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This case study is part of the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing Inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.
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As encampments grow across the country, parks departments face a unique challenge: parks have become a highly visible site of the housing crisis, but permanent housing solutions lie outside the scope of what parks can offer.
However, as convenors, land stewards, and providers of public amenities, parks departments can lean into their strengths to play a positive role in addressing houselessness—from adopting a human rights approach to service provision, to deepening relationships with encampment residents.
“Since the start of Covid-19, encampments have proliferated and increased in size,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor who has studied cities’ responses to encampments during the pandemic. “It’s put more pressure on Canadian cities to have to engage with encampments.”
In our survey of municipalities, 90% said houselessness is a challenge—one unlikely to end anytime soon.
Experts including frontline workers, people with lived experience of houselessness, and public health professionals all emphasize the urgency of planning for these realities.
“Hopefully it’ll be an ending problem, but for the foreseeable future I can still see there being people sleeping in parks. And it’s sad, but it’s a reality we have to face,” said Matthew Huxley, an advocate with lived experience.
Diana Chan McNally of Toronto Drop-In Network agreed, noting “Even when the intentions are good, there’s always the push to move unhoused people out of parks. You have to abandon that altogether. You just do, because I think the reality is that… there’s absolutely nowhere else for people to go.”
Public health experts echo this advice. Experts urge cities to plan for encampments to enhance the resiliency of parks systems, as unsheltered houselessness is projected to grow in light of climate change, including more people turning to green spaces for relief during heatwaves.
As we wrote about in the 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, displacement-oriented approaches—ranging from defensive design to encampment evictions—cause harm in a number of ways. Pushing unhoused people out of parks can force them to seek shelter in more isolated spaces where they are subject to increased safety risks, and make it more difficult for outreach workers to stay connected with people they’re supporting.
Further, in a context where Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity—representing 28-34% of the unhoused population despite accounting for just over 4% of the Canadian population—displacing people from parks represents ongoing colonial violence and land dispossession, undermining reconciliation efforts.
While there is a widespread perception that encampments prevent others from enjoying parks, our survey of over 3,000 Canadian city residents suggest this is not the case for most.
62% of respondents who noticed encampments in local parks said they had not negatively impacted their park use, pointing to an openness among park goers to share space with unhoused neighbours.
Encampments are often managed through an operational lens, with a focus on park upkeep. While this work is important, it is insufficient to address the complex needs of people sheltering in parks.
Vancouver is deepening their approach through the creation of a new position within the Park Board called the Director of Urban Relationships. A first-of-its-kind role in Canada, the position will focus on building relationships with encampment residents and community partners.
Donnie Rosa, General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, said that the new position sends a clear message that “this is a line of business that we have” as city park professionals. Having this dedicated staff with appropriate expertise will alleviate pressures on the parks operations team, who often are tasked with responding to houselessness issues.
The new position comes after the Park Board led a process in partnership with the City of Vancouver and BC Housing to move residents of a large encampment at Strathcona Park to indoor accommodations in spring of 2021. However, new encampments that have arisen since then highlight the ongoing need for this work.
In engaging with the Strathcona Park encampment, the Park Board’s approach was guided by four key values: harm reduction, trauma-informed response, reconciliation, and collaboration. In practice, these values looked like relying on social workers rather than police officers, having Park Board staff participate in a ceremonial fire protocol led by Indigenous Elders when entering the encampment, and being mindful of language—for instance, recognizing objects in the park as people’s belongings rather than garbage.
Staying true to these values was not easy within colonial systems, Rosa acknowledged. Meetings with encampment residents could run for several hours on some days, as people had important stories to share with parks staff.
“That’s not how we work. We go from meeting to meeting to meeting,” Rosa said, but these moments were critically important for them and their team.
“As colonizers, but also as the institutions we represented, and we needed to hear it, we needed to spend that time.”
Rosa emphasized that in order to do this work thoughtfully, it’s necessary to be flexible with structure and timelines. “We need to support each other in saying, it’s okay to take this approach, it’s okay to put somebody’s wellness ahead of a deadline.”
Many cities are beginning to adopt a human rights-based approach to houselessness, which focuses on ensuring unhoused people have access to essential amenities and services in parks. For example:
Parks staff, who are often trained in areas like recreation, natural resource management, or landscape architecture rather than social work or community development, may feel ill-equipped to respond to houselessness, Rosa noted.
Indeed, through our survey of 30 municipalities, 56% identified a lack of knowledge or training about houselessness among parks staff as a barrier. Some cities, like Gatineau and Toronto, mentioned recent initiatives to train parks staff in understanding houselessness.
However, Rosa encourages parks staff to recognize the strengths that they do bring: “we’re community developers, we’re community connectors, and we need to use that in this setting to bring people together, create space for that dialogue.”
Fostering a culture of humility, dialogue, and collective learning has been crucial for the Vancouver Park Board in upholding these guiding values. “I learned more … through this process than I could ever have learned going to any sort of course or training,” Rosa said. “Just living those values and making mistakes. And then holding those mistakes up and saying, how can we be better?”
One of the Park Board’s missteps, Rosa noted, is that after campers moved out of Strathcona Park, staff cleared the remaining tents and belongings, thinking they were abandoned. In retrospect, Rosa wishes they had allowed more time for the process to consult with campers and ensure they were only removing items campers were ready to part with.
Taking the opportunity to involve campers in the park remediation process through a peer employment model was another learning for next time. Former encampment residents wanted to be a part of healing the park after their departure, Rosa noted.
A recent York University report highlights that cities have two sets of powers to address encampments: formal legal powers, like bylaws, and soft powers, like city messaging that shapes how the public thinks about encampments.
Parks departments are well positioned to leverage these soft powers to reframe the narrative on encampments. This work is especially important given that 70% of cities reported managing public complaints as a challenge they encounter in responding to houselessness. By cultivating parks as places of public education, cities can not only increase awareness and comfort around sharing space, but also help curb public complaints and alleviate the burden they place on parks staff.
In Gatineau, for example, the city’s recent houselessness action plan identifies “Improving the way we share space and facilitating cohabitation in public space” as a key area of focus. Their efforts so far have included forming neighbourhood-based ‘cohabitation committees’ that work with local stakeholders including social service organizations, residents, and businesses to promote public education on issues related to houselessness.
“What we do on the cohabitation committee is destigmatization,” said Julie Sénéchal, Community Development Coordinator in the Recreation, Sports and Community Development Department at the City of Gatineau. This focus came from unhoused people who participate in the committee, who identified “the issue of prejudice and how they experience it” as an important priority, Sénéchal said.
The first committee was formed in the Île de Hull neighbourhood where a green space co-managed by the National Capital Commission, ministère des Transports du Québec, and City of Gatineau is used as a campsite for unhoused residents. A high school adjacent to the green space was one of the key partners on the committee. The students surveyed their peers to understand their questions and concerns about houselessness. Based on the students’ input, the cohabitation committee is creating informative video clips to educate neighbours to increase their comfort in sharing space.
Public space programs are also helping to support inclusion. The city hosts clean-up activities in partnership with community organizations and residents of the campsite. They are also planning an urban agriculture work program that would hire unhoused people as gardeners in partnership with a local service organization.
The plan is still in its early stages of implementation, and Sénéchal noted that meaningful, ongoing engagement with unhoused communities will be crucial to its success.
“You have to meet people where they are, that’s my working method,” Sénéchal said. She is optimistic that the plan will help to lay the groundwork for stronger collaboration with unhoused communities, noting that it “allows [the city] to put in place tools that will promote real participation and to include people experiencing houselessness in the planning process.”
“[Unhoused people] know the city from a different perspective than us,” Sénéchal said. “[They] have things to say and we want to be sure to hear them.”
In Montreal, the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough is moving in a similar direction with its new plan for social cohabitation and sharing of public space*. The plan includes an accompanying information tool that outlines realities of houselessness and encourages residents to form friendly relationships with their unhoused neighbours by saying hello or sharing a coffee.
Community-led programs can also help reshape public perspective. In Montreal’s Martin-Luther-King Park, community organization Exeko hosted a photo expo* featuring portraits of unhoused residents to help spark conversation among park goers.
Park programs can be especially helpful in addressing controversial issues related to encampments. Initiatives like a stigma reduction event hosted in honour of International Overdose Awareness Day in Thunder Bay’s Kaministiquia River Heritage Park can help community members develop a more compassionate outlook on the issue of discarded needles in parks, for example.
Programs like these offer inspiration in moving toward a future where parks, and parks departments, are seen as part of the solution to houselessness. For Donnie Rosa, the challenge moving forward is to think about “How do we make this [park] something that is enjoyable and not just a respite? How can we make your stay, your time, your life here one that works for you the best way possible?” of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
Key points:
As we wrote about in the 2021 Canadian City Parks Report, Covid-related closures of indoor spaces like restaurants, libraries, and gyms, pushed people to take their usual “indoor” activities outdoors to the park. Eating, using the washroom, and socializing with friends are just a few examples of basic everyday needs that people have increasingly looked to parks to fill throughout the pandemic.
