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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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.
Designing for inclusivity and accessibility is top of mind for many municipalities. From our surveys, 78% of municipalities indicated that universal accessible design is a high priority in their work. And while many municipalities look to provincial accessibility guidelines to meet basic standards, our 2022 public survey revealed that 10% of city residents say that insufficient accessibility features discourage them from visiting and enjoying city parks. This suggests that parks are still not working for everyone.
Waterfront Toronto, a tri-government agency, noticed gaps in existing provincial and municipal accessibility guidelines when designing new public spaces, specifically spaces around water. Some of these gaps include standards around the design of boat launches, boardwalks, beaches and water entry points.
Waterfront Toronto knew that in order to create truly accessible public spaces they needed to learn from, listen to and involve the people who understand accessibility challenges and opportunities the best – people living with disabilities.
Waterfront Toronto assembled an advisory committee made up of individuals with professional and technical expertise, most of whom are people living with disabilities, to guide the development of their new design guidelines. The guidelines aim to go above and beyond existing requirements and ensure waterfront settings can be enjoyed by all. Notable requirements include standards that all beaches must have accessible pathways into the water and boat launches for adapted canoes and kayaks must be provided.
The process of including community members with lived experience in an advisory committee is not a novel engagement practice. But what really sets this work apart is that the guidelines incorporated a permanent mechanism to include those with lived experience in all future projects.
The advisory committee emphasized the guiding principle of “nothing about us without us”, and the idea that no single voice speaks for the entire disability community. The committee members also highlighted the importance of implementation.
One of the ways Waterfront Toronto addressed this was to create a permanent accessibility committee that reviews all future public realm projects and will advise on future updates to the guidelines. This follow-on committee, known as the Accessibility Advisory Committee, is made up of individuals with professional expertise, advocates and caregivers, most of whom identify as a person with a disability, who receive an honorarium for their time. When composing the committee, Waterfront Toronto sought people with a range of disabilities and experiences to try and represent the diversity of accessibility needs.
For any new parks or public space projects, the Accessibility Advisory Committee is engaged at least twice in the process. The committee provides feedback within the early stages of the design phase to flag any accessibility concerns and again once the construction is complete, with additional opportunities for input as needed. This “roll through” of complete projects identifies any potential areas for improvement. This feedback will be implemented as amendments to the guidelines and applied to future projects, but Waterfront Toronto has also committed to accommodating the feedback at the site when a retrofit or repair is needed.
The guidelines set out a new standard for inclusively designed public spaces by filling gaps and going above and beyond current requirements, and proactively seeking out those with lived experience to guide projects on a long-term basis.
Enhancing accessibility to blue spaces ensures that everyone has access to the restorative power of nature. And while the implementation of the new guidelines ensures that people with disabilities can participate in these public spaces, accessibly designed spaces are good for everyone.
“We know that to create a vibrant waterfront that belongs to everyone, we must have a strong commitment to accessibility in everything we make and do. With the support of the Accessibility Advisory Committee we are making accessibility another area of true design excellence.”
Pina Mallozzi, Senior Vice President, Design at Waterfront Toronto
Further Reading
A typical neighbourhood park often contains slides and swings for younger kids and benches for adults to gather, but what about teenagers? What does play look like for them and what park designs are needed to support that?
This is something that Stephanie Watt thinks a lot about. Watt is a co-founder and co-director, along with Margaret Fraser, of Metalude–a public space consulting firm that specializes in engaging with youth up to age 18 to promote public participation, playable public spaces, and child-friendly cities.
Youth are very aware of their “minority” status in public spaces, Watt said, and aren’t often invited to participate in conversations about park design. They sometimes feel like they fall into a gap in public spaces where playgrounds may be designed for younger kids and other park amenities are designed with adults in mind. It’s not about designing literal play structures and objects, but about instilling a sense of playfulness in the space itself, she said.
Take the example of a plaza built in Parc Marcelin-Wilson in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough of Montreal. The park is situated near two large high schools and a public survey and conversations with the schools revealed a need to have a “meeting place for young people,” David Sauvé, Development Officer for the Department of Culture, Sports, Recreation, and Social Development in Anhuntsic-Cartierville said. So the borough decided to test a temporary “plaza” structure in the park, also near a bus stop, meant to be a hang-out spot for youth. The structure included multiple seating areas to accommodate flexible socializing.
