Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

by Maggie Helwig

An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard

We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and prefer to keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s lifelong activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused, and it demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.

Genres: Nonfiction, Canada, Audiobook, Politics, Social Justice, Religion, Memoir

176 pages, Paperback

Published May 13, 2025

About the author

Maggie Helwig (born 1961) is a Canadian poet, novelist, social justice activist, and Anglican priest.

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk]

This has done more to heal my religious trauma than any book I’ve ever read. The author has a beautiful way of noticing things - there’s an acuteness that burrows deep while reading

[Jillian B]

As a Christian and a resident of downtown Toronto, I have avidly followed the story of the encampment at St. Stephen’s-in-the-Field church. I have long admired that church’s staff for standing up for the unhoused against the sometimes hostile bureaucratic forces of the city. But reading this firsthand account by the church’s priest made me feel a much stronger appreciation for the love and labour that goes into caring for those with nowhere else to go.

This memoir is incredibly moving, sometimes funny, and often deeply sad. Some of the stories in this book are shocking, like the woman known for “rescuing” (AKA straight-up stealing) homeless people’s beloved dogs, and the city staffer who denied working for the city when approached by a community member—while wearing an official name tag. Others are low-key funny, like the right-wing agitators who attended and recorded one of the church’s services, hoping to uncover antifa scheming, and were no doubt disappointed when the priest just talked about Jesus. This book left me feeling frustrated with our broken housing system, but hopeful knowing that there are people out there who care. If you’ve ever wondered why people “choose” to live in encampments, you will gain new understanding from this book.

This book comes from a secular publisher and it’s not “Christian content” in the sense of being assuming any faith on the reader’s part (although it does contain excerpts from the author’s sermons). However, I would particularly recommend it to a Christian audience because of the way the author embodies Christ’s gentle but powerful love. It’s a reminder of the type of people we are called to be in this world, and our duty to care for our neighbours who are facing impossible odds.

[Jocelyn H]

This is excellent, about a homeless encampment in Toronto. Beautifully written and very moving. I listened to the audiobook.

[Josh Issa]

While reading this book, I was struck by two things: (1) I cannot imagine the emotional resilience needed to be in a profession that is permanently occasioned by death & (2) the power of the Spirit to sustain Maggie in constructing a community of true openness to the vulnerable and marginalized.

We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.

[Claire Lauzon]

Mandatory reading if you live in Toronto 🫵

[Danielle]

4.75/5 - This should be mandatory reading for everyone in the the City of Toronto, or any city really. This was exceptionally written. Devastating and frustrating, but full of compassion. I would highly recommend the audiobook narrated by the author. I should have expected the religious (Anglican) lens, given that Helwig is a priest, but this took away from the book for me. I will say that the religious tone is very limited and in no way preachy. Highly recommend.

[Janelle]

A devastating but absolutely necessary read, especially for anyone who lives in Toronto. Very recent and very local, showing how people prey on unhoused people, how practically nonexistent and inaccessible services are, how residents in the encampment endlessly rallied for each other, how the media has and always will push a certain narrative about homelessness that makes people want to look away. It made me think about the ways that I have looked away, the times that I've kept my head down when walking, what Maggie Helwig calls living on the outside. I am very very glad that this book exists.

"I have talked about encampments as a solution of necessity, and they are that. But there are other things I need to explain. And the most important of these is that encampments can also be spaces of grace; that encampments, in a time of great affliction, can be home to creativity and community, healing and mutual support."

[Abby Tait]

Helwig inspires sympathy, compassion and kindness - values that feel like they’ve been lost in so many religious spaces. In Encampment, Helwig provides sharp, directed and well-researched commentary on homelessness in Toronto, but clearly grounds this entire book in so much heart and care for her community. Homelessness, mental health and addiction are difficult, heavy and challenging issues; they are nuanced and polarizing in opinions, experiences, and perceptions. Irregardless of whichever “side” of these issues people fall on, this book provides something severely needed today: a human dynamic of the housing and homelessness crisis.

These problems have become so much more visible on our streets, on our transit, and in our parks in the past 5-6 years. And yet, so much of the system continues to fail the people that need it most. I work in housing and anti-poverty advocacy and I still learned so much from this little book.

[Emmkay]

Maggie Helwig is an Anglican priest at an inner city parish in Kensington Market, the small churchyard of which has come to be filled with an assortment of individuals living in tents, who have nowhere else to go - an encampment, as such places are now known. This has been a source of ongoing struggle and strife with some neighbours and some authorities. Anyone living in Toronto, and probably in most other cities these days, can’t fail to be aware of the growing proliferation of such encampments, and the profound rupture in the social contract they seem to represent. But like a lot of people, though I see encampments around the city and gauge my comfort level at passing through or by one while walking to work, there’s a lot I can learn about the experiences of people living in tbem and those who try to help.

