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.
It takes a village to make a park look beautiful! While picking up garbage might not seem like an appealing activity at first, people enjoy cleanups because they get to see the tangible results of their efforts and feel more connected to their local park.As our Earth Day webinar made clear, cleanup events are a great way to inspire a collective love and commitment to your park among your neighbours—one that can have lasting effects on your community and on the environment.Here’s a 5-step plan to make your park clean-up a great community event.
Your municipality is an incredible resource for your park group to engage in your cleanup activities, and on an ongoing basis. They can help you plan and promote your event and access resources that you may need to get started.Begin by contacting your park supervisor about your plans to organize a cleanup, especially if this is your first park event. Your park supervisor can tell you what permits you might need, explain waste disposal protocols, and possibly connect you with other park enthusiasts who can join in the cleanup effort.Many municipalities also host city-wide cleanup days that new community park groups can join. Taking part in coordinated cleanup day will allow your group to access many resources that may not otherwise be available to you, like garbage bags and gloves. Plus, the city’s promotional reach will help you reach new people. Ask your park supervisor about any upcoming city-wide cleanup days.
It’s not just cities who help coordinate cleanups. For example, The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is a conservation partnership by Ocean Wise and WWF-Canada. They offer support to anyone who’d like to coordinate a shoreline cleanup (if your park connects to water in any way—a creek, stream, marsh, or even storm drains—this includes you!).Do some research to see what other organizations, networks, or events might be relevant to your park, and who might want to partner up with you on your event. Your neighbourhood is likely full of non-profit groups, community organizations and individuals, all of whom could lend a hand to your clean up and bring new communities of interest to your park events. For example, you could approach a local bike co-op to offer tune-ups for cyclists at your event, or invite an environmental organization to help educate people on the steps they can take to reduce their waste footprint.Finally, consider approaching a local business to sponsor your event by offering small rewards like reusable water bottles, gift cards, or other prizes for participants.
Start your event plan with a walk through of the park space: how accessible is the environment? Are there paved paths for people to walk on, or mostly uneven terrain? Are there washrooms or water fountains open for participants to use? Approximately how much garbage is there currently, and how many volunteers might it take to clean it thoroughly? Take notes during your walkthrough and talk through your findings with your team. What information is important to pass along to your participants?Next, you may wish to use an online tool, such as Evenbrite or Google Forms, to promote your event, manage volunteers, collect RSVPs, and provide pre-event instructions such as weather updates, accessibility information, and guidance on suitable event attire (long pants and closed-toes shoes are best!). When you’re ready to launch, use social media, local bulletin boards, email newsletters, and word-of-mouth to promote your event. Ask your neighbors about their recommendations for good places to promote the event, such as any local Facebook groups. You may also want to invite journalists from a community newspaper or local bloggers/social media influencers to cover the event.
Finally, it’s time to prepare your supplies. You’ll want to consider offering:
Set up a check-in station before your event begins to welcome volunteers, distribute supplies, and provide safety briefings on what to do if they come across hazardous materials. Make sure you also use this welcome opportunity to collect information from the people who arrive: have them sign up for your park groups newsletter and chat with them about how they use the park and their vision for their shared space.Depending on how many participants you have and how large your park is, it’s best to divide volunteers into small groups assigned to specific areas during the cleanup. If possible, ensure that each group has a representative from your park group to offer support and answer questions as you clean. When you’re finished with your cleanup, separate recyclables, compostables, and landfill waste at the end of the cleanup.Finally, remember to make it fun throughout! Play music, organize a scavenger hunt, or create challenges like “Who can collect the most candy wrappers/pop cans/red-coloured items/whatever!”
When the cleanup is finished, it’s time to celebrate all that you’ve achieved! Take a group photo of your volunteers, and count the weight of the trash collected or the size of the areas cleaned to motivate your participants and promote future events.In the days following your event, be sure to email your volunteers, partners, sponsors, and the City to thank them for their participation, ask for their input to improve future events, and remind them to stay in touch with your park group—especially if they want to help you organize the next cleanup!
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.
Park People is excited to launch the 2024 Canadian City Parks Report, our sixth annual edition highlighting the most significant trends, issues, and practices shaping Canada’s city parks.