Metalude was brought in to better understand the use of the structure. They did this through direct observation of plaza use, semi-structured interviews with youth at the plaza as well as in other parts of the park and even at a shopping mall across the street where youth sometimes go to eat lunch. In the end they ended up collecting observational data from about 500 users and interviewed approximately 50 youth about their experiences.
Engaging with youth requires a different approach, Watt said. That means switching up what you may view as a “professional” engagement. For example, Watt said sometimes they listen to music with youth during their engagements–something that likely wouldn’t fly at a traditional town hall. You have to either keep things really fun or you have to make them really short, she said because youth often have lots of other demands on their time, from caring for siblings to sports practice to homework. It’s about learning how to “build 10 or 15 minute engagement moments that are rich,” Watt said.
The engagement was a learning moment for borough staff as well.
“They brought us back to what it was like to be a teenager in public space. Things we tend to forget when we become adults.”
David Sauvé, Development Officer for the Department of Culture, Sports, Recreation, and Social Development in Anhuntsic-Cartierville
The observational nature of the study allowed for the natural uses of the plaza to be uncovered, leading to potential design decisions about a permanent structure. For example, the importance of the social design of the seating, which was arranged in such a way that four to six people could sit and socialize in a circle rather than the typical park bench design, which forces everyone to face the same way in “a long line of strangers,” Watt said.
“The furniture allows for face-to-face [interactions] and the furniture that isn’t face-to-face was mostly used for waiting by people who were alone taking the bus.”
Stephanie Watt, Co-founder and co-director of Metalude
Another finding was how the use of one particular structure–a net installed on the plaza–was quite gendered. While boys called it a trampoline and jumped on it, girls called it a hammock. Watt said a design recommendation could be to create two different amenities, one that can accommodate jumping and one for relaxing.
You can plan for something, but it’s really important to get out there and see how people are using it. And then accommodate those usages–there isn’t a right or wrong usage.”
Cities are in dire need of new park space. Despite that need, however, sometimes funding challenges, environmental contamination, and ownership issues mean that sites slated to become parks won’t actually be designed and built in their final form for several years.
One of the key challenges of growing cities is acquiring new parkland to serve intensifying neighbourhoods when so much land has already been built on. In fact 69% of municipalities said acquiring new parkland was a major challenge for them in 2023. A long-term plan in Mississauga shows how a consistent, transparent approach to acquiring existing housing can lead to long-term gains in expanded parkland for a growing population.
Mississauga’s Cooksville neighbourhood, an area designated as an urban growth centre, is already deficient in parkland according to the City’s parks plan. While the City’s goal is 12 percent of land area for parks within urban growth centres, Cooksville was significantly below that target. With the future LRT and high-rise housing development coming to the area, growth will only continue to intensify, said Sharon Chapman, Manager of Parks and Culture Planning at the City of Mississauga.
The solution is a long-term plan by the City to acquire land within the Cooksville area to expand existing parkland so that it can accommodate more use and different activities. Council approved the plan in 2017, identifying 31 properties totalling 10ha to be acquired to assist in “achieving large cohesive areas of park with continuous trails systems.”
While expanding parkland is the primary goal, there is a second benefit of the expanded parkland–climate resilience. Some of the current houses in the area sit within a floodplain and could not be constructed today, which might make it more appealing to sell to the City, Chapman noted, since homes with a history of flooding are less marketable to buyers.
The project is not without controversy, however. Some homeowners have been upset at the plans to demolish housing in the area, saying that they don’t plan on selling to the City. Chapman said she thought some of the initial resistance from homeowners was due to misinformation as well as concern about change. The City made sure to clarify that it was proceeding on a “willing buyer-willing seller” basis only, meaning that expropriating properties is not part of the plan. Negotiations with owners willing to sell are based on reports prepared by accredited independent appraisers estimating the fair market value of the property.
“Our approach has been really a co-operative one with each individual homeowner. We have respected property owners who did not want to talk anymore about it.”
Sharon Chapman, Manager of Parks and Culture Planning at the City of Mississauga.