With these changing uses has come a culture shift in how people view the purpose of parks. As Sara Udow, Co-Founder and Principal at engagement firm PROCESS put it, “Parks are used for basic human needs, not just recreation.” In our survey of over 3,000 residents of Canadian cities, 93% agreed that allowing people to meet basic needs is an important benefit parks provide.
Yet narrowly defined ideas of “acceptable uses” of parks, rooted in stigma and inequities along the lines of race, class, ability, and more, mean that not everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of parks in supporting everyday needs. Often those who rely on parks most—such as those experiencing housing precarity and other forms of marginalization—are those whose needs are overlooked or actively denied.
For example, while parks are used by many as a place for rest and relaxation, unhoused residents are often met with enforcement and displacement when this rest extends overnight. And despite growing interest in planning parks with a public health lens, people who use substances are often excluded through hostile design features, like blue lighting in washrooms, that go against public health guidance.
However, cities and communities are beginning to recognize and address these inequities through programs that centre the well-being of those most often excluded. By challenging orthodoxies around service provision, enforcement, and environmental design, these initiatives point a way forward in creating parks that better care for all.
While addressing basic needs through features like washrooms is necessary, a focus on “meeting needs” can sometimes obscure what people experiencing marginalization have to offer to the community, said Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton.
“There’s huge deficit thinking and [a focus on] managing needs rather than seeing the gifts, assets, resources and strengths that people have to give, share and exchange.”
Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton
Rahman works with RECOVER Urban Wellbeing, a city-led initiative that aims to create the conditions for well-being for all people, especially people experiencing houselessness or marginalization in Edmonton. The framework that underpins RECOVER’s work is rooted in social ethnographic research with 59 street-involved Edmontonians that uncovered the elements that they consider most important to their sense of wellness.
Their research found that social and psychological needs—respect, family and connection, and purpose—were more important to participants’ idea of wellness than material needs. As a result, the well-being framework centres relationships: nurturing healthy connections to people, land, self, culture, the human project, and the sacred.
Each year, RECOVER launches and evaluates a series of ‘social prototypes’ to test different approaches to enhancing well-being, many of which take place in parks and outdoor spaces.
The 2021 projects include The Gallery, a public art project spotlighting the work of Indigenous artists with lived experience of houselessness with an explicit goal of building relationships between business owners and street-involved Edmontonians. Another example is Soloss, a prototype which hired and trained community members as ‘Losstenders’ to help peers work through grief. In developing the idea for the Losstender role, the project team hosted pop-up events in Churchill Square and Camp Pekiwewin, an Indigenous-led encampment, to seek community members’ input. Through the resulting program, Losstenders guide peers through healing using art, music, breathwork, dance or storytelling, addressing a gap as “professional services cannot replace the value of community care and support.”
Across Canada, 48% of cities said they had initiated at least one program to provide social services in parks. New park programs have popped up to meet basic needs such as food security, healthcare, and survival gear, while bringing a community focus:
Amid growing concerns around the role of police and enforcement in parks, care-centred models can provide an alternative form of community safety.
Vancouver’s Sweetgrass Clan runs a grassroots, Indigenous-led community safety patrol in the city’s Downtown Eastside. Modelled after Winnipeg’s Bear Clan Patrol, the group aims to provide a positive presence in the neighbourhood’s public spaces, offering de-escalation and conflict resolution rooted in traditional teachings.
Robbie Epp, the group’s Founder, sees this model as an alternative to policing that will “take the violence out of our situation, and de-stress a lot of people on the streets.”
“A big thing in our teachings is … that the best way for us to take care of our children is to have patience and respect, to try to teach them by talking to them and being examples,” Epp said, “so I knew there was another approach.”
In addition to crisis intervention, Sweetgrass Clan hosts events that help bring the community together, like a BBQ in Strathcona Park hosted in partnership with the East Van Skate Crows. Epp said that these types of events can be important in helping to foster awareness and understanding among neighbours, noting that “the toughest [part of his work] is actually communicating with residents” to help them understand the realities of Indigenous people who are street involved.
At the same time, green spaces can be healing for vulnerable people, Epp said. “Where people feel safest is when we come together in a park,” he said, “you can see people are just sitting on grass and they’re relaxed, wiggling their feet and toes around … and that’s what we need.”
Other cities are also beginning to experiment with non-police public space patrols. In Montreal, a pilot project in the Ville-Marie borough has seen a mobile team of eight psychosocial responders created to support mediation, de-escalation, and conflict resolution in public spaces.
In implementing these types of programs, it’s important to make sure that the precise duties of these staff are made clear to the public, including encampment residents, said UBC Professor Dr. Alexandra Flynn. A recent report Dr. Flynn co-authored on encampments in Toronto found that the city’s parks ambassadors are described on the city’s website as “an authorized messenger or representative… of goodwill,” when in fact, they are trained to work closely with enforcement officials to monitor and report encampment-related issues. “If that is the purpose of these positions,” Dr. Flynn said, “then that needs to be more clearly stated as the goal by municipalities.”
In a recent research project Park People undertook in partnership with students at University of Toronto’s School of Cities, we found that designing parks that support the well-being and inclusion of unhoused communities requires ‘unlearning’ common design approaches.
For example, we heard from people with lived experience of houselessness that the idea of ‘eyes on the street’ popularized by urbanist Jane Jacobs is problematic for people who live out their private lives in parks. Also known as ‘natural surveillance’, creating clear sightlines to minimize privacy in parks is often thought of as a ‘best practice’ from the perspective of design philosophies like crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)—a strategy which 76% of cities we surveyed said they use.
But for people who are denied access to private spaces like homes, having visual protection, like bushes or shrubs, is necessary. “To be constantly in the public eye … is so humiliating—to be constantly ignored, but also constantly surveilled,” said Diana Chan McNally, Training and Engagement Coordinator at Toronto Drop-In Network.
Daniela Mergarten, an advocate with lived experience, agreed that people need privacy in order to have “some autonomy” as well. Racial justice experts have similarly challenged the use of surveillance-based design strategies. As Amina Yasin wrote, CPTED has “historically criminalized Black, Indigenous, and poor people in public space.”
Instead of inherently untrusting approaches to design that promote surveillance between neighbours or attempt to control behaviours, we heard that park design should centre trust, care, and dignity.
This includes taking a harm reduction approach to supporting the well-being of people who use substances. Hannah Leyland, an Intern Architect in Vancouver with expertise in the design of drug consumption spaces, said that purpose-built amenities like sharps containers and safer public washrooms can not only save lives but also help to destigmatize addiction. Having these features in parks “sends a message to the neighbours that [people who use substances] are valued within our community,” Leyland said.
It also includes allowing people to hang out in parks—both alone and together. We heard from unhoused people that the absence of amenities like comfortable benches, covered gazebos, and picnic areas makes it difficult for people to meet basic needs like resting and socializing in a dignified way. Public space researcher Cara Chellew calls this absence “ghost amenities,” noting that these features are intentionally left out in park design as they’re thought to attract “undesirable behaviour” like “loitering.”As the authors of Care and the City write, “Deeply caring about others … [is] an exercise which can be best trained in open and accessible spaces that provide room for caring with, caring for, and caring about one another.” Through taking an intentional approach to park programming and design, we can realize the potential of parks as places that care for all.mmit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
They say all good things must come to an end. But sometimes, if we are lucky, endings can be the start of something even more beautiful. That is exactly what happened at Parc Jarry in the Villeray-St-Michel-Parc-Extension borough of Montreal, where the community park group Coalition des amis du Parc Jarry (CAP Jarry)*, recipients of a TD Park People Grant, turned the cast-offs of the Christmas season into a beautiful Ephemeral Forest of recycled trees that reflected community members’ hope and dreams.
Every January, once the holidays come to an end, bare Christmas trees are tossed to the curb. In fact, there are approximately 6 million trees in Canada that await the landfill every year. If not recycled properly and simply thrown out, every tree can create approximately 16kg of carbon dioxide. Not only does this have a significant impact on the environment, but it also misses a great opportunity to give the trees a more impactful second life.
CAP Jarry, led by Michel Lafleur, set out to tackle this challenge. Instead of the landfill, they invited all Montreal residents to bring their old Christmas trees to Parc Jarry, plant them in pre-made wooden stands, and create a magical Ephemeral Forest where park-goers could wander in a safe and socially-distanced manner. After a two-weeks on display in the park, a company specializing in repurposing wood removed the trees and gave them a new life.