Watch our special launch webinar to explore our findings:
The webinar features an engaging discussion on the future of city parks, with guest speakers from the City of Victoria and Greenspace Alliance. They share opportunities and challenges in their work around collaborations and partnerships, across city departments, communities, non-profits, and more.
Adri Stark is specialized in research and policy at Park People, and co-author of the annual Canadian City Parks Report.…
Joy is the Manager of Research and Partnerships at Park People and facilitates national research and network engagement that supports…
Julia is the Food Systems Coordinator for the City of Victoria. She comes to the role after over 15 years…
Nicole DesRoches, born in Ottawa and living in Chelsea Québec, part of the National Capital Region, therefore living within the…
Today, Park People launches the sixth Canadian City Parks Report–and the final iteration of this report in its current form, Bridging the Gap: How the park sector can meet today’s complex challenges through partnerships and collaboration.
Last year, we dove deep into the minds of park managers across the country, interviewing over 44 senior parks staff across 30 municipalities about the trends and challenges in the industry. One of the key insights from that process was a need to find collaboration sweet spots to achieve our many collective parks goals.
This year’s report expands on that insight by showcasing collaborative examples from across the country and through collecting data from 35 Canadian municipalities, over 2,500 residents of Canadian cities, as well as interviews with park staff and professionals.
Through that process we found six key insights related to collaborations and partnerships:
In this report you’ll find:
How does the City of Victoria’s Get Growing Victoria program take a food justice approach to provide gardening supplies to communities at risk of food insecurity, including those experiencing houselessness, Indigenous and racialized communities, seniors, and youth.
How Toronto is transforming future park spaces into temporary public areas through partnerships, letting residents enjoy them now while planning for long-term park development.
How partnerships across city departments and with local community groups helped the City of Charlottetown recover from Hurricane Fiona’s devastating winds.
How Mississauga is expanding parkland in a growing neighborhood to meet future demand through a cooperative, long-term property purchase plan.
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.
How an agreement between the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and Metro Vancouver Regional Parks provides a path for shared cultural planning.
How can municipalities move from awareness to action? A conversation with Jay Pitter about Black people’s experiences in parks and public spaces.
How Waterfront Toronto is raising the bar on inclusivity through their Waterfront Accessibility Design Guidelines.
How Nature Canada is building a web of partners at all scales to help Canada achieve its biodiversity conservation goals.
In questioning the future of our health and well-being, the health of our planet and how connected we feel to the rest of nature–and the equity issues inherent to all this–it’s easy to feel powerless. Multiple unique challenges suggest the need for multiple unique solutions, which may be difficult when there’s so much to pay attention to.
The new Cornerstone Parks Reports on Stewardship and Park Use allow us to change how we think. What if the same approaches that improve the planet’s health also strengthen its people’s health and happiness? And what if those activities are as within-reach as our local urban park? A growing body of evidence suggests that shared solutions to multiple challenges are at our fingertips.
The new Cornerstone Parks Reports on Stewardship and Park Use (High Park Report – Stanley Park Report – Mount Royal Report) combine findings from 796 individual survey responses throughout 2021 and 2022 to demonstrate large urban parks’ impact on communities’ connectedness to nature and–by extension–their health and happiness.
Surveys show that most park users (67%) who visit the large urban parks being studied spend their time participating in social and recreational activities rather than nature-focused ones (33%). And yet, the higher park users rate their nature-connectedness, the higher they report their physical health, mental health, and overall well-being.
People who engage in hands-on, nature-focused activities and park stewardship (over other park activities) report powerful social connections; a sense of belonging, meaning and purpose in their lives; greater physical health; and overall life satisfaction. To summarize, a healthier, happier life may begin with getting our hands dirty.
Large urban parks like High Park in Toronto, Stanley Park in Vancouver, and Mount Royal in Montreal are essential spaces for city-dwellers to access and connect with nature, including through park stewardship.
“Park stewardship” refers to park-based programs or events that invite volunteers to care for the land we’re a part of and depend on. Park stewardship can include removing invasive species, planting native species, inventorying or monitoring plants and wildlife, or removing litter, among other activities.
Among Cornerstone Park stewardship participants, 98% of those surveyed said that volunteering as stewards contributes to feeling connected to living things and the environment. Surveyed volunteers also said that participating in stewardship enables stronger feelings of nature-connectedness than engaging in recreational activities (75% vs 51%, respectively).