Commonly, park and housing advocates are pinned against each other as if urban residents need to pick between one or the other. Chapman acknowledged this and said that the City was aware “the project might be seen as removing housing stock,” but she noted it was only a few single-detached homes and not all 31 properties actually had houses on them. “We know that we are losing a small amount of single family homes and the area overall will grow immensely in terms of the new units that come in, so we need to keep the bigger picture in mind to make sure we have the right amount of parkland there.”
To date, 19 properties have been acquired, creating over 8 ha of new parkland–just shy of the 10 ha goal. Demolition happens on a rolling basis so that houses don’t sit vacant and can be turned into parkland right away.
“We’re at a point now that the properties we have acquired are enough that we can now start moving forward with plans to redevelop the park.”
The City has moved now into public engagement for the parkland, which will include both natural and built features.
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.
When it comes to the health benefits of parks, what’s in a name? Can different types of parks – with varying sizes, histories, descriptions, and designs – offer the same benefits as Canada’s historic “destination parks?” Through Cornerstone Parks’ latest research, the answer is clear. Yes, and the key is making space for stewardship.
Cornerstone Parks launched in 2021 as the only national network maximizing the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks through direct funding for community stewardship, capacity-building within and between park groups, and measuring the impact of our collective work. In 2023, Park People analyzed two years’ worth of surveys from park users and volunteers at our founding three Cornerstone Parks – Stanley Park in Vancouver; High Park in Toronto; and Mount Royal Park in Montreal – to better understand the relationship between those parks and community health and well-being.
Our initial Cornerstone Parks Reports show that park use is associated with better health and well-being, and that these benefits are dependent on park users feeling nature-connected. People who engage in park stewardship (nature-based programs that invite volunteers to care for the land) versus other park activities report powerful environmental and social connections that make them happier and healthier. The results also show that some communities are unfortunately less engaged in park stewardship than others. The good news is that park stewardship – and its resulting health benefits – can often be accessed in unexpected places.
Understanding that most city residents do not live close to historic destination parks like Stanley Park, High Park, and Mount Royal, we wondered whether different types of large urban parks – from newer adaptive reuse projects to undeveloped arteries like river valleys – likewise boost community health.
To find out, we conducted voluntary, online and in-person surveys with 86 stewards participating in programs at four new Cornerstone Parks partners, Free the Fern Stewardship Society and the Everett Crowley Park Committee in South Vancouver, the Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon, and the Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal. Between August and November 2023, survey respondents shared how stewardship impacts different aspects of their well-being and their engagement in pro-environmental behaviours.
Our 2023 Cornerstone Parks Reports echo the trends seen in our 2022 reports. From surveys with volunteer stewards at the new Cornerstone Parks, we found that:
Due to those nature connections, we found that:
These results are similar to what we heard from park stewards volunteering in long-standing destination parks in 2022.
Further, we investigated which park elements best support nature connections and thus have the greatest impact on health. Volunteer stewards in 2023 say that the places that best promote wellness-boosting nature connections are trails (25%); natural areas that include wildlife, forests, and native plants (30%); and around water (15%).
Volunteer stewards also say that the following places inhibit feelings of nature connectedness: grey/paved spaces (33%); crowded spaces (16%); recreation facilities including sports facilities, playgrounds, and other structures (21%); manicured lawns and non-native plants (17%); and areas with litter (12%).
The results demonstrate that naturalized spaces are essential to building strong connections to our environments. However, creating naturalized spaces in urbanized areas is not an easy feat. Our new Cornerstone Parks have found their own innovative ways to ensure diverse urban neighbourhoods enjoy nature nearby.
Free the Fern and the Everett Crowley Park Committee work in Everett Crowley Park and the adjoining Champlain Heights Trail system in South Vancouver, BC. Champlain Heights contains a former city landfill as well as hundreds of low-income, co-op, strata, and seniors’ housing units. The area now boasts the fifth largest park in Vancouver, Everett Crowley Park. The park and trails are part of the only 4% of native forest remaining in Vancouver, making them a refuge for residents.
“Our greatest success that these ecological improvements reflect positively on the mental and physical health of individuals, especially those who live in the Champlain Heights community.”
Damian Assadi, Chair of the Everett Crowley Park Committee and Director at Large of Free the Fern
The park and trail system balance the much-needed features of the neighbourhood – including the busy Champlain Heights Community Centre, and sports and recreation facilities – with assets proven to promote nature connectedness. Free the Fern’s many projects include a Healing Forest, recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as dedicated to the land’s first inhabitants and their descendants. They also include a Native Food Forest whose fruits, berries, and other edibles benefit both food-insecure humans and wildlife, birds, and insects.
The Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal is also an adaptive reuse project. It includes a former railway that connects to the biodiversity of Mount Royal through a series of interventions within the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough. This densely-populated, lower-income area contains many elements that inhibit nature connections, including paved spaces, crowds from the nearby universities, numerous sports facilities, and litter generated by local shops and restaurants.
“The city is an ecosystem, but a very disturbed ecosystem where we can create a habitat for species to thrive. But the ecosystem is also full of people with connections to the places they live. A socio-ecological approach balances people’s attachment to the places they live with the needs of ecosystems and creates new connections between both, for the benefit of both.”
Alexandre Beaudoin, Founder of the Darlington Ecological Corridor
Darlington achieves this balance of biodiversity, food security, and climate resilience by re-introducing nature connections into the urban fabric. They do this through giant gardening pots placed along the corridor where neighbours can reserve a pot, take free gardening courses, and plant their choice of edibles and flowers. Darlington maintains a nourishing forest and community gardens along the route, enabling residents to access fruits, berries, and plant medicines. A third of Darlington stewards (33%) say that these food forests are their favourite places to connect to nature. Knowing the well-being impacts of water, Darlington is also revitalizing a healing pond for patients of a local rehabilitation institute whose sensory, language, hearing, and motor abilities are impaired.
The Meewasin Valley Authority operates in the Meewasin Valley, a 6,700-hectare park that spans the South Saskatchewan River for 75 kilometres through and beyond the city of Saskatoon. Meewasin’s central location and massive trail system enable over 2 million visitors annually to explore its nationally unique ecosystems without leaving the city. Stewards could not contain their love for Meewasin, with almost 50% providing additional programming feedback and telling us they want more opportunities to volunteer!
“Meewasin aims to transform visitors through meaningful experiences: teaching about sustainability, how to be a good steward to our natural environment in our everyday life, and ways to stay involved through volunteering, donating, or sharing information.”
Andrea Lafond, CEO of Meewasin
The Meewasin Valley is linear and uninterrupted by development; therefore, it extends the benefits of nature to a wide variety of communities. Upgrades to the Meewasin Trail mean that residents from North, South and core Saskatoon neighbourhoods have access to the park and its programs. Access isn’t limited to those with the physical ability to travel there; Meewasin’s work exists in the digital space as well. The Meewasin App highlights traditional uses for the region’s land, river, and medicinal plants to showcase the intersection between traditional Indigenous and ecological knowledge.
Large urban parks aren’t bound by any one definition. Whether they’re 100+-year-old destinations like Stanley Park, High Park, and Mount Royal Park, or take other innovative forms, they offer proven health and well-being benefits to their communities. The 2022 and 2023 Cornerstone Parks Reports prove that the most important predictor of health and well-being is nature-connectedness. While Canadian cities continue to densify, there is a lot that they can do to reclaim their “in-between” spaces and create meaningful connections for the diverse communities that surround them.
Free the Fern and the Everett Crowley Park Committee, the Meewasin Valley Authority, and the Darlington Ecological Corridor reach out along neighbourhood trail systems, river valleys, and rail corridors – sites that resist urban development – to nourish their communities. They offer wellness-boosting programs and volunteer opportunities alongside access to food, healing, knowledge-sharing, and other points of connection. They thereby sustain and enrich both their own organizations’ capacities and the lives of residents around them.
It doesn’t matter what a park is called so much as it matters that communities feel called to it. Communities hear that call via the many nature-connected features, programs, and stewardship opportunities offered again and again by Cornerstone Parks. Hear the call and experience what park stewardship can do for you!
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its latest report. In response to the report’s finding, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Terrible, alarming climate change news makes it difficult to know how to inch forward in any direction and to decide if our actions even matter.
This Venn diagram, created by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab is a useful tool to answer the question, ” What should I do about climate change?”
It’s featured in her TED Talk How to find Joy in Climate Action where she says:
“People often ask me what they can do to help address the climate crisis. But what they usually mean is what’s one quick, easy, simple thing they can do. Well, that particular ship has sailed.” She adds:
“All too rarely are we asked to contribute our special talents, our superpowers, to climate solutions. And what a failing. For that would actually enable the radical changes we need.”