To make the trees even more magical, community members were invited to write their wishes and hopes for the new year on little pieces of paper tied to their tree. This gave every tree a personal touch and it gave people a chance to express their vision for the future. At a time when social interactions are rare and we long to interact with others, reading the personal wishes on every tree felt like an intimate exchange with the Christmas tree’s new owner – their ideas, their hopes, and dreams for the future.
The forest created a sense of human connection at a time when people need it most. Walking through the hundreds of trees in the middle of the vast Parc Jarry created an inspiring, joyful and frankly magical experience.
“Everyone was smiling”, remembers Villeray’s mayor Mme. Fumagalli, who helped facilitate the project from a political and administrative point of view.
“There was a lot of curiosity, a kind of mutual help, above all, such synergy… The project had an enormous positive impact”.
Mme. Fumagalli found it especially extraordinary how citizens got involved and took ownership of their parks this winter. From the Ephemeral Forest to the hordes of Montrealers who built snowmen across city parks after a snowstorm, she says we clearly see “the necessity during winter to have some kind of animation, especially with the current COVID context”.
Another key to this event’s success was in its simplicity: the idea is easily transferable to other parks, boroughs and cities to create their own magical Ephemeral Forest. “I am certain that it is an idea that will have a snowball effect”, assures Mme. Fumagalli. “There is so much potential, from vacant lots to small parks, the reproducible aspect on a small scale, and the fact that it requires few resources”.
Nothing is more rewarding than planting food and watching it grow from seed to harvest. That’s why thousands of people get their hands dirty in community gardens across the country. First and foremost, growing fruits and vegetables provides people with access to fresh food. But community gardens also play a vital role in connecting people to nature and each other, enhancing community resilience and well-being.
“The power of food, placemaking and public spaces is far-reaching and intersects greatly with the issues we are facing today.”
DeeDee, Marpole Temporary Community Garden
Among the 72 outstanding community park groups awarded TD Park People Grants this year are several that demonstrate how growing and harvesting food is a powerful pathway to cultivating community and ecological resilience.
Since 2016, TD Park People Grants have helped 365 grassroots community groups and community-based non-profits build vital connections between people and parks. Two of the community gardening groups supported through a TD Park People Grant this year are Marpole Temporary Community Garden in Vancouver and the Congolese Women’s Group in Ottawa.
Both groups demonstrate how environmental education, sustainability, and stewardship come together, both joyfully and fruitfully, in gardens that are programmed and animated by communities.
Marpole Temporary Community Garden was initiated by DeeDee Nelson who took it upon herself to investigate a “locked up and neglected” plot of land during the pandemic. As DeeDee initiated efforts to clean the space, she tells us, “people just started poking their heads in and asking about joining in.”The temporary garden is in Marpole, one of the geographic areas identified by the Vancouver Park Board as an Equity Initiative Zone. A developer provided the space to the community temporarily, just until construction begins. Located on a busy road, with, what Dee Dee describes as “cars whizzing by on Granville Street,” the garden is a green oasis that transports participants from the congestion and busyness of traffic into a lush space that nourishes the community.
The Congolese Women’s Group is made up of 21 new immigrant women living in the neighbourhoods served by the South-East Ottawa Community Health Centre (SEOCHC). The group was formed in 2019 after a picnic in the park inspired the group to make better use of outdoor spaces. Euphrasie, who works at the SEOCHC as a Community Developer, noticed that the women were both eager to find affordable sources of fresh food and keen to learn about plants. She humbly proposed a community gardening program, asking participants: “What do you think about starting a community garden? Even if it’s a small one, you can start there.” And with that, the women began growing food.
Also located in an equity-deserving neighbourhood, The Congolese Women’s Group sees the community garden sessions as an avenue to address issues like isolation, safety, and mental well-being in the community. In addition to gardening workshops, a Harvest Celebration will joyfully close off the season.
Access to quality, nutritious fruits and vegetables is a systemic challenge in equity-deserving communities. Food insecurity has become an even bigger challenge for low-income families as food costs continue to rise. As DeeDee shares:
“There are so many seniors on a fixed limited budget, and they have told me specifically that they’re growing their own food because it’s too expensive in the store.”
While both groups recognize the community gardens’ role in addressing food insecurity, they also prioritize sharing the harvests’ surplus with others. At Marpole Temporary Community Garden, participants frequently hand out fresh vegetables to passers-by. In fact, they’ve set up what they call a “Veggie Table” to formalize the generous gesture. When people ask “how much does it cost?” DeeDee gleefully responds,
“It’s free. It’s totally free.”
The Congolese Women’s Group also shares this spirit of solidarity. The food collected during the workshops will be distributed to the community during an end-of-season Harvest Celebration which Euphrase shares, will be a “great, great event.” The food from the harvest will be shared with the entire community as a gesture that Eurphase says symbolizes that “yes, there’s something we can do together that can be beneficial, not only to us who are working there but also to everyone in the community.”
The community gardens play an important role in connecting participants to one other and to the broader community. At Marpole Temporary Community Garden, DeeDee has witnessed how engagement in the community garden leads to greater civic engagement overall. She shares:
“All of a sudden people learn they have a voice. They start to realize that the municipal government is made up of real people that can help make things happen. Every citizen can think about what they would like in their community and then ask for it, and that goes not only for public spaces but for land use, active transportation options and virtually anything else that goes on in a community. We have a say in our cities and the more we realize this, the more empowered we are to speak up.”
DeeDee surmises that seniors have been particularly attracted to the garden because many live alone. Particularly during COVID when seniors needed to avoid indoor spaces to protect their health, the community garden gave them a unique opportunity to socialize in the outdoors. She adds: “We are in dire need of outside space for the community. For people to come and spend time in nature and have a community space to gather.”
In our interview, Euphrasie from the Congolese Women’s Group shares how the community garden is a vital source of joyful community connection:
“I saw children coming and wandering in the community garden to look at the plants. They started asking: ‘Oh, what’s this? Oh, what’s that?’ It’s a very nice place to be because participants engage with people of all ages. They meet their seniors, they meet their kids, they meet with their parents. And wow, it’s such a place a way to bring people together to break that isolation, to just help people to go beyond what is going on in their life. You know, and when they meet, it’s just laughter. I love it.”
While laughter and glee fill the garden, it’s important to recognize that community gardens do the serious heavy lifting when it comes to building social resilience. As DeeDee from Marpole Temporary Community Garden astutely recognizes, the kind of social resilience cultivated in community gardens will be increasingly important in the face of climate change:
“Growing that community spirit and community connection is I think, totally what makes a resilient community because then if something like the heat dome or flooding happens, we know who’s down the street and who needs help.”
As we recently highlighted in the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report: “There are multiple inequities in the access and enjoyment of urban green spaces, with ramifications for climate justice, equitable park development, and public health.”
Community gardens in equity deserving communities provide people with access to green outdoor spaces that support individuals’ health and well-being. We know that people who spend more time in nature enjoy enhanced cognitive functioning. They are also more likely to report high levels of happiness and well-being.
As Euphrasie from the Congolese Women’s Group nicely puts it:
“Even if you’re not working in the community garden, just going in there, you breathe, that fresh air, you hear the birds singing. This is good for your health, for this environment and for the community.”
In all of the programs at Marpole Temporary Community Garden, DeeDee starts with a meaningful land acknowledgement, inviting participants to think beyond how nature can benefit human life, and encourages everyone to think about how they can enhance the natural world:
“If we’re saying thank you to the land, that means we must be getting something. So what are we giving? I like to ask people to consider our relationship within nature just like any healthy relationship, one that has a spirit of reciprocity.”
During the workshops, DeeDee teaches participants to use permaculture and syntropic agriculture approaches derived from Indigenous knowledge to enrich the land. For her, those practices are key to ensuring a sustainable planet.
“It really makes us think about what would be the best way to make this sustainable growth, not just growing for this year, but growing for the future.”
Both Marpole Temporary Community Garden and the Congolese Women’s Group underscored that finding space for community gardens is incredibly challenging. While the Congolese Women’s Group was able to secure space through the City of Ottawa’s Community Garden Program, Euphrasie emphasized how long and complicated the process can be:
“It used to be easier to apply for a plot. You just had to go in person and ask. But now everything is online, which is making it more difficult for us. It takes us more time and energy.”
Marpole Temporary Community Garden is situated on private land. However, relying on the generosity of private land owners is not sustainable over the long term. As DeeDee puts it “We’re enjoying our wonderful borrowed backyard while we have it.”
Given the many benefits of community gardens, we need to ensure gardeners have access to spaces to build meaningful relationships with one another, their community and the natural environment.
“Gardening nourishes the community physically, emotionally and mentally. It is a significant reminder of how working together as a community benefits everyone.”