Knowing that there’s an association between nature connection and health suggests that participating in park stewardship could significantly impact health more than general park use.
Our survey findings show that:
0%
of volunteer stewards said stewardship makes them feel happy and satisfied
said stewardship contributes to their mental well-being
said stewardship contributes to their physical health
In greater detail:
of stewards agreed that stewardship contributes to them developing and maintaining social connections (only 73% said the same about recreational activities)
of stewards agreed that stewardship contributes to their sense of belonging to a community (only 69% said the same about recreational activities)
of stewards agreed that stewardship contributes to a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives (only 74% said the same about recreational activities)
Those participating in park stewardship more often rate their physical health and life satisfaction higher. People who participate in stewardship activities 20 or more times per year rate their life satisfaction the highest–even higher than those who engage in park recreation daily!
Unfortunately, our findings also show that some communities are less engaged in park stewardship. The majority of those who participate in stewardship identify as cis-gendered women (68%), able-bodied (86%) and white (76%).
With many communities under-represented in these parks and their programs, not everyone can access the health and social benefits experienced by park stewards.
Park user surveys also revealed that nature connections are weaker amongst specific demographics:
of park users who identify as a visible minority felt strongly connected to nature (73% of white park users said the same)
of park users born outside of Canada felt strongly connected to nature (73% of those born in Canada said the same)
People with a disability also felt significantly less connected to nature than their able-bodied counterparts. In both 2021 and 2022, 0% of park stewards surveyed indicated that they had a visible disability.
If certain communities are left out of stewardship programs and feel generally disconnected from nature, it’s reasonable to assume that this may impact their health.
Large urban parks have a meaningful opportunity to diversify their visitors and stewards. With current gaps in mind, founding Cornerstone Parks High Park, Stanley Park, and Mount Royal prioritize innovative programs that engage equity-deserving communities in park stewardship. The proof is in the numbers. From 2021 to 2022:
increase in the number of newcomers participating in stewardship at Cornerstone Parks
increase in the number of stewards who are BIPOC
This increase in inclusivity is thanks to innovative programs like:
The Cornerstone Parks program is currently announcing new partnerships that maximize the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks. They include the Darlington Ecological Corridor* in Montreal, Quebec; the Everett Crowley Park Committee and Free the Fern in Vancouver, BC; and the Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
The Cornerstone Parks network is excited to grow with them and measure how their stewardship work improves the lives of their diverse communities, all while helping their cities adapt to current and future crises such as climate change.
Environmental health, human health, and equity are complex. But we can work smarter, not harder, with solutions that nurture ourselves, the planet, and each other simultaneously. If we follow the evidence that participating in environmental stewardship leads to better health and greater happiness–and if we commit to extending those well-being benefits to more equity-deserving communities–the solution-seeking potential of our actions is multiplied.
To get our hands dirty is to reclaim power, especially in times of change. Canada’s large urban parks are the sites that show us how. Through innovative programs, they connect communities to nature and each other. The closer every Canadian is to a Cornerstone Park, the closer they are to tangible solutions: for now and for the future.
Dive deeper into the findings of our Cornerstone Parks Reports on Stewardship and Park Use, and follow us as we expand our network of Cornerstone Parks.
Park People launches the fifth annual Canadian City Parks Report, Surfacing Solutions: How Addressing Conflict and Reframing Challenges as Opportunities Can Create More Equitable and Sustainable Parks.
Over the past five years of the Canadian City Parks Report, our goal has always been to tell a story—the story of where city parks are going and where they need to go.
This year, we took an even deeper approach to gathering these stories. We sat down for interviews with 44 senior parks staff across 30 municipalities, who generously shared with us the challenges they are facing, the projects and people inspiring them, and their vision for the future of city parks.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from those conversations with the data we gathered from our surveys of 35 municipalities and over 2000 residents of Canadian cities.
Dive into the pdf to read about our key insights on trends and challenges in city parks:
As cities struggle to find and pay for new park space to meet growth needs, some argue that a shift towards focusing on quality is part of the solution.
Discover Vancouver’s ambitious parks and recreation master plan, using innovative mapping to guide equity-led parkland investment.
Brampton leads the way with its Eco Park Strategy, a citywide initiative focused on naturalization projects that preserve and enhance natural and cultural heritage.
