This year again, local leaders gathered their neighbours, built connections, and restored nature in projects big and small. The movement continues to expand, and we're pleased to share just some of these impacts in our 2025 Impact Report.
Ready to rally your crew and make a visible difference in your local park? This guide walks you through everything you need to host a successful community clean-up in Toronto
Creative ways to connect people to nature, community, and care for ravines in Toronto.
Parc Jarry in Montreal, Toronto’s waterfront, CRAB Park in Vancouver… People are coming together to protect the places they love.
Learn more about green social prescribing, an evolving practice that encourages individuals to reestablish connections with nature and one another to enhance their mental, physical, and social wellbeing.
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Natalie Brown
Park People
Sep 18, 2026 Canada-wide Greater Montreal
This past August, over 1000 Montrealers marched for the future of Parc Jarry, wielding signs that shouted their love for the park. They were protesting the construction of a new 15,000 seat stadium by Tennis Canada, an organization that hosts professional tennis tournaments and currently occupies about 25% of Parc Jarry’s land. If built, the new stadium would take over more green space, including a public baseball diamond.
The local neighbourhoods of Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension mobilized in full force. The park is critical to wellbeing in Parc-Extension in particular, which features high levels of income insecurity, low green space access, and vulnerability to heat waves due to an overabundance of pavement.
The Parc Jarry march came only two weeks after the federal government announced that they were not moving forward with the expansion of Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto’s waterfront. The airport expansion plan, driven by the Ontario government, had run into formidable public opposition, with the impact of the plan on the Toronto Islands and Little Norway Park a particular flashpoint. A planned protest led by NoJetsTO that weekend turned into a celebration.
“Both the island airport victory and [Biidaasige] Park represent acts of summoned collective imagination — on the one hand, the shared conviction that engaging government is still worth the effort, even in a cynical age; and on the other, that a sustained and fierce determination by ordinary residents to build a better city can yield absolutely transformative results.”
This is John Lorinc writing about Toronto, but the words apply equally well to Montreal. Le Front Commun pour la protection du Parc Jarry*, the umbrella body formed by many different advocates, is not only fighting against what they don’t want, but also dreaming big about what could be possible instead. Their demands include asking the City of Montreal to create a public council of Jarry Park users – one with real decision-making powers. If planned and implemented well, this could be an innovative governance structure that moves beyond point-in-time community engagement exercises and towards something that looks more like long-term collaborative decision-making between municipality and community.
What can we take away from the passion that Torontonians and Montrealers alike are showing for their parks this summer?
Patrick Corrigan for the Toronto Star:
It is not sufficient to say ‘trust us.’ If governments want public support for a project with major impacts on a cityscape, they need to make the case transparently. Alluding to secret feasibility studies, whether for a tennis stadium or an airport, is just not going to cut it. And the more this happens, the more we risk disillusioning people about the health of our democracy. Luckily…
There has been research showing that large-scale protest movements, like Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square movement, are not as effective at driving change as they used to be. Social media allows organizers to reach very high turnout numbers without the need to build the organizing infrastructure – of relationships, meetings, fundraisers, etc. – that used to be necessary. The ties that bind the protesters are weak as a result.
But when you are fighting for a local place, especially one you visit all the time, your activism is IRL by default. It is tied to local relationships and gathering spots. You can see it from your window. Visually compelling interventions like the Front Commun’s light projections and balcony banners take advantage of this direct connection to place, encouraging even more people to feel that they are part of a movement.
Both Parc Jarry and the Toronto waterfront are not out of the woods yet. But the tide seems to be turning on both files. Envisioning the day when advocates celebrate a battle won, what might come next?
Many park advocacy movements spark or renew community-led involvement and programming that continues for years after. Some of my favourite examples are CRAB Park in Vancouver, where a fight for public access to the water led to the creation of a unique park within the Port of Vancouver. CRAB stands for Create a Real Available Beach, and it was the rallying cry for the activists who fought for the creation of the park. Despite being named Portside Park when it was opened in 1987, by 2004 the Vancouver Park Board acknowledged that it was, now and forever, CRAB Park, and changed the name back.
A 1969 mock funeral for the Don River in Toronto is credited with sparking the citizen advocacy that led to the Task Force to Bring Back the Don and eventually to visionary re-naturalization projects like Biidaasige Park. Although many would probably still say no to a glass of Don River water, people and animals are rebuilding their connection to the water today in ways that are sparking tremendous joy across Toronto, thanks to the inventive advocacy of those original student protestors and many others.
In our work at Park People, we often witness groups experience an evolution from green space activism to stewardship. The new role is grounded in the learning and relationships from their advocacy, but also calls on them to develop new skills and ideas. Freed to move beyond a common opponent to organize around, park groups are challenged and liberated to advance a radically positive vision for the space, translating their love for it into a long-term commitment to keep it safe and to help others enjoy it.
“In short, one can understand this strange moment as an epic clash between an envisioned future and a present made real by thousands of individual acts of imagination.”
John Lorinc again. A present made real by thousands of individual acts of imagination sounds like a revitalized civic sphere, rooted in possibility instead of fear. And it all starts at the park.
This guide walks you through how to start and grow a park group in Toronto, from planning your first meeting to organizing activities, reaching new people, and navigating City permits, funding, and support.
In 2026, 34 organizations across the country are receiving the Park People Nature Connect Fund. Through nature-based activities, hands-on ecological stewardship and restoration and other forms of landcare, they will help people and nature thrive together.