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.
The programs offers community members from equity-deserving neighbourhoods training and coaching to help them enhance or transform vacant or underused spaces into public green areas.
Pumpkin parades are a creative way to celebrate local creativity and give carved jack-o’-lanterns a second life. Here’s a step-by-step guide to make your pumpkin parade a smashing success.
Learn more about the impact of Canada’s large urban parks’ stewardship initiatives—from healthier ecosystems and stronger community well-being to essential support for city services.
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By donating to Park People, you’ll support vibrant parks for everyone.
Dr. Nadha Hassen and Ayan Mohamed
Oct 21, 2025 Greater Toronto Area
Learn more from our evaluation of the Sparking Change Toronto program.
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.
Equity, Health, Sparking Change
From our work to 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 Impact Report.
Discover the impact of the Sparking Change program in Toronto on community health, equity, human-nature connection, and ecological integrity through grassroots park initiatives.