How the City of North Vancouver is working to better engage equity-deserving groups in its longstanding Park Stewards program, including people who are underhoused, newcomers, and at-risk youth.
The Montreal’s Darlington Ecological Corridor bridges urban and natural spaces while addressing both ecological restoration and social needs through meaningful partnerships.
A look into the logistics of collaborative governance in a large urban park with Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon.
Learn more about the District of Saanich’s collaborative approach to tackling conflict over off-leash dog parks.
How cities are navigating the benefits and challenges of privately owned public spaces (POPS) through creative policies and guidelines on design, stewardship, and public programming.
Restoring the Don River’s natural flow, Toronto’s renaturalization project enhances biodiversity, mitigates flooding, and reconnects the city with its waterways.
Public washrooms are a park necessity.. Discover Edmonton’s approach to creating safe, inclusive public washrooms.
Bill 23: A conversation with Michelle Dobbie, Manager Park and Natural Heritage Planning, City of Richmond Hill.
Happy 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.
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.
Park People is thrilled to announce three new partners within our growing national network of Cornerstone Parks: the Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition in Edmonton, AB; Toronto Botanical Garden in Toronto, ON; and Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, NS.
Launched in 2021, Cornerstone Parks is the only national network dedicated to maximizing the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks. These are critical spaces for people living in cities to build meaningful connections to nature and each other, and they give cities a head start when mitigating the impacts of climate change.
Large urban parks often require more maintenance, operations, and programming resources, as well as innovative solutions to their unique challenges. Cornerstone Parks convenes organizations working in parks across Canada through a community of practice. The program supports them through direct funding for community stewardship and restoration, capacity-building within and between park groups (especially in equity-deserving communities), and measuring and storytelling the impact of our collective work.
The Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition, Toronto Botanical Garden, and Ecology Action Centre join the program’s three founding partners – Stanley Park Ecology Society in Vancouver, BC; High Park Nature Centre in Toronto, ON; and Les Amis de la montagne in Montreal, QC – as well as returning 2023 partners the Everett Crowley Park Committee and Free the Fern Stewardship Society in Vancouver, BC; Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon, SK; Rowntree Mills Park in Toronto, ON; and Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal, QC.
The Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition (ERVCC) is dedicated to the protection, preservation, and regeneration of the North Saskatchewan River Valley and Ravine System in Edmonton, AB. The river valley is an 18,000-acre “ribbon of green” forming the largest expanse of urban parkland in Canada. The volunteer-led Coalition collaborates with many conservation groups and initiatives – including Swim Drink Fish, Edmonton Native Plant Society, Shrubscriber, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, and Edmonton’s Root for Trees – to support conservation and restoration through knowledge-sharing, co-stewardship, public education, and political advocacy.
Through Cornerstone, they aim to accelerate the number of trees and plants planted alongside Root for Trees, enhance water monitoring with Swim Drink Fish, support the Tree Equity Program and Bird Friendly Edmonton, and pilot a new trail restoration program with their City. All this while creating employment opportunities that elevate people-power over carbon and exploring future designation as a National Urban Park.
Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG) offers an array of gardens spanning nearly four acres in Toronto, ON, adjacent to the Don Valley Ravine, Wilket Creek, and Edwards Gardens. They’re currently undergoing a landmark expansion across a 35-acre site, re-aligning their efforts to become a purpose-led botanical garden, cultivating a community with a profound connection to nature, and inspiring impact in their unique ecosystem and beyond.
With Cornerstone support, Toronto Botanical Garden will pilot a series of activities – including accessible ravine tours, citizen science initiatives, seed saving, and a fall festival coinciding with City of Toronto Ravine Days – to help communities engage more deeply with their local ravine systems and support ecological restoration efforts.
The Ecology Action Centre has operated as a member-based environmental charity in Nova Scotia since 1971. Their efforts to establish a Halifax greenbelt – a thriving and protected network of parks and greenspaces – have led to strong partnerships with local conservation organizations representing three key locations: Purcells Cove Backlands, Blue-Mountain Birch Cove Lakes, and Sandy Lake-Sackville River.
