Transformational Change
Stephanie and Joe Mancini have served the Waterloo Region for more than four decades, and we’re proud to partner with their charitable organization, The Working Centre, on initiatives both large and small.
Our partnership is about more than just doing good work, or about admiring how The Working Centre gives people access to the tools they need to create their own work and better their lives. We feel kinship not only with the organization’s commitment to strengthening the community, but also with its team’s entrepreneurial spirit. They find problems, then devise new and effective ways to solve them. Then they take the lessons learned from that process and find partners to help them scale their success.
One of The Working Centre’s biggest successes is St. John’s Kitchen, a gathering place in downtown Kitchener for people in need, many of whom are street-involved or experiencing homelessness. It’s a site where people can come together, have conversation, prepare a daily meal and share it, and access a variety of supports and resources—all in a spirit of respect and mutual support. We partnered with The Working Centre on its most ambitious project to date: dramatically expanding the 97 Victoria Street site it has called home since 2006.
By kickstarting the private fundraising effort with a $1.0 million dollar commitment and investing hundreds of hours of pro-bono development management expertise, we are helping build a new St. John’s Kitchen facility and forty-four units of supportive housing. Just as importantly, by leading the part of the project that aligns with our expertise, we let The Working Centre team keep focusing on what it does best: providing support to people who need it.
As Joe Mancini puts it, “The main thing 97 Victoria tries to build is a community of people.” That takes time, and our commitment to The Working Centre is ongoing. We’ll continue doing smaller but no less important things like donating survival packs in winter and water bottles in the summer. As CEO Craig Beattie put it in summer 2022,“If you take pride in the community that you live in, there should be a component of being good stewards. As folks who live here, it’s important: we’ve got a role and a responsibility to look at the community as a whole.”