Euphrasie, Congolese Women’s Group
While Vancouver has an extensive and impressive park system, historically, there has been an inequitable distribution of park investments in the city. The Vancouver Park Board’s VanPlay Master Plan recognizes this discrepancy and seeks to address this inequity by using indicators to identify and prioritize geographic areas most in need of additional park investment, known as Initiative Zones.
Vancouver’s Initiative Zones were identified by examining three layers of data:
With support from the Vancouver Foundation, Park People surveyed and interviewed people living in the identified Initiative Zones.
Park People undertook the following process to generate an understanding of park engagement in Vancouver’s potential Initiative Zones:
Here is some of what we learned about parks from participants living in Vancouver’s Initiative Zones.
“Being near the water, the rhythm of the waves always calms me. I can feel the tension and stress leave my body, and when I leave, I feel ready to face the world again”
Rose
“The experience in parks is irreplaceable. I love being in this public space where you can see other people running, playing, walking, laughing, and interacting. That’s really hard to mimic anywhere else”
Theodore
Across the board, people recognize that parks can benefit people’s mental and physical health and help build strong social and neighbourhood connections, which are key to community resilience.
Over 97% of the survey respondents from Vancouver’s Initiative Zones agreed that parks play a significant role in their well-being and quality of life.
However, our research indicates that people living in potential Initiative Zones feel they don’t influence the parks in their communities.
Of our survey respondents:
The interview process highlighted why individuals in the Initiative Zones are less likely to engage in park decision-making. The interviews surfaced the following barriers to park engagement:
Whether it be family obligations, chronic pain, long working hours, depression, or social anxiety, the life pressures and realities of people living in equity-deserving communities leave them feeling they have little time “leftover” for time-consuming park engagement processes. So, while parks play an essential role in people’s health and well-being, those who most need parks most are least likely to have the time or energy to devote to shaping their parks.
Many participants expressed that they were disappointed by past park engagement experiences. These negative experiences made them reluctant to contribute to future park decision-making processes. For example, Molly shared that while she’s previously tried to submit park service requests through 311, her claims were rejected because she didn’t categorize them correctly. These kinds of negative experiences leave people demoralized by unduly complex and cumbersome bureaucracy.
Youth, in particular, feel left out of park engagement processes and, as a result, aren’t motivated to engage. Young people shared that in-person engagement events can be very intimidating for young people who worry that their contributions won’t be taken seriously by adults. A lack of youth-targeted outreach and engagement is particularly unfortunate because the planning processes underway today will likely be implemented when these youth enter adulthood. In short, young people are missing the chance to shape the city and community of their future.
“I think the biggest barriers to participating in engagement processes are energy, mental health, and time. For the most part, everyone I know is super burnt out, so they really don’t even feel empowered enough to participate in anything like that. Everyone’s kind of facing their own mental health thing, and the idea of putting energy into a process that probably isn’t going to do much doesn’t really seem worth it. Like what benefit are you going to get out of spending two hours at City Hall when you could spend those two hours preparing food for the next day or just watching TV and relaxing because you’re so tired?” – Rose
The research indicates that people living in Vancouver Initiative Zones don’t always feel safe or welcomed in their parks. Participants also highlighted that their parks do not appear to be well cared for. Respondents shared that a lack of quality park spaces and amenities keeps them from spending time in their parks. For example:
Participants in potential Initiative Zones identified several opportunities to improve park engagement and park use in their communities. Here’s what they recommended:
It’s vital that park programs and processes are deliberately designed for people who live in these communities. People engage in parks when they see their interests and identities reflected back at them. This is what creates a sense of belonging.
For example, the only time one participant, Ace, ever went to City Hall was for a Black History Month event. Similarly, Molly became more involved in her park when she came across a beginner skateboarding drop-in event that was created specifically for moms. From there, Molly grew her park engagement, participating in an event to inform Vancouver’s Skateboard Amenities Strategy.
Even if people don’t directly participate in culturally relevant park programs, the interview participants shared that they benefit from seeing others in their community being meaningfully engaged in their parks.
“I like the group of ladies who dance to Chinese music in that sheltered area at Slocan Park. They, and other groups, hold their exercise classes there, and I’ve missed seeing them this past year… They look like they’re having fun always.” – Fern
While many participants expressed safety concerns about their parks, they underscored that increased police presence is not the solution. In fact, quite a few respondents shared that increased police presence in the park would make them feel far less safe. Participants suggested that building strong community connections through park involvement would help improve perceptions of safety in parks. Patrick said, “when you get to know your neighbours better, community safety increases without the need for police presence.”
Several participants highlighted methods to better connect young people to parks. Susan suggested that the Park Board start using Tik Tok for youth outreach and consider the “instagrammability factor” in park designs. She emphasized that while teens may show up at a given park to take photos, once they’re at the park, they’re more likely to stay and benefit from the experience.
Participants underscored that youth engagement is tied to better park engagement and access overall. This is particularly true for individuals who are not comfortable communicating in English. As one young participant noted, she’s been filling out and translating important technical documents for her parents since the age of 12, an experience many children of immigrants can relate to. In some cultures, older generations are more likely to trust information or take action on issues when the information comes from a trusted family member or friend. We heard from journal participants that their parents and grandparents are more likely to trust information coming directly from their children than from a government body or the internet. Participants shared that young people can help make park experiences more comfortable for adults who may experience challenges such as language or trust barriers.
Our research with participants living in Vancouver’s Initiative Zones demonstrates much of what we learned in Park People’s Sparking Change Report, which found:
“Parks are not simply green places of respite with grass and trees—they are critical pieces of the social infrastructure of our cities. And we believe they have a role to play in creating more inclusive, equitable places that are shaped by and for the people living there.”
We need to create parks that are designed for and accessed by those who can most benefit from them. The Vancouver Park Board’s forward-thinking VanPlay Master Plan goes a long way toward creating more equitable park resource allocation. As the research highlights, we need to ensure that equity-deserving communities feel heard in the planning and management of parks and that parks are designed to ensure the benefits of parks are equitably distributed.
*The nine journal participants chose the following pseudonyms for themselves so that we could share their experiences and insights anonymously
Parks are not neutral spaces but places where legacies of colonialism and white supremacy too often perpetuate urban inequity. At the same time, Black and racial justice movements have helped reimagine parks as places where the presence, experiences, and needs of Black Canadians can be visible and valued.
To recognize Black History Month, we’ve selected some of the content that has resonated with Park People over the past years, highlighting works that contribute to centering Black liberation in planning, designing, and managing parks and public spaces. We’re grateful to the Black thought leaders and communities contributing to a radical rethinking of our parks and public spaces.
Race and Nature in the City: Engaging youth of colour in nature-based activities, 2021, Nature Canada
An evidence-based, community-informed needs assessment that makes recommendations for meaningfully engaging racialized communities in nature and nature-based programming in urban areas.
Healing Disconnectedness with Collective Stewardship, Canadian City Parks Report, 2021, Park People
How reframing our notions of park stewardship can help restore relationships to the land. Parks have become a vital communal space in the COVID-19 pandemic. They appeal to our need for relationships; both to each other in a time of social distancing and to the outdoors as we are asked to stay at home. But we often fail to acknowledge the role of parks in generations of dispossession.
An Invitation to Hike: Let’s Hike T.O.’s Approach to Connecting People of Colour, Newcomers and Young Adults to Nature in Toronto, Park People
Let’s Hike TO is a thriving Toronto organization that intentionally extends a warm invitation to people of colour, newcomers and young adults to join in engaging group hikes. While anyone can attend their walks regardless of age or identity, the group has made an intentional effort since its inception in July 2021 to become the city’s diversity-focused hiking group.
Humber River Black History Walk, Jacqueline L. Scott, 2021, Park People
A guest post was written by Jacqueline L. Scott. Jacqueline is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, OISE, in the Department of Social Justice Education. She is a hike leader with two outdoor clubs. Jacqueline leads Black History Walks in Toronto. She is the author of travel and adventure books, from a Black perspective.
Urban Park Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Are Socially Vulnerable Communities Disproportionately Impacted? Edited by Michelle L. Johnson, 2021, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities.
The COVID-19 pandemic altered human behaviour around the world. To maintain mental and physical health during periods of lockdown and quarantine, people often engaged in outdoor, physically distanced activities such as visits to parks and green space. However, research tracking outdoor recreation patterns during the pandemic has yielded inconsistent results, and few studies have explored the impacts of COVID-19 on park use across diverse neighbourhoods. The research team used a mixed-methods approach to examine changes in park use patterns in cities across North Carolina, USA, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis on impacts in socially vulnerable communities (based on racial/ethnic composition and socioeconomic status).
