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.
Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks?
The InTO the Ravines Champions program offers people living near ravines training and support to learn, explore, and celebrate Toronto's one-of-a-kind ravines system.
A reflection on the BEING BLACK IN PUBLIC Survey Report, exploring how Black communities experience parks and public spaces, and what fosters joy and belonging.
For years, Geri and Gary James drove an hour outside Toronto to find nature — not realizing one of the…
How do we build a healthier, greener, more joyful Toronto? We start at the park. Discover how communities across the city have transformed their green spaces over the past fifteen years. Then roll up your sleeves and help shape what comes next.
By donating to Park People, you’ll support vibrant parks for everyone.
With the intensification of many communities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (ON), we are seeing a change in how people use parks. Parks in higher-density areas are heavily relied on by urban residents who no longer have access to private backyards for outdoor exercise and social and cultural activities. This requires a change in the way parks have historically been planned and designed in many of these municipalities.
Thriving Places is designed as a case study toolkit highlighting new urban parks and open spaces in the Greater Golden Horseshoe that showcase creative ideas for planning, designing, programming, and engaging community in public spaces in intensifying neighbourhoods.
“We don’t always need to look to cities such as New York, Vancouver, and San Francisco for creative park ideas when so many municipalities across the GGH are stepping up with innovative projects.”
Explore inspiring new urban parks in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (ON).
From growing food to restoring natural habitat to bringing arts programming to parks, the Weston Family Parks Challenge kick-started a more creative, collaborative approach to green space in Toronto. This report highlights what we can learn from the Weston Family Parks Challenge, and how we can apply those lessons to other municipalities to help guide the future of park philanthropy in Canada.
“While there is a long history in Canada of private donations of land to create city parks, there has been a limited culture of philanthropy for park improvements and programming”.
Applying lessons from the Weston Family Parks Challenge to guide the future of park philanthropy in Canada
It’s become a familiar urban experience. Heavy rain, flash floods, rising water levels, and, ultimately, flooded parks, streets, and homes. With climate change leading to extreme weather—both hot, dry periods and heavy rain—it’s imperative that we design our urban environments to mitigate these impacts.
In this report, Park People explores the challenges and opportunities facing city parks in Canada by offering inspiration, best practices, and key strategies for moving forward.
“Green infrastructure at its core is about creating spaces that help manage stormwater, but these projects also bring a host of other benefits—from habitat creation to providing new spaces for people to gather. Much like parks, the benefits of green infrastructure are deep and layered, touching on the environment, economic, and social.”
Challenges and opportunities facing city parks in Canada
Financing City Parks in Canada surveys the landscape of park funding in Canada, exploring options to ensure reliable and sustainable funding for Canada’s parks. The paper asks questions such as: How much should be spent on parks? How should they be financed? Who should pay? It outlines the major strengths and weaknesses of approaches and breaks down which are appropriate, realistic, and sustainable.
There is no singular or unequivocal business model that addresses the best way to finance capital and operating costs of city parks. There are, however, a number of possibilities; some are used in different cities in Canada and elsewhere, and some may be used in the future.
Explore the landscape of park funding in Canada
Toronto has amazing parks. There are more than 1,500 of them and 80 square kilometres of parkland and natural spaces in the city. Half of the people in the city visit a park at least once a week and almost 14% visit a park every day.
But our parks are not as good as they could be.
Executive Director Dave Harvey used his Fellowship with the Metcalf Foundation to research and write this report on improving our parks. This paper identifies a number of problems facing Toronto’s parks and explores opportunities and recommendations to overcome them.
The report was very well received and became the inspiration for launching Park People.
“We’ve taken our parks for granted, neglected the need for improvements, and they are languishing. […] Toronto’s parks are fertile ground for fresh new thinking.”
Explore opportunities and recommendations to address issues in Toronto parks
Public areas like parks, ravines, and other greenspaces have become crucial during a growing period of isolation, inequality, and climate anxiety. They provide a space for healing, connection, and growth, in addition to a place to play, rest, and get fresh air. Parks offer a chance to reclaim space, foster a sense of community, and inspire local leadership for many groups, particularly those that are historically underrepresented in decision-making processes.
Community members are converting their local parks into vibrant hubs of connection, joy, and action; that spirit is celebrated in this report. It draws attention to the value of community-driven transformation and grassroots leadership in our common green areas.
