As Dave Harvey retires from his co-leadership position at Park People, he reflects on the incredible journey since founding the organization in 2011.
Park People’s Executive Director, Erika Nikolai, has been honoured with the Distinguished Individual Award from World Urban Parks—an international recognition that celebrates her leadership and the growing national movement Park People has helped build here in Canada.
In East Vancouver’s Champlain Heights, we sat down with two organizations leading a grassroots effort to restore native forests and build community.
Meet the Ontario Community Changemakers and learn more about their inspiring initiatives transforming parks across the province.
A guidance and resources to measure the impact of your park work on community health and wellbeing, integrating a social equity lens.
Shakeera Solomon from the Vision of Hope Resource Centre in Brampton, a recipient of a TD Park People Grant, shares valuable tips on transitioning indoor programs to the outdoors.
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This case study is part of the 2024 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.
As climate change brings more frequent extreme weather, cities are grappling with increasing storm damage to parks and infrastructure. In 2024, 97% of municipal parks departments said that addressing impacts from climate change and extreme weather has become a challenge. Floods, droughts, and fires all pose risks, but there’s another element that’s caused massive damage in recent years–wind.
Park managers we spoke with in 2023 mentioned increasingly intense storms that don’t just bring higher wind speeds, but winds that last for more sustained periods, causing far more damage. While cities have begun to redesign parks to withstand flooding or adapt to drought through altering planting palettes, preparing for high wind presents a difficult challenge.
As the Parks and Recreation Manager for the City of Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, Frank Quinn knows a thing or two about preparing for storms. But when Hurricane Fiona hit the Island in September 2022 as one of the strongest storms to ever land on Canadian shores, it was a different beast.
The storm was Atlantic Canada’s most costly, causing $220 million in damage to Prince Edward Island alone. Hurricane Fiona lasted for hours, damaging municipal infrastructure and ravaging the city’s tree canopy. In the Royalty Oaks natural area many old growth trees were knocked down–some 300 years old.
Quinn said the City’s Emergency Measures Organization, which includes senior staff from different departments, met frequently leading up to the storm as well as afterwards. As a smaller city, Quinn said people from different departments are used to working and supporting each other–something that came in handy after the storm.
“We all had good working relationships, we all know each other. We had a wide range of experiences and expertise.” They were able to draw on each other’s knowledge of internal staff expertise, but also contractors who could be brought on to help.
Public safety and clean-up were top priority, but Quinn was also cognizant that “once you’re in the house for a couple days, you want to get out.” His team assessed every playground within the first couple of days as well as inspected trail systems, posting notices about what was closed and what was open for use.
Without power, communication was a challenge, Quinn said. As the city cleared trails and re-opened amenities like playgrounds, they posted messages on the city’s website and used the media. But the key to public messaging was working with community organizations, like church groups, to pass information along to city residents.
The City is now building redundancies into systems and creating more back-up services. One big issue during the storm was fuel, Quinn said. While staff had fueled up machinery and vehicles prior to the storm arriving, when they needed to be refueled there were issues because the main fuel depot did not have a back-up generator on site.
“We dealt with smaller storms before where there were power outages for a day or two, but when you have a storm and sections of the City doesn’t have power for two weeks, this creates several issues and challenges,” such as where to get fuel.
Franck Quinn, Parks and Recreation Manager for the City of Charlottetown.
Quinn said the City has learned lessons from the experience of Fiona and has already begun to prepare for the next storm. “We’re building new infrastructure and making it more resilient so that it can stand up to higher winds,” he said. The City also purchased new equipment that can be used for cleaning up trees, but can also be adapted for other day-to-day uses like grading trails.
Food-based park programming like food forests, community gardens and edible plants have grown in scope and popularity in the last five years in Canadian cities. Clearly, both municipalities and community members see the potential for food production in parks and want to see more of it. Over the past three years, 50% of city residents consistently say they’d like to see more urban agriculture and community gardens in their parks.
But if cities are planning to invest in park-based food programs, how can they ensure they are being used and, crucially, that produce is actually reaching those in need?
Launched in 2020, the City of Victoria’s Get Growing Victoria program uses a food justice approach to provide gardening supplies to communities at-risk of experiencing food insecurity, including people experiencing houselessness, Indigenous and racialized communities, seniors, and youth.
Instead of only focusing on increasing access to fresh food for all residents, food justice acknowledges that certain populations face structural and systemic barriers to food security. By acknowledging the barriers to gardening, the Get Growing program is able to provide sustainable and healthy food to those who tend to be excluded from community garden programs.
The Parks department quickly realized that the best way to reach those at-risk populations was to partner with non-profit organizations who know the community needs best. Collaborating with non-profit partners also meant the City was better able to meet the community where they’re at rather than expecting people to self-identify and sign-up for the program through city processes.
The program now has 67 community partners including public health organizations, mental health service providers, immigrant and refugee organizations, social service providers and affordable housing organizations. The partner organizations distribute gardening supplies and vegetable seedlings grown in City greenhouses to their clients and community members so they can use the materials at home or in their local community garden. Get Growing gives partners the autonomy to integrate the materials into their program delivery in ways that best suit their community’s needs.
City of Victoria food systems coordinator, Julia Ford, tells us they would not be able to run the program without the non-profit partners. “They greatly increase our impact, and allow us to reach more vulnerable communities that the program is intended for and who may not otherwise interact with the City directly.”
Exemplifying Julia’s point, this year our public survey found that over 30% of city residents do not feel confident that they know who to reach out to if they experience a problem or have feedback about their park. By collaborating with local non-profits that do have stronger rapport with local community members, the City of Victoria can reach those who feel disconnected from city services.
Now in the program’s fourth year of operation, it is estimated that 400,000 pounds of fresh produce has been grown. Beyond that, evaluation of program participants found that the vast majority of participants felt that the program increased their mental well-being, intake of healthy foods and increased their overall physical activity levels. The program demonstrates what’s possible in parks when we start looking at them with community health in mind.
“I think this program demonstrates the potential for Parks Departments to really look at the resources they have available and think creatively about how to use them to support community and preventive health in a much more active way,” Ford said. “I think within the Parks sector there’s a solid understanding that passive park use and access to green space is important for mental health and well-being. But how can we move to be active partners in supporting communities who want to spearhead innovative uses of public space? How can we support people to explore new recreational activities in a meaningful, accessible and equitable way?”
Julia Ford, City of Victoria Food Systems Coordinator