Examining privilege and power in US urban parks and open space during the double crises of antiblack racism and COVID-19, Fushcia-Ann Hoover & Theodore C. Lim, 2021, Springer Link
Creating the positive outcomes socio-ecological researchers and practitioners seek for urban areas requires acknowledging and addressing the interactions of race and systemic racism in parks, open and green spaces. Racial experiences are inseparable from physical landscapes and the processes of designing, managing, or studying them. From COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement and protests, the events of 2020 in the United States underscore how considerations of social justice must extend beyond the conventional distributional focus of environmental justice. It must incorporate an understanding of how the built environment is racialized spatially, but not always readily quantified through the proximity-based measurements frequently used in research and practice.
Jay Pitter On ‘Being Black In Public’ — And Its Implications For Sustainable Transport Policy, Jay Pitter, 2024, Streets Blog
An interview with placemaker and mobility justice icon Jay Pitter to talk about “Being Black in Public” and her work to inspire policymakers to adopt new strategies and approaches to “transform Black public space precarity into equitable and joyful public space through policy reform.
Public Safety at the City’s Core, Jay Pitter, 2021, Azure Magazine
Public safety is not merely the absence of physical threat; it is the presence of inclusive places shaped by equitable urban placemaking and policy. It is the visceral yet indescribable sense of belonging that is experienced in spaces which invite rather than tolerate differences.
Want safer cities and public spaces? Invest in BIPOC-led work. Lena Phillips, 2021, Safe in Public Space
Given the increasingly urban orientation of the world, a re-set of how cities are shaped moving forward is critical. Socioeconomic disparities have long been named by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). This has been compounded by the heightened visibility of systemic racism, particularly its impact on Black lives. The field of planning, specifically, is tasked with constructing our built environments and mediating our socioeconomic infrastructure through mechanisms like funding, governance and public space policy. However, through ongoing processes of colonialism and racism, planning works to reinforce oppressive systems. The lack of diversity and critical interrogation within this field – one that fails to recognize its impact on the everyday lives of communities – contributes to the perpetual underfunding of BIPOC-led initiatives and allows systemic injustice to play out in our public spaces.
6 ways to approach urban green spaces in the push for racial justice and health equity, Nahda Hassen, 2021, The Conversation
How can we take an intersectional, anti-racist approach to plan urban green spaces as a public health measure? Policy-makers, planners and public health professionals can learn from critical race and critical theory scholars in pushing for multidisciplinary action. Here are six ideas for policy-makers, city officials, public health, city builders and planners to consider in research, policy and practice.
Green spaces, mental health and well-being in the time of COVID-19, Nadha Hassen, 2021, York U
In her doctoral study on “Parks Prescriptions and Perceptions: Experiences of Racialized People with Mood Disorders in Green Spaces,” Vanier scholar Nadha Hassen explores the experiences of racialized people living with mental illness in urban green spaces in Toronto. Using a visual research method called photovoice, Hassen’s research captures the experiences of people who are racialized and living with mood disorders as they interact with Toronto’s urban green spaces.
Leveraging built environment interventions to equitably promote health during and after COVID-19 in Toronto, Canada, Nadha Hassen, 2021, Oxford Academics
This paper puts forward three considerations for built environment interventions to promote health equitably: addressing structural determinants of health and embedding anti-racist intersectional principles, revisiting tactical urbanism as a health promotion tool and rethinking community engagement processes through equity-based placemaking. This paper outlines four built environment interventions in Toronto, Canada, that seek to address the challenges in navigating urban space safely in the short term, including street design that prioritizes pedestrians, protected cycling infrastructure, access to inclusive green space and safe, affordable housing. Longer-term strategies to create equitable health-promoting urban environments are discussed and may be valuable to other cities with similar urban equity concerns.
‘Without social justice, you cannot have environmental justice’: Making Toronto’s urban forests more inclusive spaces, Ambika Tenneti, 2021, University of Toronto, Scarborough
“Access is not just about proximity,” says Tenneti, an environmental science graduate from India who is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at U of T’s Daniels Forestry. People may live near a ravine, but if there’s no entrance near where they live and they have to walk, bike or take public transit before getting into it, then it’s not accessible. That also costs time and money, which recent immigrants often lack when they first arrive. Likewise, there are some psychological barriers that prevent people from enjoying the ravines and other natural areas in the city. This is where Tenneti’s research comes into play. As a recent immigrant to Canada, she investigates community engagement in the city’s urban forests, looking specifically at factors that lead to inclusion or exclusion, with a focus on the experience of new immigrants. Her research suggests that immigrant communities are interested and do enjoy urban nature, but they prefer parks over wilderness areas. She says in general, people feel comfortable going to well-maintained, multi-use green areas where children have access to playing fields and other amenities such as seating, equipment, trees and gardens. Access to washrooms and drinking water is also important for planning family outings.’
A question of life and death’: Why climate action must also take racial justice into account, What on Earth, 2021, CBC
Jesse Firempong is a communications officer with Greenpeace Canada. She spoke to What on Earth host Laura Lynch about how major environmental groups often centre white voices to the exclusion of BIPOC voices and concerns.
Parks Need Leaders of Colour, Canadian City Parks Report, 2021, Park People
How BIPOC park leaders are centring conversations of justice and power in parks. This past year was marked by an unprecedented wave of racial justice movements that fostered hope and resilience in the middle of a global pandemic (no small task). Across Canada and the world, Black, Indigenous and people of colour demanded justice in all its forms.
‘She’s out here trailblazing’: these 10 Black environmentalists are building community, Serena Austin, 2024, the Narwhal
Black Canadian scientists, researchers and environmental advocates discuss the importance of mentors, protégés and friends in their fields
Black Placemaking: United Through Heritage, Selma Elkhazin, 2023, Heritage Toronto
The African and Caribbean diaspora in Toronto consistently crafts places for the dynamic Black community. These places are spaces of belonging for the Black identity, and allow for the community to connect, invent, and continue creating diverse culture in the city.
Nothing for us, without us, 2024, University of Toronto and School of Cities
This mini-documentary explores anti-Black racism in Canadian city planning (Little Jamaica in Toronto, Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver, and Africville in Nova Scotia) and sheds light on the persistent issue of anti-Black racism and its impact on urban planning.
Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax, Ted Rutland, 2018Modern urban planning has long promised to improve the quality of human life. But how is human life defined? Displacing Blackness develops a unique critique of urban planning by focusing, not on its subservience to economic or political elites, but on its efforts to improve people’s lives. In his book, the author shows how race – specifically blackness – has defined the boundaries of the human being and guided urban planning, with grave consequences for the city’s Black residents.
Watch: A Conversation About Racism in the Outdoors, Brentin Mock, 2021, Audubon
On this episode of I Saw a Bird, Brentin Mock, a staff writer for CityLab, joined hosts David Ringer and Christine Lin to discuss his recent article on the dangers Black people face in the outdoors
How will we ensure equitable access to parks and public spaces? City Talk Canada, 2020, Canadian Urban Institute
Featuring Dave Harvey, Executive Director, Park People; Carlos Moreno, Scientific Director, Chair ETI (Entrepreneurship – Territory – Innovation), Panthéon – Sorbonne University; Rena Soutar, Reconciliation Planner, City of Vancouver Parks & Recreation; and Cheyenne Sundance, Founder & Farmer, Sundance Harvest Farm.
Advancing Climate Justice in Parks, 2021, Park People
Urban green spaces help mitigate the impacts of climate change by reducing temperatures and lowering flood risk. However, unequal access to these spaces leaves many lower-income, racialized communities more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Addressing these inequities involves the more equitable distribution of green space and changes in how we engage and involve communities in the design and planning of city parks.
Change, Hope, and Tension: Perspectives and Practices on Making Green Spaces BIPOC Inclusive, 2021, Park People
A candid conversation with 3 distinguished panellists exploring the barriers and opportunities for creating parks as natural places for engagement across differences.
This summer, Park People’s Sparking Change and TD Park People Grants programs in Toronto connected 36 equity-deserving community park groups with training, networks, seed funding and coaching to support city parks as places that connect people to nature and each other.
Many grant recipients around Toronto are activating community parks as sites of decolonization and reconciliation. One of these is The Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group (IPSG).
The IPSG at St. Matthew’s United Church was founded in 2018 to offer and foster local leadership in building balanced, just relationships with Indigenous people, the land, the water, and all living beings. In addition to hosting year-round events, a core group of 20 volunteers steward the green space beside the church, located in Toronto’s Corso Italia neighbourhood. During an August evening golden hour, Wesley Reibeling met with Elder Catherine Brooks to talk about the Indigenous People’s Solidarity Group, reconciliation and moving toward building a better future together. Earlier that evening, Elder Catherine Brooks, the IPSG, and local leaders and community members joined together to launch the National Healing Forest initiative in what is now known as Bickford Park.
Elder Catherine encouraged the IPSG to become the first Toronto National Healing Forest initiative, joining 9 other projects from coast to coast “in the spirit of reconciliation”.
