What Guides Our Work in 2026

We’re here with you at the start of 2026, when the days are slowly getting longer and the new year invites reflection. Not in the glossy “resolution” sense, but in the quieter work of asking what we’re really committing to, and how we want to move through what’s ahead. 

As we step into this next year in Nogojiwanong / Peterborough, we wanted to share some of the intentions guiding our work. 

Keeping housing at the centre

Housing continues to feel like the clearest, most meaningful response we can offer in the midst of a deepening housing crisis. Every time we’re able to purchase a home, create a new unit, move someone in, or partner with other nonprofits to provide ongoing support, it shifts what’s possible, one household at a time. 

What’s coming up: Two additional rental units (a basement apartment and a tiny house) are well underway, with completion looking like March 2026.

Keep working on emergency shelter

Like many of you, we wish emergency shelter wasn’t needed. But here in Peterborough, we’re not there yet. Until we are, we remain committed to offering immediate support through programs like Trinity, and to improving those programs as we go. 

With renewed funding, we’ll be making some practical changes like increasing staff presence and improving outdoor spaces to better support the people who rely on this site every day. 

What’s coming up: Temporary fencing will be installed while the ground is frozen, with more intensive property improvements planned for the spring. 

Holding the tension between urgency and permanence

Emergency programming takes an enormous amount of capacity, time, and resources. It’s essential for helping people survive right now, but it cannot be the end point. Our work has to keep pointing toward permanent housing, even while we respond to the immediate need. 

Lately, our emergency services team has been connecting with shelter and drop-in providers across Ontario, learning what’s working elsewhere. One agency shared a guiding principle that we’re still sitting with: they aim to always have more housing spaces than shelter spaces, to keep long-term solutions at the centre. We’re learning, listening, and considering what that could mean for us. 

Being honest about capacity

The need in our community far exceeds what any single organization can provide. Our shelter is full every night. Hundreds of people pass through our doors each day. Our outreach team regularly connects with around 100 people sleeping outside. 

For a long time, we believed that if we just stretched a bit more… fundraised harder, ran one more program, we could meet the need we see. That belief no longer holds. This crisis isn’t unique to Peterborough; it’s provincial and federal in scale. 

Over the past year, we’ve been grappling with what it means to be a capacity-informed organization, influenced in part by Shira Hassan’s essay Politicized Social Service. If we want to do this work well, and do it for the long haul, we have to be clear about what we can sustain. As this year unfolds, you’ll hear us talking more openly about scope: what we can do well, where our impact is strongest, and how our programs align with our values and long-term sustainability. 

Resisting the pleasures of doom

There’s a poster on the wall at our office; a quote by writer and journalist Sarah Jaffe: resist the pleasures of doom. It’s a reminder we return to often. Hopelessness is easy. Choosing hope takes work. 

We see that work happening all around us. Over the holidays alone, community members dropped off homemade cookies, warm socks, and new pillows. People volunteered their time, wrote notes of encouragement to staff, shared gifts with one another, made art, and showed up. Local businesses offered support. People took care of each other. That’s the part of the story that doesn’t always make headlines, but it’s real, and it sustains us. 

When we need a reminder of what we’re working toward, these are some of the things that help us stay grounded:

• Manifesto: the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front by Wendell Berry (poem)

• Olly Costello’s art (visuals)

• The song Cicadas, by the local band Fittonia

• Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (book)

• “At the Risk of Listening”: Ziysah von Bieberstein, Ptbo Poet Laureate (spoken word)

Thank you for walking alongside us as we enter this next year. Clear-eyed about the challenges, honest about our limits, and still deeply committed to building a more caring, more just community together. 

With care,

Tammy, Auden, and Michael

Leadership team at One City