Through an evaluation of the Sparking Change Toronto program Park People aimed to understand the impact of the program in four key areas outlined in Park People’s Theory of Change:
Discover the impact of the Sparking Change program in Toronto.
Parks and greenspaces are powerful spaces for community connection, health, wellbeing, and resilience. At Park People, we’ve developed a framework and process to better understand and measure the impact of our work across five key domains—including community health and wellbeing.
This toolkit shares our approach and work to date as a case study, with a focus on health and wellbeing indicators, and offers practical tools and questions to help others in the sector deepen their own impact measurement practices. Whether you’re a nonprofit, municipality, or community group, we hope this resource supports your efforts to build healthier, more connected communities through parks and greenspaces.
We offer this toolkit as a case study and a starting point. It includes
Together, we can strengthen the case for parks as essential to healthy, thriving communities.
Measuring health, wellbeing, and equity across parks and greenspaces.
Canada’s large urban parks play a proven role in supporting the healthy ecosystems and connected communities that make for thriving cities.
From 2021 – 2025, a growing network of Cornerstone Parks – from coast to coast – tracked their shared impact on people as well as the planet. They demonstrated how caring for the land by removing invasive species and planting native species, among other activities, positively impacts community volunteers’ mental well-being and physical health.
Cornerstone Parks also proved the enormous value of their work to their cities. For the vast majority of parks departments in Canadian cities, financial and human resources are insufficient, and parks departments are being asked to address broader social issues that they feel ill equipped to handle (CCPR, 2024). Meanwhile, Cornerstone Parks and their volunteers provide significant economic value to Canada’s major municipalities, offer needed support to City staff, and lighten the load for traditional health and social services by providing community care.
The tireless work of our Cornerstone partners proves that, for people living in cities, parks are vital sites of connection – to nature, to our neighbours, and ultimately to solutions that make Canadian cities more livable.
Discover the impact of Canada’s large urban parks’ stewardship initiatives.
A profound Indigenous saying here on Turtle Island is that Water is Life. Water is not only scientifically required for life to flourish, but it also connects people to new places; it brings people together. In Toronto, we are lucky to have many water sources – from rivers and lakes to ponds and ravines formed through thousands of years of geographical shifts.
Focusing on these waterways, the InTO the Ravines program, launched in 2020, has made quite a splash. First conceptualized on the heels of Toronto’s first-ever Ravine Strategy, the program’s multifaceted, support-focused and community-first approach has made soaring positive impacts. The InTO the Ravines program seeks to mitigate the impacts of climate change that continue to become more apparent everywhere, including in Toronto’s urban and natural spaces, while keeping communities at the centre.
As the program nears its 4-year mark, Park People has recently launched the Ravine Engagement Report, highlighting its tremendous impacts on the communities it serves across the city.
InTO the Ravines has sought to tackle the fact that despite many people living or working near them, Toronto’s ravines are often forgotten spaces in the city. InTO the Ravines consists of two main components.
First, a microgrant stream, where community-led groups are funded to host gathering and learning events in and around Toronto’s ravine system. Second, a champions training program, where pairs of community leaders are provided training, funding, and event planning support to host an event in their local ravines.
Equity-deserving community groups who face barriers, including uncertainty due to fear of getting lost or other feelings of lack of safety, in accessing ravine spaces are prioritized. As can be found throughout the Ravine Engagement Report, InTO the Ravines, through its very design, has been developed to work more closely and collaboratively with equity-deserving community members to support the Protect, Connect, and Celebrate tenets of the Ravine Strategy.
The multipronged nature of the program has had wide-reaching impacts: over 3,000 community members have actively engaged with their ravine spaces, with 50 champions receiving training and support over the course of the past three years.
Since the implementation of this unique and innovative program began three years ago, everyone involved in InTO the Ravines, whether they have played the role of champions, grantees, or program staff, has been able to experience Toronto’s ravine spaces in different, unique, and memorable ways. InTO the Ravines program also emphasizes continuing to develop relationships with the ravine spaces long after their involvement in the program ends.
InTO the Ravines centres around fostering connections between people and nature and nurturing spaces for self-connection or self-reflection.
As the program launched and the impacts of the pandemic became more pronounced, including greater feelings of isolation and sadness, the importance of these natural spaces became all the more crucial, especially for those in equity-deserving communities. As the program facilitates space for community gatherings in and around ravine spaces, community connection is a major element of this program. Over 100 events have been hosted by community members, and 15% of in-person event attendees said they had never visited a ravine before. Importantly, in a space where the impacts of climate change manifest, ravine spaces become critical to highlight the need to restore relationships and reconnect to nature.