This initiative is an invitation to Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, organizations, and individuals to create green spaces across Canada, to honour residential school victims, survivors, and their families, as well as missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Elder Catherine Brooks: “Well, first of all, one of the co-leads, Robin Buyers, and I met years ago when I was the Executive Director of a native women’s shelter. She was teaching at George Brown College in Community Work. She had her students do little fundraising projects for us, because, of course, what are shelters always short of? Money, or what we would call “Zhooniya”.
She became a friend over time and invited me to a book talk from author and journalist Tanya Talaga. The book group was very thoughtful and there seemed to be a lot of care put into it.
So I got kind of interested in going to the book talks, and then they said to me, “Well, how would you like to be our elder in residence at St. Matthew’s Church?” And of course, I kind of went, “I beg your pardon?”
So I thought about it, and I thought if we’re going to do this work towards reconciliation, then maybe this isn’t a bad idea. You know, maybe this is actually a good idea! So I went and talked to a Traditional Healer, whose judgment I really trust and respect. And they said, “It’s certainly something that hasn’t been done, and we should do new things.” So here I am.
And then initially, I began by doing various types of ceremonies and we have continued in terms of looking at ways to support Indigenous people. And that’s exactly what the group does.
So I’m kind of guiding them but they come up with their ideas. They have been doing that since before I was here and I give them credit for that.”
Elder Catherine Brooks: “I think it was one of the Cree chiefs, who said, ‘When the last tree is cut down, the last fish is eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.’
And you know, you can’t go fly up there and move up there, as there won’t be anything to send up there to keep you going. You’re not going to go live on Mars. What would be better, is if we all had enough to eat, a place to live, and decent education for our children and work on teaching not to wreck the planet.
Our job is supposed to be stewards of this place, keep it safe, and also express our gratitude and appreciation to creation, for being here, for being alive. People are just beginning to realize what a miracle it is to be human beings and all these wonderful things to exist. So we’re just beginning to have that sense of connection.
“I think a great example of this is how the Indigenous People’s Solidarity Group is using gardening to teach respect for the land. Teaching young children and grown-ups to love the land and to take care of it so that they can understand the relationship between the bees, the plants and having corn and food. By doing this, you are teaching them to know that this is a really important matter because this is how we live. Everybody lives off the land, in a manner of speaking, because that’s where our food comes for, so we are all benefiting from that.”
Funding through the United Church, Pollinate TO, and Canada Summer Jobs allowed IPSG to expand their work exponentially in 2021 and into 2022, recognizing Catherine Brooks as Elder-in-Residence, hosting online and outdoor events, and hiring youth to assist in maintaining the garden space, and to re-design the north end of the green space at St. Matthews United Church with over 50 native species.
Through Park People’s microgrants, Sparking Change and TD Park People Grants, IPSG was able to expand its programming and outreach. On June 14, 2022, IPSG hosted an Ode’miin Giizas Celebration: Strawberry Moon Lodge, Feast, & Ceremony.
The Strawberry Moon Feast and Ceremony celebrates the strawberry. The strawberry is the first berry of the season, which is often represented in Indigenous culture as a berry of connection, maintaining and fulfilling relationships. Full Moon ceremonies celebrate Grandmother Moon, the waters, and women as keepers of the waters.
At the event, Women, 2 Spirit, trans and intersex people were all welcome to join in the ceremony. Subsequently, they gathered inside for a feast of traditional foods, songs and teachings led by Elder Catherine Brooks. Men and others not participating in the moon ceremony remained outside in conversation with a Firekeeper. Once the moon had risen, everyone congregated around the sacred fire to make offerings together, while bowls of water were used to reflect the moon.
As Elder Catherine told me during the interview, “If we only could learn how to live here in peace and harmony with our fellow beings. Nothing in the world, like this tree, the grass, the sky, the water, nothing needs us. But we need everything. Our job is to be stewards of this place, keep it safe, and also express our gratitude and appreciation to creation, for being here, and for being alive. People are just beginning to realize what a miracle it is to be human beings and for all these wonderful things to exist. So we’re just beginning to have that sense of connection.“
Some examples of this connection include a Territorial Acknowledgement that was raised at St Matthew’s United Church in 2020, and a food and traditional medicine garden was planted, Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan — Healing Garden.
The transformation of what was once grass on infill from 150 years of city-building to a healing garden. Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan is situated on a busy St. Clair West corner, in the Bracondale Hill and Wychwood area. The garden’s location helps engage passersby in the neighbourhood which is key to expanding the garden’s reach. Members of the community stewarding the small greenspace adjacent to St. Matthews United Church, (IPSG) and volunteers have modelled how small green urban spaces may become sites of re-connection with nature and recognition of Indigenous spirituality.
Elder Catherine and Wesley discussed better ways forward and how to work together toward better futures and this is what she had to say; “People, spirits are so resilient – or you, and I wouldn’t be talking.
And it’s true of the other people who came here too. Some of the people that came here were leaving because things were hard. In Europe, a reason the bubonic plague kept killing so many people in waves is that they just didn’t have food and when they came to the New World– or what they call the “New World” – Turtle Island, and South America, then they discovered all the potatoes, different kinds of potatoes, tomatoes, corns, beans farms, squash, and tobacco, which is sacred to us. You know, the prophecy did say we’re all going to meet up. We have the ‘Noah’s Ark’ of human beings here on Turtle Island.
We’re going to learn to live together in peace and harmony and then we’re going to help our brothers and sisters all over the world also to live in peace and harmony. It’s a prophecy and it doesn’t mean we got the exact time when it’s going to happen. But we can try our best to work every day towards that. We need to be people of action.”
With municipal elections coming up here in Toronto, Elder Catherine offers some great advice about how to help Indigenous issues be front of mind for municipal leaders:
“Listen to me, you know, it makes a difference in who gets elected– and you know, the difference between good and fair is much less than the distance between fair and bad, ignorant and indifferent. If you want to help Indigenous people, elect people!“
Go talk to those people you elect and say you care about our issues because they listen. I think most people who get elected do want to serve in a way for the public. Here’s the thing we need that support. It doesn’t have to be every week, but maybe go once a year and knock on their doors, because we have the right to be represented, whether we voted for them or not. That would be an incredible help.”
“Go visit your MP and MPP and tell them you care about Aboriginal issues and Indigenous issues, women’s issues, LGBT+ issues. Get out there and support people! That will bring about the change we want to see. Never give up. We wouldn’t have made as much progress if we had given up. If our ancestors had given up, we as a people wouldn’t be here today. “
If your city or local community is having municipal elections coming up this season, this is a reminder to get out and vote and vote with the community in mind when you cast your ballot.
As advocates have pushed for action on issues ranging from policing, to houselessness, to racial justice, the past two years have brought to light fractured relationships, mistrust, and frustration. But equally, these efforts have highlighted that communities are eager to have their voices heard.
“There’s much more attention that’s being placed on the city and the city’s choices by residents and by advocacy communities,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor and municipal governance expert. Dr. Flynn noted that parks have been a key space of protest and pushback and “expectations are very high that municipalities are going to be responsive.”
At the same time, however, the pandemic has turned park engagement on its head. When Covid-19 first hit, in-person consultations became impossible, leading cities to go virtual, with 81% reporting increased use of online engagement methods.
But the impacts on park engagement go deeper than the shift from in-person to online.
Early in the pandemic, cities rushed to establish pilot projects, like converting streets into pop-up parklets and loosening bylaws on alcohol consumption. In the urgency to respond to emerging needs, engagement was often rushed or bypassed altogether. Fast forward to this year: 92% of cities we surveyed said that they had extended or made permanent at least one park pilot program initiated in response to Covid.
Dr. Flynn, who studied municipal governance during the pandemic, terms this shift in engagement “pop-up governance.”
“It’s easy to be in favour of pop-up governance when you really like the outcome,” Dr. Flynn said, noting that public space expansions have been popular among many urbanists. But the process is inherently undemocratic, said Dr. Flynn, noting that cities “leveraged the pandemic, in some ways, to not engage.”
For Dr. Flynn, this raises questions about “why did [these projects] have to happen without engagement? And does that speak to larger issues with the existing processes?” In her view, “governance models even outside of the pandemic, in most jurisdictions, really aren’t able to appropriately address the engagement needs of people who want to be weighing in” on park decision-making.
Indeed, our survey results found that only 22% of city residents feel they have the ability to influence what goes on in their local park—a decrease from 34% in last year’s report.
As cities shift from addressing immediate pandemic needs to planning for the future, there is an opportunity to rethink community engagement to give communities more decision-making power on the park issues that affect them most, said Koa Thornhill, a Program Manager at Park People with expertise working with equity-deserving communities.
As Thornhill put it, grassroots advocacy movements during the pandemic have “brought us to this beautiful point of thinking about, how do we decentralize some of the power that exists in [institutional] spaces?”
Shifting power means moving beyond one-off project-based consultations toward ongoing relationship-building with communities. This requires recognizing and valuing that communities know their needs best.