Maggie Dunlop, a 2022 InTO the Ravine Champion, has many superpowers. She’s an education researcher and mother of two children under five who joined the program because she believes: “I have to be able to look them in the eyes in 2050 and tell them I did everything I could.”
About a minute into talking with Maggie, she sort of casually says:
“I was thinking, you know, we are just on a runaway train, and I can’t do anything to stop it. And I came to the conclusion that I just have to do a little thing. And that little thing is probably to make people a bit more connected to our place – the world around us.”
I paused and circled back, “The runaway train you mentioned?” I asked. And Maggie verified that yes, she was talking about that runaway train. The runaway train where it feels like you are a strapped-in passenger, most certainly not in the driver’s seat, with the train hurtling toward climate catastrophe.
Living your Venn diagram can feel small as climate change looms so very (very) large. But, at the same time, when a recent New York Times headline posed the question “Do You Have to Be an Optimist to Work Toward a Better World?” this answer resonated with me most:
“It’s important to imagine a positive future for a positive future to happen.”
In short, there is nothing naive about optimism. And, there’s nothing naive about Maggie who says: “It is not easy doing something new. There is a reason why things aren’t already being done.”
The new thing that Maggie is doing is helping her community dip into and see the green spaces and ravines in her community. That’s what connects her to her Venn diagram.
Access to amazing green spaces is what drew Maggie to her Toronto Rockcliffe Smythe neighbourhood. Rockcliffe Smythe was mostly farmland until the 1920s when it became home to a significant gravel quarry. The gravel pit was converted into Smythe Park and gifted to the community. The park is at the end of the Black Creek watershed, about 70 metres from the Humber River. It’s a growing and densifying community situated in a delicate river valley on active flood plains where homes regularly experience flooding. It’s also home to wood ducks, beavers, opossums (North America’s only marsupial), snakes, lizards and a greatly reduced population of frogs, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, fish, and turtles.
As an InTO the Ravines Champion, Maggie and her neighbour and fellow mother Francine Brunet received a little bit of funding, and some critical support to make a meaningful difference in connecting their community to the green space and biodiversity Maggie desperately needs them to notice.
You can hear Maggie’s frustration when she tells me: “People are “just buying stuff, and spending money and just not really thinking about how it’s all connected.”
Maggie’s a regular visitor to High Park where she takes her children to play and attends events when she can. It was in High Park where she was trained as a Turtle Protector. With a stipend to host an event in the park, Maggie and Francine hired a retired science teacher that Maggie met at an event in High Park. Maggie invited the teacher, and his box of caterpillars, to Smythe Park on a sunny summer afternoon.
Oh, and about 100 people showed up.
That’s the simple version.
The less simple version is that Maggie stopped people on her commute to work, with pockets full of flyers and her three-year-old daughter in a bike seat to joyfully tell passersby about the caterpillar event. She and Francine also strategically hosted the workshop on a day when families were hosting barbeques and gatherings in the park. They strolled over to families and invited them to come on over.
Later that summer, in a quiet corner of Smythe Park, stretching their stipend even further, Maggie and Francine hired an artist to lead a clay turtle-making workshop with families. They divided the group, with half heading to the water’s edge to learn about the turtles that live in the community. Prior to the event, most of those in attendance knew little or nothing about the turtles that live in the community and didn’t know that two species of turtles are provincially designated as of “special concern.”
This issue is of special concern to Maggie:
“When we don’t know that we’re among turtles when we don’t know what a red-winged blackbird looks like, we’re kind of walking through the world a little bit blind.”
Maggie grew up in England and was very disoriented by the varied species she encountered in her new Canadian home. “When I came here. I didn’t know what the trees were or the birds or the flowers. And, I felt illiterate as a result.”
So, Maggie is determined to build up ecological literacy – not just her own, but her community’s.
“If they know what a starling is, and they don’t see them so often anymore…when they notice that the animals that they’re used to seeing and whose behaviour they know, are acting differently….If they notice that the berries that this animal eats are not growing at the right time anymore, then it starts to make sense that we should be concerned about this.”
Maggie hopes to create a guide that translates common species’ names into Spanish, Portuguese, and Somali – the languages of parents of young children in her community. Because, “It’d be much easier for people to understand, to remember, if they knew what local animals, flowers and trees are in their own language.”