I found this short book invaluable, informative, and moving. What a Kafkaesque world truly needy people dealing with homelessness enter - while I’ve seen that when the city is engaged in dismantling an encampment they often refer to having ‘encouraged the residents to come indoors’ and to having offered placements, it is frustrating to read about how illusory those options can be. Helwig’s theology is humble, robust, and challenging: her moral compass has led her to give herself over to service in a way few of us can imagine. She vividly depicts the attendant disruptions, while also drawing the residents and their challenges lovingly and compassionately. It’s evident that this is work she feels called to do despite its challenges, even at a time when she’s faced her own personal heartache, as her father has passed away and her husband has been affected by dementia.

“During the spring, I had started obsessively watching livestreams from a feral cat rescue facility in British Columbia, and it wasn’t until the summer that I realized that part of my obsession was that these few feral cats were, almost alone in the country, receiving the kind of precise and personal care that should be given to all beings by virtue of their creation. ..[O]n the livestream gentle people tended to fragile creatures, feeding them and dressing their wounds, paying attention to their traumas, learning the complexities of their lives, realizing that they would make decisions even if they weren’t what the staff wanted, even if a cat with advanced kidney disease wanted to go back to the feral colony to die. If the cat rescue livestream was the only place I could find that kind of care, at least I still knew it was happening somewhere.”

[midori]

Mother Maggie embodies everything organized religion should and must stand for. This is Christianity at its best, the very soul of it. Her heart and compassion for her people are enormous.

“In every case, encampment makes visible what has been hidden, forces afflicted bodies into the public eye. For protest encampments, that making visible is the aim, the only real purpose; for survival encampments, it is a side effect. But the discomfort caused to the comfortable is not wholly different.”

“We are sent into this world to plant life in the wasteland. Tell the impossible story: That love is stronger than death, and many waters cannot quench it, and floods cannot drown it. That we are not lost among the graves. Tell it in the face of all the evidence. Tell it even if no one believes you, tell it even if you can hardly believe it yourself. Because without this story, the world is lost. Keep saying this, that our hearts and souls can rise out of the rubble, that life will rise up in the abandoned places, that another world is possible, that we can begin to build that world in the wreckage of this our garden.”

[Marianne]

Such a beautifully written book about a dire situation. Maggie Helwig took me right into this encampment and made me experience both the humanity of the residents and the infuriating, practically absurd daily injustices and horrors they deal with. The system is stacked against all of us, and the unhoused most of all.

[Amarah H-S]

read my q&a with the author here: https://broadview.org/anglican-priest...

[Liz Hein]

an essential reminder that to be called by your name is no small thing

[Amanda Lane]

What a fantastic book. Maggie Helwig is a badass. I admire her and the residents outlined in this book so much. A must read for Torontonians and all Ontarians.

Made me think so much about the loss of small community churches - the power of them as connected community spaces and sites of compassion. As someone quite uncomfortable with organized religion, I found that I was yearning for places like this to exist to catch those who need somewhere to land.


Just a wow book. MORE COMPASSION AND KINDNESS PLEASE.

[Tamara]

Important. Provides context and insight into a place that I pass by several times each week. Provides context and insight into the people that all of us pass by daily. Compassion.

[Paula Woynarowsky]

I’m not religious but I’m open to considering different perspectives. Reading this book was a practice in empathy and left me feeling more connected to humanity.

[Sarah]

On any given night, in Kelowna, there are a few hundred unhoused people sleeping outdoors, in tents, in shelters. Earlier this year, City officials threatened a local church with $500/day fines for allowing people to camp in their churchyard.

Maggie Helwig writes of her similar experiences as the priest of a Toronto church, fighting City Hall while serving food and kindness to people in need. She lays out how the system is built to justify its existence, not to actually help its clients. Helwig doesn't have the answer to this multi pronged, complex societal issue, but shows that seeing people, listening and compassion is a good start.

Winner of the 2025 Toronto Book Award.