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that investing time and resources in building meaningful community relationships upfront is well worth the effort “so that when you actually get to those places where you do need to do some really acute engagement… There are deep relationships.” As Ebrahim put it, “It’s a reorientation to how we come together and build partnerships—that is, going slow to go fast.”
The City of Edmonton is putting this approach into practice. Through their RECOVER Urban Wellness initiative, city-supported ‘social prototypes’ explore creative models for engaging with equity-deserving communities. One of the 2021 prototypes, called Auricle, asks “what would it look like for a city to engage citizens in more humble and authentic ways, deeply listening and understanding what wellbeing means to them?”
The project involved hiring a team of 10 Local Listeners—community members living in Edmonton’s Alberta Avenue neighbourhood—to engage neighbours using storytelling methods. Through this process, the Listeners collected over 150 stories, which were then shared back to the community at an event called Knowsy Fest. The festival, a celebration of community knowledge, invited residents to interpret the stories themselves, and share ideas for how the city might use their insights.
Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton and part of the RECOVER team, said that this kind of community engagement “requires a paradigm shift towards deeply recognizing that relationships move at the pace of trust.”
“Having the time and resources dedicated to relationship building can be tough when we’re on taxpayers’ dime,” Rahman said. “Given that impact isn’t seen in the immediate term, people may have a hard time justifying why just ‘listening’ and fostering relationships is worthwhile.” But for Rahman, this approach is essential to make meaningful change in communities.
When it comes to building relationships, it’s important to be sensitive to neighbourhood dynamics, said Dr. Flynn. Connecting with communities that have been historically well-served by government may be relatively straightforward, but “there’s a lot of communities who don’t share that same trust,” she said.
To understand the unique priorities that exist in each neighbourhood, Ebrahim and her colleagues suggest that cities undertake neighbourhood-based “equity impact assessments” every few years.
This would involve co-creating neighbourhood profiles using demographic data to provide insight into how to tailor engagement methods to meet local needs—such as providing childcare where there’s a high proportion of single parents, or translating materials into commonly spoken languages.
Brampton’s Nurturing Neighbourhoods platform provides a useful model for relationship and trust building. The program was created in response to a commitment in the Brampton 2040 Vision strategy to conduct neighbourhood audits to identify priorities for ongoing, incremental improvements in neighbourhoods based on collaboration with residents.
For 2021, the Nurturing Neighbourhoods program offered guided virtual walking tours in each of the city’s neighbourhoods. The tours highlighted local parks, businesses, and community spaces, and emphasized ways residents could engage in their community. The tours were complemented by neighbourhood-specific online surveys and interactive mapping tools which invited residents to mark locations where they have concerns or ideas for improvement. The insights generated are then used to create a long-term action plan for each neighbourhood.
Kelowna is also moving toward a neighbourhood-centred approach to community engagement. The city is working with neighbourhood associations to “decentralize park programming [and] introduce park amenities and programs that better reflect the needs of the local community,” city staff said.
Koa Thornhill echoed the importance of cities committing to “hav[ing] strong ties to local organizations,” and also pointed out the opportunity to connect with residents directly through existing on-the-ground staff.
Parks maintenance staff, for example, could see it as their role to maintain human relationships the same way they maintain the grass. Thornhill recommended providing on-the-ground parks staff with “training to maintain and navigate relationships.” She noted it could boost morale by “help[ing] them see that community members are really grateful for the work that they do and it doesn’t go unseen.”
In thinking through how to strengthen relationships with communities, results from our national survey of 150 community park groups provide insight on how municipalities can move forward.
63% of cities said they had a strong relationship with local community park groups, but when asked the same question, only 44% of community groups said they had a strong relationship with the city. This number was even lower, at 38%, for groups that identified as equity-deserving. This discrepancy highlights that community relationships may not be as strong as city staff perceive.
The good news is that 83% of community groups said they’d be interested in deepening their relationship with their municipality. When asked what cities could offer to support community groups’ work, some common themes emerged:
Above all, what groups are looking for is to be recognized as valued collaborators working toward a shared goal of ensuring that parks best serve communities. As one group put it, “We need municipalities to trust us; the people who look after these spaces often are the most knowledgeable about what it needs because we are there every day.”
Dr. Alexandra Flynn is hopeful that we can work toward this future, noting that “municipalities are full of lots of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
Park engagement has been transformed by the pandemic. In our survey, 92% of cities said Covid has changed how they engage communities, and 23% said engagement has become a greater priority since the start of the pandemic.
As we’ve written elsewhere in the Canadian City Parks Report, it’s not just the format of engagement that has changed as cities shift from in-person to online methods. Cities are also sharpening their focus on building relationships with groups that have historically been left out, with 35% reporting that the pandemic has prompted more intentional outreach to equity-deserving groups.
“There is new awareness about systemic inequity, and creating equity in our park system means talking with those most affected.”
City staff, Gelph
This work is needed. Our public survey showed that equity-deserving groups face disproportionate barriers to participating in city-led park planning processes. Overall, the top three barriers respondents cited were: being unsure of how to get involved (36%), unsure if their participation would make a difference (31%), and not having enough time to participate (28%). These percentages were higher for respondents who identified as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC), at 48%, 35%, and 36%, respectively.
Cities and community groups across the country are responding to these barriers through creative methods that put equity at the fore.
It is vital to involve communities in deciding what the engagement process looks like, said Jennifer Chan, Co-founder and CEO of the Department of Imaginary Affairs (DIA) . Last summer, the organization led a project called A Tale of Two Parks to surface stories of safe and unsafe experiences that exist at the same park. Through the project, six racialized youth were hired as Social Researchers to engage park goers, especially BIPOC communities, in two Toronto parks.
Through conversations with community members at the park, the DIA team learned that park goers often have great ideas for changes they’d like to see, but community members often felt that “it doesn’t really matter what our ideas are, since the city doesn’t care about us” Chan said. “This statement really struck me in thinking about, how can we meaningfully engage with community when the starting perspective is that ‘the city doesn’t care about us?'”
In response, the DIA designed a participatory planning game called “What if Parks Were Designed By Us?” The game allows participants to experience and define a months-long planning process in a matter of minutes. It invites community members to work together to develop their own planning process, strengthening their ability as a community to identify issues, build a unified vision, and even practice dealing with monkey wrenches getting thrown into their plan.
By gamifying the planning process, DIA aims to reduce barriers to existing planning processes as well envision new possibilities for park engagement, shifting away from traditional mechanisms like town halls “where all the power is held by the city, not with the community,” Chan said.
The City of Toronto has been engaging residents for the Toronto Island Park Master Plan since 2020, which will set out a new vision for a beloved destination park accessible by ferry just minutes from downtown. It’s a signature project that involves many stakeholders, as the Island is meant to serve all Torontonians.
A key priority for the engagement team is embedding an equity lens throughout the process. “Equity really is framed by identifying who is and who isn’t at the table,” said Daniel Fusca, the city’s Manager of Consultation for Parks, Forestry and Recreation.
The process started with a pre-engagement phase—a new approach for the division. This involved meeting with relevant community organizations, Indigenous partners, and other departments within the city, to get a sense of their priorities and determine how they wanted to be involved.
The pre-engagement phase “goes against most people’s instincts of what is appropriate engagement,” Fusca said. There’s an expectation, rooted in conventional engagement practices, to “put something in front of the public for them to react to or else it’s a waste of their time.”
“It took a bit of work to convince everybody that this is actually a good idea,” Fusca said. “There’s a bit of getting people out of their comfort zone.”
The pre-engagement with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) and other Indigenous partners was especially vital given the significance of the Islands as a sacred place of healing and ceremony. Through these conversations, the city heard about the importance of incorporating ceremony into the engagement events, and re-working their land acknowledgment to recognize the waters as well as the lands.
They also heard that each Indigenous partner had different collaboration preferences. Some rights holders preferred regular meetings with the city. For the urban Indigenous communities, they’ve held sharing circles during each phase which are led by an Indigenous facilitator—something the community identified as important.
Lori Ellis, Project Officer of Strategic Projects, acknowledged that the pre-engagement took time and required them to adjust their original scope of work. “But it’s worth its weight in gold in regards to building that foundation of trust and transparency,” she said, noting that the city is now looking to incorporate a pre-engagement phase into future projects.
It’s also laid a foundation for ongoing collaboration with different communities to share back how their input has been used. The project team has tried to make these touchpoints meaningful by tailoring them to the community’s specific interests and input, Fusca said. “We would hone in the presentation to just focus on the things that were most meaningful to them and try to reflect back anything they told us,” he shared.
Constantly scanning to “identify the key voices that are still missing, and to do our best to address that” has been another strategy at the heart of the city’s approach, Fusca said. For example, after identifying that youth and racialized communities living outside of the downtown core were underrepresented in the first phase of engagement, they developed a Youth Ambassador Program.
