As Dave Harvey retires from his co-leadership position at Park People, he reflects on the incredible journey since founding the organization in 2011.
Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks?
Here are some valuable tips to create a welcoming, safe, and respectful environment for participants of all abilities, backgrounds, ages, and gender identities!
Park clean-ups bring neighbours together, foster connection, and leave a lasting impact—explore our 5-step guide to get started.
Explore inspiring community-led events funded by our microgrants program, from land-based learning to nature walks and skill-sharing workshops.
How a temporary plaza in Montreal’s Parc Marcelin-Wilson was created to offer a gathering space for youth, with design improvements informed by Metalude’s insights through direct observations and youth engagement.
Come together with community members, park professionals, and municipal staff at the 2025 Park People Vancouver Forum!
Come together with community members, park professionals, and municipal staff at the 2025 Toronto Park Summit!
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This case study is part of the 2023 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.
More cities across Canada are prioritizing the naturalization of existing parkland. Converting manicured parkland into natural meadows has multiple benefits including increasing climate resilience, biodiversity, and nature connection for residents.
However, these projects have also proven controversial. For example, Vancouver’s “no-mow” pilot project, which naturalized certain sections of parks, was met with opposition by some residents who viewed the spaces as unkempt–a challenge that many other cities in Canada have reported facing.
Karley Cianchino thinks a lot about park naturalization. As City of Brampton Environmental Project Specialist, Cianchino’s job is to plan parks collaboratively with communities through the lens of nature.
Brampton prioritizes naturalization projects using its unique Eco Park Strategy–a citywide strategy that contains principles for conserving and enhancing both natural and cultural heritage. The strategy includes a helpful tool in understanding how to plan spaces, situating them on a scale from highly naturalized systems to high functioning social systems, recognizing that most places are a blend.
“If a park has a low environmental score, then we’ll look for opportunities to bring some restoration work forward.”
Karley Cianchino, City of Brampton Environmental Project Specialist
No matter how good they are, strategies have a habit of sitting on a shelf gathering dust. To ensure that doesn’t happen, Cianchino said that she does a lot of internal coordination, including a bi-monthly Eco Park meeting, as well as “casual conversations” with colleagues about new projects and discussing how to incorporate the Eco Park objectives. For example, if a park is undergoing upgrades, perhaps that’s an opportunity to incorporate naturalization work. This approach not only minimizes redundant community engagement and resource allocation but also enhances synergy between projects.
Not all of these projects go off without a hitch, however. Recently the city naturalized a large section of Dearbourne Park–the first time the city had brought its naturalization program to a busy neighbourhood park. It wasn’t received well, Cianchino said, with residents pointing out they had lost park space they used for other activities.
The city held a community meeting with residents who selected a smaller 10,000 square foot space in the park to be a programmed pollinator habitat, which would be stewarded by the community group Cianchino created with ongoing support from the city. In the future Cianchino said she wants to implement a QR code system in locations identified for potential naturalization asking residents to let the city know how they currently use the space.
Supporting community stewards will be a key part of the project’s ongoing success. Working with volunteers, Cianchino led the group’s first “bio blitz,” where residents measure the number of pollinators before the planting of native species this fall. Cianchino also works with the group to discuss what people can do in their own yards to support naturalization efforts. The core of the Eco Park Strategy, she said, is a series of linked habitats and green corridors,
“and you can’t just do that through public land. It’s critical that we educate landowners and help them build capacity to naturalize their spaces in a manner that works for them.”
Further Reading:
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.
By 2030, 30% of Canada’s land, water, and marine areas will be protected. That is, of course, if the country meets this goal, which was set by the international community at COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference.
Reaching such an ambitious goal requires strong collaboration. All levels of government, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, local non-profits, private landowners, and individual residents must all work together. But how do you build such a broad, but also deep coalition?
The work of Nature Canada–a national organization dedicated to protecting Canadian wildlife and wilderness–is all about bringing those various actors together in a concerted effort to work both nationally and hyper-locally through the Municipal Protected Areas Program to ensure Canada meets its 30×30 goal.