Maggie is planting seeds – seeds of knowledge, joy, literacy, awareness, building a better world, using her own two hands. Make no mistake about it: this is climate leadership. As Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the creator of the Venn diagram, says:
“There is so much work to be done, Please, do not choose something that makes you miserable. What we need is a change in every sector and every community. The solution shouldn’t be ‘What can I do to address the climate crisis?’, but ‘What can we do together?”
Park People launches the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report, the fourth annual report featuring the biggest trends, issues, and practices shaping Canada’s city parks.
In the webinar, you can hear directly from the Canadian City Parks Report authors—Adri Stark, Emily Riddle, and Jake Tobin Garrett and get the inside track on:
The session features an in-depth discussion moderated by Park People Board Chair Zahra Ebrahim. The webinar is held in English; French subtitles are available.
Adri Stark is specialized in research and policy at Park People, and co-author of the annual Canadian City Parks Report.…
Emily Riddle is nehiyaw and a member of the Alexander First Nation in Treaty 6. She lives in amiskwaciwâskahikan. A…
Jake Tobin Garrett (he/him) is a writer, illustrator and public space policy and research consultant. He was previously Park People’s…
Zahra is a public interest designer and strategist focused on shifting power to people who are typically underrepresented in institutions…
You may know Park People from one of our microgrant programs, such as the TD Park People Grants. Through these programs, we provide small amounts of funding to community groups and NGOs to organize activities and events in their local parks.
That all sounds great – but why do we do this? Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks? This post explores these questions and shines a light on some of the tensions and challenges of providing microgrants.
City parks have unrealized potential to promote human wellbeing, biodiversity and climate resilience. Too many people living in Canadian cities cannot easily access high-quality green spaces with amenities and activities that enrich their lives. Neighbourhoods such as my own (in the ward of Davenport in Toronto) are very vulnerable to the increasing heat waves we face because of a lack of trees and green space. The parks that we do have are precious, but they are not neutral spaces. For many reasons, they do not feel safe or promote a sense of belonging for everyone.
One of Park People’s early tenets was that when communities get involved, parks get better. Communities are full of people with energy, ideas, and talents. They understand the opportunities to improve their local parks and the challenges specific to their community. With the right resources, their work can be much more sustainable and responsive than an initiative led by an outside group like Park People. So, our guiding question is: How do we support community leaders in realizing the potential of their local parks?
Our network’s community groups have varied goals, from growing food to promoting biodiversity and supporting mental health. Regardless of their focus area, park events are a great way to build strategic support and awareness for their initiatives. They are joyful and fun, providing an enticing entry point for engaging city staff, fellow community members and local politicians to talk about a vision for the park or the wider community.
Events also have a lot of inherent value, even when they don’t tie into a bigger plan. Our research and program evaluations show that park events build a sense of social connection and belonging, making people feel happier and less isolated. In 2024, these social ties are critical to addressing the pandemic’s mental and physical health repercussions and preparing us to support each other through the ongoing climate crisis challenges, such as urban heat waves and floods.
The diversity of events that groups organize is inspiring. They range from programming to support families with neurodiverse children in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park to hands-on mushroom-growing workshops in Ville de Deux-Montagnes outside Montreal. These events tell us the rich story of what is happening in Canadian city parks so that we can make the case for more resources and support from governments and other stakeholders.
Through microgrants, we can fund groups too small or new to have non-profit status. Although the amounts are small, they help offset the costs of volunteering, especially in lower-income communities. By keeping our application processes simple and removing traditional fundraising barriers (such as the need for non-profit status), people can spend their limited time bringing their ideas to life, trying out new things, and cultivating other support like help from their local city councillor. And at a systems level, we are doing our part in a small way to try to redistribute resources and power within the parks sector.
Offering grants also encourages groups to get in touch with us. Once we are in touch, we can offer other types of support, such as training workshops, coaching, and peer connections. We learn so much about what’s happening and what folks need and dream of doing through applications and conversations. In 2023, we offered phone call applications for smaller grant amounts. There was a groundswell of new groups that stepped forward.
In our annual survey, park groups tell us that their number one need is more funding. Microgrants are a way for us to respond to this need. They also help us build group capacity and relationships to set grantees up to access larger funding in the future.