The program hired a team of 10 youth between the ages of 15 to 27 who collectively spoke nine different languages and lived in neighbourhoods outside of the downtown core. They were provided with training and a budget to design their own outreach program to engage their communities.
Pablo Muñoz, a Senior Public Consultation Coordinator for the city who has previous experience as a youth worker, noted the important role youth play as conduits of information to and from the community. “For a lot of immigrant and refugee families, children and youth tend to be the connection to the Canadian English-speaking world. They tend to be the translators, and in many ways, have a big leadership role,” he said. This is a finding echoed in recent Park People research that explored barriers to park engagement in Vancouver’s equity-deserving neighbourhoods.
Another learning from the process is that despite the breadth of audiences involved in the project, it’s been important to hold space to go deeper through small group workshops centred on equity.
Some workshops included visioning exercises guided by Bob Goulais, an Anishinaabe facilitator, where participants closed their eyes to envision the future of the Islands. “It’s a much different way than bureaucratic engagement, where we’re going inwards and acknowledging a little bit more of the soul and the spirit,” said Muñoz.
Other initiatives included an “equity and belonging deep-dive,” and a video interview with activists and historians about the LGBTQ2S+ history of Hanlan’s Point, a clothing-optional beach on the Islands.
At these sessions, “the turnout would be smaller, but the conversation would be much richer. None of these conversations ever went the way you thought that they were going to go. And they always were incredibly meaningful,” Muñoz said.
What other cities are doing:
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that when it comes to deepening engagement, in many ways cities are “set up to fail.” Through research to inform the Making Space toolkit—a resource for engaging equity-deserving communities in planning processes—Ebrahim and her team learned that cities may face internal barriers to implementing meaningful processes.
However, many of these issues could be addressed through “simple intervention points,” Ebrahim said:
In exploring the research on nature connectedness and health, many strategies are identified to facilitate human-nature connections, including stewardship activities, nature mindfulness, preserving natural wooded areas, embedding sports into nature programs, and embracing diverse cultural knowledge and practices into park maintenance and events. But how do these strategies work on the ground with actual urban residents? We turned to our new Cornerstone partner, Meewasin Valley Authority, to understand how they foster nature connectedness in their urban park.
The Cornerstone Parks program, which works to maximize the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks, underwent two years of research with large urban park users and stewards to better understand the connection between parks and health. The recently published results suggested something we were already keenly aware of through conversations with communities and from our passions for spending time in parks – park use is associated with better health and well-being. But what really stood out from the research was that the most predictive factor of better health and well-being was park users’ feeling of nature connectedness.
Our Cornerstone Parks survey of park users found a significant relationship between feeling connected with nature and higher reported mental health, physical health and general well-being. This means that as large urban park users feel more connected to nature, they rate their mental, physical, and wellbeing higher.
However, most park users (67%) who visit Cornerstone parks primarily spend their time engaging in social activities, sports or recreational activities rather than enriching nature-based activities (33% of park users). And we see that park users who engage primarily in nature-based activities in Cornerstone parks report stronger nature connections and higher well-being scores.
So how do we, as park users, park professionals and community members, ensure that people are getting the greatest benefit from visiting large urban parks? In exploring the research on nature connectedness and health, many strategies are identified to facilitate human-nature connections, including stewardship activities, nature mindfulness, preserving natural wooded areas, embedding sports into nature programs, and embracing diverse cultural knowledge and practices into park maintenance and events. But how do these strategies work on the ground with actual urban residents? We turned to our new Cornerstone partner, Meewasin Valley Authority, to understand how they foster nature connectedness in their urban park.
Meewasin Valley is a 6700-hectare park that spans the South Saskatchewan River for 75 km through and beyond the city of Saskatoon. The park is an ecological treasure composed of a prairie landscape with several unique ecosystems not found throughout the rest of the country. Grasslands, like those found in Meewasin, are one of the most imperilled ecosystems on the planet. They are incredibly rich in biodiversity and have been one of the most affected by human activity.
Due to Meewasin’s central location and massive trail system, the park welcomes over 2 million visits annually! The accessibility of the park allows city residents and tourists to easily explore nature without leaving the city.
Meewasin Valley Authority is a leader in innovative nature programming. They host curriculum-connected programs for children, an app sharing Indigenous stories of the Valley, pollinator walks, dark skies stargazing, and sheep grazing demonstrations.
So what can we learn from Meewasin’s diverse nature programming, and how can those learnings, along with what the research tells us, be leveraged to optimize the health benefits of large urban parks?
At Meewasin, stewardship is a major part of park programming. Meewasin has over 1,000 volunteers who work on various stewardship activities throughout the Meewasin Valley, including wrapping trees with wire to mitigate beaver damage, removing invasive species, replanting of native vegetation, engaging in wildlife inventory and litter clean-up in the park.
One way Meewasin ensures that stewardship activities are accessible and encouraging to diverse users is by offering various volunteer opportunities. This ensures that people can be involved in ways that most pique their interests or needs. For example, those looking to contribute to conservation efforts in the park that are not physically able to do plantings and invasive species control can help with wildlife inventory projects, public education and nature interpretation at events or join the marketing and public programming team.
There is a growing body of research around the benefits of nature mindfulness and ecotherapy activities, increasing their popularity. Nature mindfulness and ecotherapy are broad terms that refer to activities involving mediation, bringing awareness of the natural world around us, yoga, deep breathing and raising consciousness of our place in the natural world. Not surprisingly, the research on these types of activities suggests that they deepen people’s connection to nature.
Research has also found that nature mindfulness activities have significant implications for children specifically. Engaging in nature mindfulness activities improves children’s sense of connection to nature, motivation for pro-environmental behaviours, and overall mood. Meewasin seems to be well aware of the benefits of mindfulness as their school education programs include nature mindfulness activities to help ground students in the park and strengthen their connection to nature.
In a time where we are inundated with negative news, specifically climate and environmental disasters, it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed and disempowered. This can lead to disengagement with nature and nature programs as people try to avoid feelings of eco-grief and climate anxiety.
Meewasin looks to provide relief from climate anxiety and negative environmental news with their more lighthearted programs like Naughty by Nature, which looks at the dating and mating strategies of the animals in the park. The program allows people to engage in joyful activities in nature and appeals to those who may not already be interested in conservation.
By offering different types of programs and focusing on fun, Meewasin can engage new populations in conservation and connect people to nature and conservation in a joyful way.
We often think of sport and park recreation as directly conflicting with nature conservation. In the past, we’ve seen nature spaces cleared to make way for new sports facilities.
However, the health of nature and sports are directly intertwined. As the climate changes, certain winter sports may become obsolete, and summer sports may become dangerous in extreme heat. So, it only makes sense that those passionate about sports also feel a sense of responsibility to the environment.
Many research institutions and policymakers have picked up on this connection and have started to make the case for using sports and recreation as a gateway to nature education. Using sports as an entry point, we can engage a whole different group of people in nature conservation and fuel their sense of connection to nature.The Sip and Skate program at Meewasin is a great example of how to put this approach into practice. Meewasin attracts visitors to join an evening of skating in the river valley with food and drinks and then provides opportunities for conservation education throughout the event. The brilliance of these events is that the Meewasin team inspires a passion for conservation by emphasizing the need to care for the planet to ensure that outdoor skating rinks can continue to exist.
Biocultural diversity refers to the idea that the way we think about nature is based on our culture and heritage. For example, humans have evolved alongside the unique biodiversity in their native regions, have different languages and cultures, and therefore have different names, knowledge and practices relating to the land. This is biocultural diversity.
One explanation for why people feel disconnected from nature is due to a lack of cultural ties to their current environment. In Canada, we see this through the erasure of Indigenous cultures and Indigenous traditional knowledge and practices of caring for the land. This creates a disconnect between Indigenous peoples and nature.
To combat this, Meewasin, alongside other Cornerstone parks, is working towards building strong partnerships with Indigenous groups and ensuring stewardship practices are informed by the traditional caretakers of the land. Meewasin is currently working with many partners to expand access to traditional medicines and plants, provide urban ceremonial space and host fire ceremonies. This allows Indigenous populations to connect with nature in the park in ways that are most meaningful to them.
Now that we better understand the pathways to improved health through park use, wherein the key is nature connectedness, we must optimize these benefits for everyone! Cornerstone parks have demonstrated their ability to foster nature connections for city residents and are leaders in finding innovative approaches to bring nature to more people.
As we advocate for more nature spaces, we also need to advocate for more nature programs that appeal to diverse users and incorporate many ways to connect with the land. Follow Park People, Meewasin and the rest of our Cornerstone partners online as we unpack more innovative nature programs and design strategies to optimize the interconnected health of our people, parks and cities.