While protected natural areas may conjure images of vast uninterrupted pristine landscapes far away from where many of us live, Nature Canada Organizing Manager Dylan Rawlyk argued that protecting land within urban areas is vital.
One practical reason is that the most biodiverse landscapes within the country are situated along the southern edge of Canada where the majority of the population lives within a constellation of urban areas. Another less obvious reason has to do with storytelling. Bringing protected natural areas close to where people live their everyday lives helps make the importance of biodiversity more tangible. “[People] know it, they love it, and they’re connected to it,” Rawlyk said.
While cities often have natural area management and restoration plans in place, they each undertake conservation in slightly different ways, so part of the work of achieving the 30×30 target is working with cities to “unify all of our collective impacts,” Rawlyk said. While the majority of cities listed it as a priority, Park People’s 2024 survey found that one third of cities said addressing federal biodiversity and land protection goals was a high priority in 2024.
Nature Canada has forged both cross-country and hyper-local partnerships, creating, as Rawlyk put it, a web of organizations. At Nature Canada “we play the role of convening all those groups together and ensuring that we can see how the actions each one is doing is contributing to the greater whole.”
For example, in Hamilton, work led by Ontario Nature is helping to convene different organizations to add lands in the city’s Eco Park system to Federally recognized protection status. By working with the City of Hamilton, Hamilton Conservation Authority, and Hamilton Naturalist Club, the goal is to assess current lands and see which ones may need some different protection policies in place to meet the Federal definition and contribute to the overall 30×30 goal. Projects like this aligned with Federal programs such as the National Urban Park initiative led by Parks Canada are important to meet biodiversity protection goals.
Collaboration with First Nations communities and Indigenous organizations is “core” to the work, Rawlyk said, especially given the colonial history of conservation movements that have displaced Indigenous peoples from their land. To ensure these past mistakes are not repeated, Rawlyk pointed to an example of recent work by Réseau de Milieux Naturels protégés in Quebec, which “ran a workshop with a range of land trusts and also First Nations communities to try to build bridges between them.”
Nature Canada has also built partnerships with regional non-profits such as Ontario Nature and BC Nature who better understand local contexts and have strong political ties to move policies forward. Drilling down even further, working with hyper-local organizations, such as Whistler Naturalists Society, is essential because these groups hold deep knowledge of specific places, often performing activities like bio-blitzes to monitor species.
“That level of species understanding within the region is incredibly vital to be able to move forward with this work,” Rawlyk said. Even individual residents play a key role as they “can advocate to put more conservation measures in place” and act as watchdogs to ensure these places stay protected.
In the face of climate change, what nature-based solutions are cities implementing to support their resilience and biodiversity? Last December in Montreal, COP15 (the United Nations Biodiversity Conference) ended with a landmark agreement to guide global climate action through 2030. This agreement created several ambitious targets, including one (Target 12) which focused on increasing green and blue spaces in cities.
One year after COP15, this webinar brings together academics, NGOs, and other change-makers to address how their work contributes to biodiversity targets and discuss why biodiversity is so critical to a sustainable future.
In this moderated discussion, experts explore how different sectors are currently working to meet shared urban biodiversity goals and how we can all work differently –or more collaboratively– in the future. By exploring on-the-ground work across Canadian cities, experts demonstrate the multiple tools and ways we can all contribute to this urgent call to action.
In this webinar, we expand our understanding of biodiversity and re-imagine cities as critical spaces for collaboratively enhancing it.
The webinar is held in English; French subtitles are available.
Clint is an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper at University of Windsor. Through his appointment with the University, Clint leads field courses where students engage in ecological monitoring and restoration projects on Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation).
Autumn Jordan (she/they) organizes Nature Canada’s Bird Friendly City and Town Certification Program, which provides municipalities of all sizes with…
Rachel Buxton (she/her) is a conservation scientist with a focus on protecting wildlife in the city. She has worked on…
Dr. Febria (she/her/siya) is a Pinay/Filipina immigrant settler to Turtle Island and an assistant professor at the Great Lakes Institute…
Janet Sumner is a seasoned environmentalist with over 30 years of experience. Since 2003, she has served as the Executive…