As a Cornerstone partner, the Ecology Action Centre will expand its existing hike series to improve public awareness and engagement within these parks, initiate research on local invasive species through citizen science programs, and pilot new activities like park user surveys. They will support Blue-Mountain Birch Cove Lakes as they, too, explore future designation as a National Urban Park.
Welcoming new partners into the Cornerstone Parks program helps us to make different (yet equally critical) connections: between parks in the same municipalities and across different municipalities; between long-established and newly-emerging park-based organizations; and between different types of large urban parks, as shaped by our changing cities.
By fostering relationships between different parks within the same urban centres – Vancouver, Edmonton and Saskatoon, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax – Cornerstone Parks enables peer-to-peer support where challenges like invasive plant species, wildlife interactions, and the impacts of climate change (as well as local policies to address them) are often the same. By creating dialogues between cities, the program exposes park groups to new (and shared) challenges and demonstrates novel models of collaboration and co-governance to help surface transferrable solutions.
Since 2021, the program has evolved to address the fact that there are many different types of large urban parks. This includes historically prioritized destination parks like our founders, Stanley Park in Vancouver, High Park in Toronto, and Mount Royal in Montreal. It also includes “adaptive reuse” projects like Everett Crowley Park and its connecting Champlain Heights trail system in Vancouver and the Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal – a former landfill site and rail corridor, respectively – whose revitalization creates new and essential green spaces for equity-deserving communities. It further includes connective parks like ravines, river valleys, and greenbelts that continue to resist urban development as cities rapidly grow around them.
Canada’s large urban parks are vital nature spaces that deserve our support. Whatever their location and history, and however long their organizational legacy of conservation and care, they all provide critical nature and community connections to people living in cities.
Cornerstone Parks enjoy benefits that they, in turn, multiply and extend to the urbanized, often equity-deserving communities who visit them. They do this through accessible programs and opportunities that measurably improve park users’ and volunteers’ physical health, mental health, and overall well-being. A win for these parks is a win for communities.
The Cornerstone Parks program is honoured to play a role in providing shared resources, networking and capacity-building, impact measurement and storytelling, and overall advocacy to help support the continued growth of our new partners, the Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition, Toronto Botanical Garden, and Ecology Action Centre, and uplift the ongoing work of all our Cornerstone Parks.
I will retire from my co-leadership position at Park People at the end of June 2024, thirteen years after I founded the organization.
This milestone has me considering the many positive changes that have happened in urban parks in Canada since 2011 and the special role that Park People has played in advancing them. It’s been quite a journey for me, the organization, and Canada’s incredible ecosystem of city parks.
Since the very beginning, Park People’s work has been about creating new connections—between people and nature, between neighbours when they meet by chance in public spaces, and between leaders and bold ideas that can make our parks even better.
Park People’s own origin story echoes this theme brilliantly. In 2010, I released a paper for the Metcalf Foundation, “Fertile Ground for New Thinking,” with my ideas for improving Toronto’s park system. Its final recommendation was to start a park-focused NGO in the city. At the time, I had absolutely no intention to start or lead such a group, but an enthusiastic group of people were inspired by the paper and pushed me to start an NGO. In return, I cajoled them into becoming our founding board members and volunteers. We then embarked on a bold plan to support more people to see themselves as park leaders and to connect them to the tools they would need to create great parks for everyone.
On April 12, 2011, we officially launched Park People with our Toronto Park Summit. This was our first opportunity to connect park professionals and emerging advocates in our city. Through these lively conversations, we began building the collective power required to support and sustain vibrant green spaces that all urban residents can enjoy.
In the years since our original group of board members and volunteers has expanded exponentially: Park People now has more than 25 staff members, offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and a national board of city and community builders. We’ve also engaged thousands of new supporters — our Park People Network now unites 1,400 local park groups in 35 cities in every province, and we’ve provided grants to grassroots community leaders to animate their parks in 21 urban areas.
When launching Park People, our goal was to spark a city parks movement that could fundamentally change how our society sees the value of these public green spaces. It was an ambitious vision, but I think that through our work with many great partners and community leaders, we’ve achieved it.
Canada’s parks have changed significantly in these last 13 years, mostly for the better. Park People is proud to have been a small part of these shifts, contributing vital research on trends and opportunities and working with governments and park leaders to support progressive park policies.
