St John’s Helps FaithWorks Tackle Food Insecurity & Homelessness

This year’s FaithWorks campaign began in January with your envelope donations to FaithWorks. By now you have seen the posters and received the promotional envelopes for FaithWorks, featuring Cliff and Amber and the theme, “When I was hungry (thirsty and a stranger), you gave to me….”.

You may not know that Cliff and Amber live in Peterborough and work with, as well as receive from, One Roof/City Peterborough. They represent this year’s Faces of Faithworks. For the last three years, in the first quarter of the year, we have supported people in need of shelter through our donations to One Roof/One City Peterborough and A Place Called Home, Lindsay especially with additional percentages of our regular enveloped donations as well as our designated ones.

At the end of 2023, One Roof Peterborough closed its doors at the Anglican Centre on Brock Street and the next day reopened them at the Trinity Community Centre. Here, because of no commercial kitchen, the meal program had to be reduced to reheated food. One Roof Peterborough has now become One Roof Community Centre and now has an overnight shelter component within its walls. This program is run cooperatively by One City Peterborough and funded by the City of Peterborough. Both One Roof Peterborough and One Roof Community Centre, Peterborough are funded separately via donations to FaithWorks. One City Peterborough strives to create permanent solutions to shelter, while One Roof operates as a day time drop-in with some food and an overnight emergency shelter.

In the second quarter of 2024 (April-June), we will concentrate our outreach on those who are immigrants, refugees and those who face discrimination. Our designated givings will help support Anglican United Refugee Alliance (AURA), the Durham Region Migrant Workers Ministry and Flemingdon Park Ministry’s Drop-In Centre in the multicultural Flemingdon area.

Food Insecurity will be the focus for the third quarter of 2024. Dedicated donations will be solicited from July through September for Flemingdon Park Ministry’s The Common Table Farm program, which distributes free, healthy, organic produce to neighbourhood families and seniors; One Roof Community Centre, Peterborough’s Commercial Kitchen and the Toronto Urban Native Ministry, which provides meals and cultural programs to its clientele.

The Faces of FaithWorks Campaign for the fall – October through December will focus on the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) and the many partners under their umbrella, including the Canadian Foodgrains Bank which supplies wheat, rice, and other grains to countries overseas where there is a food crisis (as in Gaza or the Sudan) or as part of their implementation of sustainable agricultural education programs with seed and tool resources.

This is a summary of this year’s FaithWorks’ hopes for the St. John’s community. Given time I hope to come up with a special event to enlarge our donations. This could be a dinner, a concert, a games night, an art night, card tournament or whatever we wish to do to raise additional funds for FaithWorks. Please let me know if you have ideas, or wish to volunteer or organize such an event.

Thank you for the past year’s support as well as this year’s contributions toward helping our neighbours in need. Through FaithWorks you are not just donating money to be given to people, you are working with local projects and with people of lived experience who are helping themselves to change their lives.