At the May 5^th 2008 City of Kitchener Council meeting, a social justice issue was raised before council members for their consideration and direction. What made this interesting was the tendency for an elected council to avoid discussing a highly sensitive matter such as poverty and homelessness in the public forum in the hopes that it would just “go way”. Yet Kitchener’s council and its senior management encouraged a public dialogue between a social awareness organization and the concerned citizens of the community as way to address the specific conflict, while furthering the public’s awareness of the issues of poverty and the changing face of Kitchener’s downtown core.

Using this example, the role of social justice will be reviewed and how was it used to  inspire members of the community-at-large to get involved on both sides of the issue? Why did the council take the action they did, given the current state of mind of many of the businesses, which would have preferred to have the poverty issue disappear from the front pages of the newspapers? How did the organization, Food Not Bombs, use this opportunity to raise awareness about poverty and hunger in the general population? And further why did the parties eventually reach a compromise solution that attempted to seek a balance between the economic needs and the social justice needs?