The connection piece of InTO the Ravines is especially emphasized through the champion training program. Here, champions get to meet each other and learn from each other and speakers from the Toronto Region Conservation Authority and the City of Toronto, as well as build up their own skills in event planning and networking.
For me, it was knowing more about not just what is the Ravine Strategy, but what the city sort of looked to develop and how it grew. So meeting with park staff…that was pretty cool because I think on just our own– we had the documents, but just hearing it from the city and the work on that strategy was cool to get an inside look.
Program Participant
Park People ensures that champion alumni remain connected to the program by supporting them through various means, events and opportunities, networks, and funding to continue their activation of ravines in the years after they have completed training and that they are re-connected to other cohort members. 50% of past participants have continued to host events in their ravines after completing the program.
Finally, InTO the Ravines has also helped facilitate new connections to the land through Indigenous teachings as part of the various ravine events.
Events like this or talking to an elder, for me, was one of the first opportunities to learn about Indigenous history and parks. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have ever known where to even find information other than just reading up online.
Park and nature access are unequal across the city. For many of our programs, including InTO the Ravines, Park People prioritizes working with equity-deserving, resident-led groups who often live close to ravines but, for various reasons, both physical and sociological, do not access them.
As mentioned in our Ravine Engagement Report, several participants reported that they either didn’t know that ravines existed in their communities or that they were unaware of how to access them.
Our research found this was especially true in communities of colour.
Specifically, the Champions training program has focused on redressing some of this imbalance by working with residents from equity-deserving communities to provide them with training, funding, and support. One of InTO the Ravines’ core value is that community members are the experts on their local parks, neighbourhoods and ravines, and their nuanced and lived knowledge of their local community make them excellent leaders to take on this work.
A community member shares the impact of this focus in our Ravine Engagement Report,
In a dense city like Toronto, where few people have access to backyards or natural areas outside the city, InTO the ravines helped (me) see these spaces as shared places where (I) could get away from the daily life in the city.
Community member
Significantly, 70% of event attendees are more likely to bring friends and family to visit the ravines in the future.
Another cornerstone of the InTO the Ravines program is strong and collaborative partnerships. The InTO the Ravines Champions training program focuses on working together as a group and helps foster partnerships between sets of champions and inter-community partnerships across different city regions. As a testament to this, 125 park and ravine groups and 30 organizations worked together on the development and execution of InTO the Ravines.
Additionally, The City of Toronto and Park People developed this program collaboratively and continue to work jointly through the year to support each other’s strengths and to offer assistance or help fill in gaps. InTO the Ravines champions and microgrant recipients work collaboratively with Park People and the City through focus groups, feedback and evaluations to improve the program each year and are plugged into our wider Toronto Network. This year, Park People worked directly with past champions to provide partnership and support where groups requested it, continuing to prioritize working in trusting and collaborative relationships with community groups.
These themes also show up in a myriad of other ways through our Ravine Engagement Report.
Also, find the Ravine Strategy here to learn more about the important principles and how you can get involved.
If you are in Toronto between Saturday, September 30 and October 9, we highly encourage you to attend a Ravine Days event, including one that Park People and Evergreen are jointly supporting on Saturday, October 7, and one that STEPS Public Art is hosting with the support of Park People’s Cornerstone program.
“We often have limits in our heads, where we don’t always feel capable of taking action. I overcame this barrier by meeting other people who are doing great things in the parks. Thanks to the Park People program, I was able to get the myth out of my head that I am limited. Everything is possible!”
Program participant, Montreal Urban Park Champions
As we face some of the most significant challenges in generations, parks remain relevant in addressing climate change, social cohesion, and political polarization. Parks and public spaces are more than physical landscapes; they’re where we learn to share, to compromise, and to adapt to the needs of people we don’t yet know.
From the community leaders we support in activating their local parks to the municipalities that use our insights to create better park policy, the movement continues to expand. We’re pleased to share just some of these impacts in our 2024 Impact Report.
Small actions in parks often lead to unexpected change. A senior in Vancouver might become inspired to start organizing her own community events via our TD Park People Grants, or an Arts in the Parks participant who discovers a new path as an artist.
Park People’s future is rooted in connection. We’ll continue to support the people and ideas that help public spaces thrive.