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 emerging stream of the Park People Nature Connect Fund provides up to $5,000 to grassroots and registered organizations across Canada that connect people with nature, foster ecological stewardship, and restore urban parks and green spaces.
The scaling stream of the Park People Nature Connect Fund offers up to $20,000 to registered organizations across Canada that connect people with nature while fostering ecological stewardship and restoring urban parks.
Learn more about green social prescribing, an evolving practice that encourages individuals to reestablish connections with nature and one another to enhance their mental, physical, and social wellbeing.
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.
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.
Our city and our ravines were shaped by past extreme weather events. Looking ahead, our ravines can help us be more climate-resilient. But first, we need to protect them.
In this webinar, David MacLeod, Senior Environmental Specialist with the City of Toronto, and Carbon Conversations TO explore how these natural spaces can mitigate climate impacts and the steps we must take to protect them.
The webinar is held in English; French subtitles are available.
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.