Park People has been providing microgrants or small honoraria in some form since 2014. We have learned a lot over the years and are still learning.
We are inspired by trust-based philanthropy, which ‘seeks to transform the relationships between philanthropic organizations and non-profits by identifying systemic inequalities and addressing inherent power imbalances,’ as Jennifer Brennan and Shereen Munshi define the term in this article on Indigenous philanthropy. Even though we are a very small-scale funder relative to others, the key principles of identifying systemic inequalities and inherent power imbalances in your ways of working are very relevant. That is why we are continually reflecting and working on:
Providing funding creates an unequal power dynamic between Park People and the groups in our network. This can make it more challenging for groups to provide us with honest feedback on our programs. We do our best to mitigate this by keeping our granting process separate from our evaluation activities, but that introduces another challenge.
Groups that are very engaged in our other program activities, such as our network gatherings, training workshops, conferences and other events, can be particularly disappointed when they don’t receive a microgrant from us. It doesn’t feel great when you have put a lot into engaging with Park People to receive a no on your grant application.
How can providing funding be part of a reciprocal and not transactional relationship? We are excited about exploring more participatory approaches to granting that centre decision-making in the hands of community members, which could allow us to navigate this tension better.
Park People supports community park groups and NGOs following a tiered support model. Microgrants are intended to help groups get started or get established in their community, but in some cases, groups evolve to a stage where $1500 or $2000 is too small to be worth applying for. This is a success story, but it means that the microgrants Park People has available to offer do not match the needs of many groups.
We do our best to connect these groups to larger funding opportunities through fundraising workshops, tailored sessions to support groups in applying for specific grants like TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, and our funding web page which features links to dozens of grants. These activities are well-attended and valued by participants and are consistent with our goal to build the capacity of groups rather than engage in local parks ourselves. But they are more complex than providing a microgrant. ‘Success’ becomes harder to define and talk about.
As Park People’s network grows and as parks became more central to people’s lives during the pandemic, the number of people applying for grants has increased significantly. This means we are saying no to more people every year. There is an ongoing tension between wanting to encourage many people to get engaged in parks and not wanting to waste people’s time participating in grant application processes where their odds of success are low.
We are currently reflecting on the pros and cons of trying to expand the availability of our microgrants versus building up other types of support for the groups in our network. There is probably no perfect answer. In the short term, we are finding creative ways to meet this demand. For example, some of our recent and planned changes to our microgrants include:
2021-2023:
2024:
In the longer term, Park People does not envision a permanent role for ourselves in funding park groups. We believe that larger institutions like municipalities should review how decision-making and power-sharing work in their parks and public spaces. They have the resources to provide more systematic and continuous support for community-led initiatives. Ultimately, we dream of the groups in our network being able to spend more time enriching their communities and parks, and less time fundraising. Systemic changes, such as reforming park permitting processes or dedicating staff to community engagement on an ongoing basis, are critical.
Returning to our guiding question – how do we support community leaders in realizing their local parks’ potential to enhance well-being and resilience? Microgrants that fund events and activities in those parks are one tool in our support toolbox for community leaders. As you have read in this post, they are not the be-all and end-all of support for community leaders, and they don’t meet the needs of every group.
Engage and learn with us
Are you a non-profit that provides microgrants or has in the past? What did you learn? Are you a community member who has accessed or tried to access Park People’s grants? Tell us your thoughts on microgrants – the good, the bad, and what Park People can do to improve.
Further reading
After two years of people enjoying parks more than ever, we have an opportunity to give back to the green spaces that give so much.
This Earth Day webinar offer a fresh perspective on great spring community cleanups. Learn from experts with on-the-ground experiences making clean-ups inviting and engaging with lasting impact.
The session aims to inspire you to join or start a park clean-up in your community or refresh your community’s event. It is for anyone that wants to learn fresh approaches to engaging people in the important work of keeping our parks looking their best.
The webinar is held in English; French subtitles are available.
Harpreet is the President of the County Court Neighbourhood Association where his work exemplifies his passion for community capacity building…
Marica Tagliero has worked for more than 20 years in environmental and community development in Quebec and abroad. She has…
The Friends of Oakridge Park have been putting on events to involve the community of Oakridge in Toronto since 2015.…