As a result:
The major increase in park use during the height of the pandemic wasn’t a one-time blip: I’ve never seen so many people using our parks in so many new and creative ways. Parks are where we meet with friends, celebrate occasions, mourn losses, sample great food, hear music, and experience art—they’re key to the diversity, richness, and joy of urban life.
This belief has long guided the design of Park People’s grants, training, and networking programs, which have helped hundreds of people turn their parks into dynamic community hubs. We’ve consistently made the case for the unique value of parks, from our parks-focused platform for the 2014 Toronto election to solutions papers, national conferences and our Canadian City Parks Report.
They aren’t frills—they’re core to the character of our communities. Our research has shown that they measurably improve our physical, mental, and overall well-being and can serve as antidotes to the social isolation and loneliness epidemic.
Who isn’t using parks is as important as who is. Through programs like Sparking Change, Park People centres equity-deserving communities in our program planning and delivery, collaborating with them to ensure their knowledge and experiences make parks accessible for all. As we embark upon this work and share what we have learned from it, we’ve observed that equity metrics have increasingly become a core part of park planning and acquisition strategies in municipalities across the country.
As Rena Soutar of the Vancouver Parks Board says, “There is no such thing as a culturally neutral space that’s been touched by human hands.” The 2022 Park People Conference featured three of Canada’s leading Indigenous park professionals, Rena, Lewis Cardinal, and Spencer Lindsay, who addressed how colonialism plays out in park practices and how we can embed reconciliation and decolonization into the places we call parks. As an example, the Vancouver Park Board has implemented co-management and guardian programs with Indigenous communities. At the same time, Edmonton worked closely with Indigenous leaders on kihcihkaw askî, the country’s first urban Indigenous culture park site.
As our climate changes, urban parks are becoming increasingly important spaces to mitigate heat, absorb stormwater, and protect plants, animals, and people. Park People has been at the forefront of highlighting opportunities for parks to serve as powerful tools for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The value of a park doesn’t lie in size. Small pockets of green space can be far more meaningful to our well-being. As our cities increasingly densify and the cost of land rises, we’re seeing neglected spaces such as those under highways, roads, electricity corridors, railway lines, and even old landfills being transformed into beautiful natural spaces. Our research and financial support helped spur such innovative parks as Toronto’s Meadoway and Bentway and Calgary’s Flyover Park.
We’re asking a lot of our municipal parks departments. More people are using parks, and staff are now entrusted with addressing issues of homelessness, equity, reconciliation with Indigenous people, climate change mitigation, and adaptation. In my opinion, their work is more interesting and rewarding, and park staff are making a positive difference in our cities and communities. But it’s certainly a tougher job than it used to be. In response, Park People has made supporting and connecting our municipal park staff partners one of our top priorities.
The populations of our cities are rapidly increasing, and park budgets in Canadian cities are frankly not keeping up. If this longtime trend continues, I’m concerned about what our parks will look like 13 years from now. Without appropriate funding, there won’t be enough parks to meet community needs. We’ll slide down into an American-style model, where a lack of government support created a crisis in parks that philanthropy and private conservancies had to address. Partnerships and philanthropy are great, but there is absolutely no replacement for properly funded city parks departments.
Creative community partnerships are no longer the exception for city parks; they’re the norm. From working with local volunteer groups to creating formal park conservancies, park departments are embracing collaborations with unexpected partners to add value to city park resources, not replace them. Park People made the case for such partnerships from our earliest days, and we have helped to nurture and lay the groundwork for some of Canada’s leading park partnership models. Meanwhile, the federal government is becoming an important player in city parks. Canada was once one of the few jurisdictions without a strong federal role in city parks. But after creating Rouge National Urban Park in Toronto, the federal government has initiated a process to create six new national urban parks across Canada in the next few years. Provinces like Ontario, which have traditionally stayed away from pursuing provincial parks in cities, have also committed to new urban parks. Park People has been excited to partner with governments and support these game-changing efforts.
Park People didn’t invent community involvement in parks — there were people across Canada doing that long before 2011. But we played a critical role by bringing them together, amplifying their voices, sharing their successes, inspiring others, and most fundamentally, making it easier for them to unlock resources and address barriers so that they can make their parks more vibrant and their neighbourhoods stronger.
The last 13 years have seen incredibly positive changes in Canada’s urban park system. I’m proud to say that Park People has played an important role in advancing these developments.