener artist Andy Macpherson. The illustration is structured as a spiral derived from the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on. In this illustration, the spiral-built on an underlying grid of squares based on the Fibonacci sequence-seemed a fitting metaphor for the story of The Working Centre: the story of an ever-evolving way of working and thinking, a story built on the stories of those who have gone before, a story that reflects a natural equilibrium, a sort of golden ratio.
Transition to Common Work
BUILDING COMMUNITY AT THE WORKING CENTRE
Joseph and Stephanie Mancini
Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Mancini, Joseph, 1958-, author
Transition to common work : building community at the Working Centre / Joseph Mancini and Stephanie Mancini.
Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77112-160-6 (pbk.).-ISBN 978-1-77112-162-0 (epub).- ISBN 978-1-77112-161-3 (pdf)
1. Working Centre (Kitchener, Ont.). 2. Community development-Ontario- Waterloo (Regional municipality). 3. Unemployed-Services for-Ontario-Waterloo (Regional municipality). 4. Social work with the unemployed-Ontario- Waterloo (Regional municipality). 5. Poor-Services for-Ontario-Waterloo (Regional municipality). I. Mancini, Stephanie, 1959-, author II. Title.
HV110.K57M35 2015 362.5 80971344 C2014-908359-9 C2014-908360-2
Front-cover image by Andy Macpherson. Cover design by Sandra Friesen. Text design by Sandra Friesen.
2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Foreword , Frances Westley
Foreword , Kenneth Westhues
Acknowledgements
PART ONE: THE WORKING CENTRE TAKES ROOT
1 Introduction: Beyond Us and Them
2 Building Community: The Working Centre s Roots
3 Liberation from Overdevelopment
PART TWO: COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
4 The Virtues
5 St. John s Kitchen: Redistribution through Cooperation
6 Searching for Work at the Help Centre
7 The Nuts and Bolts of an Alternative Organization
PART THREE: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF WORK
8 Ethical Imagination: The Working Centre s Approach to Salaries
9 Community Tools
10 Small Is Beautiful: Re-embedding Reciprocal Relationships in Daily Work
11 Conclusion: Transition to Common Work
Map of The Working Centre Buildings and Projects
Map of The Working Centre Locations in Downtown Kitchener
A Thirty-Year Chronology of The Working Centre
People of The Working Centre
Notes
Selected Bibliography
FRANCES WESTLEY
Foreword
Within days of my arrival in Kitchener in 2007 to join the University of Waterloo and to establish the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, I was introduced to The Working Centre and to Joe and Stephanie Mancini. The Working Centre was synonymous with social innovation in the minds of those concerned with social justice and positive change in Kitchener/Waterloo region, and was viewed with pride as a homegrown example of successful transformation.
Over the next few months I became familiar with many of the places described in this book. I had meals and meetings in the Queen Street Commons, visited the bicycle repair shop, the Job Search Resource Centre, shopped at Worth a Second Look, and had the pleasure of many conversations with Joe and Stephanie Mancini. What I saw puzzled me: it was clear that something unusual was going on, but it was not clear how . How could these two gentle, kind, responsive, and unassuming people have produced what felt like an empire of innovation-including multiple renovated buildings and interlocking initiatives-from the restaurant to the gardens to the St. John s Kitchen, to the outreach program. How all this was resourced-how had they found the funds to do this-to build so much, to feed so many, to support even more? It felt like the biblical story of the loaves and fishes. Direct enquiries produced vague answers about this small government grant, that small donor, this initiative, but somehow these answers did not add up to an explanation, did not relieve my curiosity. I was looking for the magic formula that has allowed The Working Centre to create the transformation of downtown Kitchener, a transformation impossible to miss. Lastly, it puzzled me that, given their success, the Mancinis weren t out selling this formula. They seem to have found the secret to addressing so many of the problems facing the downtown core of small cities-and doing it while reclaiming and restoring old buildings into beautiful community spaces-all with no visible show of resources. Why weren t they trumpeting their story to the world?
Our research in social innovation indicates that those who want to change the world come in many shapes and forms, as do the movements and the projects they espouse. When we think of successful change, particularly that associated with social innovation, we often think of those changes that transform our culture or our economy at a very high level-creating a sea change, if you will, in the way we as a society think, care, and behave. We see many small and local innovations that never have a broad impact, or those that add tremendous value by providing a service or relieving the immediate difficulties of a vulnerable group, but do nothing to address the attitudes or institutions that increased the problem in the first place.
Joe and Stephanie Mancini seemed to have little preoccupation with taking on the regional or provincial governments, on challenging the private-property laws that produced homelessness as a by-product, or the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that accounted for many of the homeless people they dealt with. It wasn t the broader why that captured their interest and their energies; rather, it was the personal, specific why-the circumstances of those they encountered in their work. They remained focused on Kitchener, on this community, on making change happen here, and were resistant to efforts to suggest that they had invented or created a process that should be replicated on the one hand, or to divert their attention to broader structural change on the other.
At the time, convinced as I was that only broad institutional change could ensure the success or long-term impact of social innovation, I felt that this decision to stay focused on local efforts was a pity. Nonetheless, the radical nature of the organization and of the process by which its activities multiplied over time felt huge and far-reaching.
So it was with great eagerness that I opened this book and began to read. What this book contains cannot be described as a formula, but it does describe the alchemy that a selfless and dedicated few can ignite and therefore holds lessons worth learning for all those who are unhappy with the world as it is and who believe that change is possible. For me those insights occurred at three levels: that of the individual, that of the community relationships, and that of the broader institutions shaping our world.
The story starts at the level of the individual. Joe and Stephanie are without doubt an extraordinary couple with many gifts. But the gift with which the story begins is that of commitment. We committed to The Working Centre, they write, by declining our acceptance into teachers college. We knew this decision was not a path to riches, so we learned the skills of keeping a frugal household. Our commitment was strengthened by the relationships that were growing from the work of the centre. As a young couple the Mancinis made a choice-to live in a way that was consistent with the community and innovation they wanted to create, and to find strength through the relationships they were building. Later we see that this was translated very directly into the decision that The Working Centre would be a flat structure in which everyone would be paid approximately the same living wage. It is hard to imagine that this innovation would be successful if it had not had the full commitment of its founders, not just the commitment to build an innovative approach to work and to community but to be the change we want to see.
But equally strong as this personal commitment to a simple and dedicated life is the commitment to drawing strength from relationships. This book is full of tributes to the individuals who inspired and strengthened The Working Centre. From the local individuals who helped to shape their thinking in the early days, such as Margaret Nally, Hulene Montgomery, Ted Jackson, Ken Westhues, Theresa Houton, and others to the social