“ I have talked about encampments as a solution of necessity, and they are that. But there are other things I need to explain. And the most important of these is that encampments can also be spaces of grace; that encampments, in a time of great affliction, can be home to creativity and community, healing and mutual support.” P56

“ All the dysfunction most of us enact behind closed doors takes place in public view; and, similarly, none of us would fair very well if we were permanently in public view, if every time we shouted or cried, we had the whole street as an audience.” P87

[Julia Rap]

So so special. Mother Maggie clearly explains the bureaucratic systems that disenfranchise us and demonstrates what the love of god truly means and requires of us. Faith, which is the hardest and best work of our lives, is a commitment to the dignity and preciousness of all other beings.

[Rachel Ashera Rosen]

So far this is the best thing I've read this year and I doubt anything will usurp its place. It's truly stunning. Maggie does the thing that all kind of people—especially leaders of faith communities—could do, but mostly don't, which is opening up the courtyard to her church to a tent encampment. The City of Toronto, itself struggling with a lack of funding from the provincial government, spends the next few years trying to destroy it. In that interstitial period, Maggie tries to keep her little community intact and alive, ministers to them, saves them from overdoses, and is at their bedsides when they die (if they are lucky enough to die in bed, which most aren't).

It is harrowing and heartbreaking and if I were in charge, I would make every politician and every NIMBY in my neighbourhood Facebook group read it. It's too easy to say that this is a story that answers WWJD because Maggie doesn't ask us to believe in God so much as she asks us to believe in the humanity of every single person, no matter how damaged or difficult.

Read it, then go do something. If every single one of us did a tiny fraction of what Maggie's done, the world might be okay.

[Olivia]

Devastating in many ways but also very beautiful. At its core, this book is about compassion and community. I enjoyed the relationship between Maggie’s Anglican faith and her activism/work in the community.

[Bree C.]

3.5. As a front line worker for many years, there was nothing in this book that was new or surprising to me. Of course, it was still as disappointing and bleak as it is in my corner of the woods. I am grateful to Maggie and all of the folks that work alongside her to support our vulnerable community members. I found the writing itself to be chaotic but a friend and former co-worker pointed out that perhaps it was an intended effect and I agree, indented or otherwise, it does truly reflect the work. Despite this, it is an important book that I hope finds its way into the hands of many.

[Danielle Fitzgerald]

Audiobook: great insight into the St. Stephen’s survival encampment and homelessness in Toronto. The author is the priest at the church beside the encampment - their dedication is incredible and they are able to share personal stories of their continued struggles with law enforcement and encampment residents. Devastating stories of survival within a short lived community. Religious aspects of the book were minimal

[Steph]

“It was at Black Lives Matter protests that I learned the chant 'The system isn't broken, it was built this way. It applies here, as it applies so many other places - the system was built to ensure that people without the ability to pay also don't have the ability to heal, indeed have a very limited ability even to go on living. And if we as a society are not willing to pay for treatment for people who want it, but decide that we are willing to pay for their long-term detention, then we are making it very clear that the only thing we really want to do is to punish the vulnerable for being vulnerable.”

[Niamh McKenna]

mandatory reading for those in toronto/gta 🫵🏼 devastating, hopeful, shocking, infuriating etc etc

[Sahar]

"Nothing stable is going to last; and the only way we, the small and the ordinary, might survive in any decent way is if we learn to take care of each other, to do it deeply and consistently and in ways that will change how we think and how we live."

i think anyone who lives in a big city or toronto specifically should read this. there's so much we can learn from maggie helwig.

[Margi]

This is an extraordinary book, telling an extraordinary story. As well as being a talented writer, Maggie Helwig is a fearless advocate for the unhoused and vulnerable. I admire her tremendously.

[Amanda]

an important read written by a compassionate champion of the marginalized. Helwig is a tireless advocate of Toronto's unhoused community and shares their struggle, introducing readers to some of the regular residents of the encampment at her church, St Stephens in the Fields in Kensington Market. Helwig is the minister there. She also shares a few of her homilies. One in particular about love really affected me. This book is a realistic not sentimental portrait of unhoused people trying to get by in a time where capitalism and bureaucracy dominate, and those, such as Helwig, who do what they can in what feels like a hopeless situation because of those who continue to enforce these harsh and ridiculous systems to keep the middle class comfortable at the expense of the less fortunate. it's a book I wish my own city counsellors would read before they raize encampments.

[Kevin]

A gorgeous book, will be recommending over and again

[Carolyn Whitzman]

An excellent book about the dystopian reality we are living in. Maggie Helwig gives a clear and sometimes dryly funny account of the residents of the encampment outside her church, the bureaucrats who try to destroy people’s homes, and the circus of bylaws and legal procedures that substitute for compassion and solutions. Not for the faint of heart.

[Naomi Reed]

Maggie Helwig is a living angel and her work in Toronto shows how vital community and collective care are.